#praise be to shalnarkonice

[hxhhasmysoul]

I remember you mentioned a while back that you rarely made any online friends who are artists. You stated that you made four, three from the HxH fandom and one in JJK. The thing that intrigues me the most is the statement of you most likely won’t be able to befriend another artist within the JJK fandom in such low stakes condition. I was wondering what you possibly meant by that, and was hoping for a possible clarification or explanation. Although I can see where you are coming from, the JJK fandom is extremely… active in comparison to the HxH fandom. Additionally, I do wonder how did you befriended this JJK artist in the first place.

I don't remember how I phrased the low stakes thing. Maybe I was confusing and rambly when I wrote about it. I'll try to write it out clearly but it will take some background.

Despite the HxH fandom being small, much smaller than JJK, it's actually pretty active. But most of all it has Shal, I tagged Shal recently in one of my answers so I won't do it again, not to bother her.

Shal isn't the only person who's active like that in the HxH fandom but she's like a staple of the HxH fandom, someone who the fandom owes a lot to, probably the most to. Shal and her kin are community organisers. For years, like fucking clockwork, Shal has successfully run several HxH annual events. Shal runs a very chill and active HxH fandom server called Greed Island Server. If you look at HxH posts you will see that many of them mention that server. There's a blog on here called HxH events that aggregates and promotes HxH events.

My theory is that, because of Shal's achievements there are also many other HxH events going on here without Shal.

This lowers the bar of entry into the HxH community here, makes it low stakes.

Most events have discords. In a general discord it's sometimes hard to jump into the convo, hard to say something. In an event discord it's easy to interact, talk about the event. Talk about the stuff you're doing for the event. Discuss ideas. The topics are clear. Also many people join these events and some of them are there for the first time, some are veterans. The newbies will ask questions about how it works, the veterans will answer. Clear topic, clear interaction purpose. Also in the servers it's rarely directly to a particular person. At least initially. That also lowers the stakes. Someone starts a topic and others join in or they don't but there's enough people so there likely be some response, not radio silence.

And once it gets going you can make friends. You may find you click with some of these people. You may go to the dms and talk about other stuff. (though no guarantees, this is not a promise that the moment you join an event you will make deep and meaningful connections. doing that will improve your chances, that's it.)

As far as I've noticed JJK has nothing of the sort. There are some popular accounts, some popular writers, artists, meta writers, popular aggressive clout chasers with their cold takes. You will have all of that in the HxH fandom, the good, the bad, the irritating.

But because there are no events to interact with people in the JJK fandom you have to do it here. You have to either be a mean fuck like me and give little shits and just comment on posts in notes, tags or reblogs. You need to send asks off anon. It requires putting yourself out there in a situation where you don't know whether the person, and it will always be one on one, wants the interaction. Any interaction at all or just on this particular topic.

JJK fandom is active like a big city centre. There's a lot of people around, some are in groups, most are there on their own. Most people are going somewhere. It's hard to come up to someone and start a conversation.

HxH fandom is active more like fair, it's smaller but people come there to do stuff together. They may not know each other but they are open to having fun together at the same time. (it's not ideal, there are shit people, I'm not romaticising)

I hope this explains what I meant.

Re getting to know the artist. It was one of the weirdest things that happened in my life, it was stressful and a bad idea and bad choices on my part that turned out surprisingly ok. I don't feel like revisiting it in detail anymore. It's also not something I'd advise anyone to do. In normal circumstances I would've got blocked because I was a dick.