#thanks to elegantforce for making me this collage

[arsenicpanda]

“Hey, arsenicpanda,” I hear my convenient strawman asking, “why have you been so distant from the bughead fandom lately?”

Well, as they say, one bad apple can spoil the barrel…

And I’ve encountered a lot of bad apples.

So, back in March, I went from just shipping Betty and Jughead to also shipping Jughead and Tabitha (and to a lesser extent Jughead and Toni, but that one isn’t relevant here).  And it brought me a chunk of anon hate.  See, there I was, playing with a toy with all these kids I thought were my friends, when I spotted another totally different toy I liked and started playing with that one too. And then, for no apparent reason, some of the people I’d been playing with before just started throwing rocks at me.

Harassment over a ship is annoying, I know this from the B/As, but harassment over a ship from members of one of your own fan-communities is just...it hurts, somehow, even coming from random strangers.  It’s mostly died down now, but there were around two months where I got a serious, concentrated amount of asshole anons every time I opened my mouth to talk about Jughead and Tabitha or posted a gif set of them. I’d immediately get hate in my inbox in a way that says “I hate your opinions but I also have you on notifications.”  Once I turned off anon and got someone who made three sockpuppet accounts to continue to send me hate.  Sometimes they’d take their interpretations of my opinions over to other blogs on anon in hopes that I’d be dunked on without being mentioned by name.  And it sucked, a lot.

I was largely left alone otherwise, but I felt as if there was an implicit message of “If you fall in line, you can stay, but otherwise get the fuck out,” and somehow that part hurt most of all.  Maybe because I’d thought this was a safe space, but in reality it was only safe as long as I didn’t say anything that most of the fandom would take issue with. Still, I didn’t answer them and I kept quiet because I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of getting a rise out of me, and I didn’t want to answer that kind of hurtful shit in the first place; I did keep screenshots though because I always like to have proof of things.

It’s eaten at me somehow, left a bad taste in my mouth about the bughead fandom; I felt, and continue to feel even, unwelcome in my own fandom.  We like to pretend that we are never the aggressors, never the assholes, and something about getting concrete proof that that’s not the case bothers me.  I know every fandom has assholes, but I didn’t expect the assholes to eat their own, which is very “I never thought the face-eating leopards would eat my face,” I know, I know.  Riverdale itself tried its hardest to ruin bughead for me, but it never succeeded, not really; the bughead fandom, however, really kneecapped my ability to enjoy it somehow.  Perhaps it’s the nature of anon hate, that there’s no one to direct your ire to when you get it; it just comes from the void, and at best you’ll have a vague direction to be mad at, but that’s not very satisfying, now is it?  I don’t even know how many people this is, if it’s one or two or ten or more, if it’s really bughead fans or if this is some bizarre false flag operation from the B/As, and it’s so frustrating.

I still ship bughead, by the way, and I’m 99.9% sure it’s endgame, and I’ll enjoy that when it happens; I like Jughead/Tabitha and bugabitha though, and I’d be down for those as endgame too (canon Jughead/Tabitha would require Betty having her own romantic endgame, just one that wasn’t Archie).  I don’t make much bughead content because all my ideas would work best with footage of their reunion, something we know we’re getting in 5b; I just have to wait it out, and I will.  I make a lot of Jughead/Tabitha content because I have ideas for them, and I also probably have all the footage for them I’ll ever be able to use, so there’s no reason to wait for more; it’s also a small ship, and someone should do it, so why not me?  Be the change you want to see in the world and so on.

So why talk about this now, you ask?  Why do this when it’ll just put a target on my back and invite the harassment back in?  Because it bothers me, mainly, and because I just want to post the proof of the bughead fandom’s bullying that I can refer back to should I ever need to.  Maybe I just want to shame the fandom into better behavior.  Maybe I just want to get it off my chest.  Maybe I want to say, “Hey, don’t send hurtful anons, because odds are someone else already had that idea, and they really add up,” and encourage people not to perpetuate this behavior and energy in the Riverdale fandom or carry it into other fandoms they’re a part of.  Maybe I just want to explain why I haven’t been around, even though I’d like to be.  I don’t know.

But this is why I’m consuming less bughead content these days, this negative association.  And it’s frustrating because I’ve met some really great people here and read great fics and seen great art and gif sets.  I’m not leaving, and I’m certainly not shutting up about my opinions on anything; I’m not giving anyone that satisfaction.  But I am stepping back some in terms of engagement, I suppose.  I’ll keep making the content I’m inspired to make, share the opinions I feel like sharing, including ones on bughead, but I’ll just consume less content.  Hopefully this won’t be a permanent condition because that would just suck so much because, as I said, there are some awesome people here and they make some awesome content and have some awesome opinions.

tl;dr Fandom can suck, including the bughead fandom, which I’ve experienced first hand, and now I’m stepping back a bit but not leaving.