Creativity, Fandoms, and Social Media – Part One (Introduction)

Introduction …

I was going to put this into one LONG blog, but decided that would be boring as hell (pardon my language). I even got bored reading it.

Given the stuff that I’ve read, heard, and witnessed over the last few years (and more here recently) … I wanted to take a deeper look in the world of the “fandom”. Which to some can be a fun place – to others? It’s a scary world of being bullied and perhaps feeling more socially isolated than they already are, or would be.

I thought it would be best to break this blog up over several parts to really get to the deeper truth and clearly explain what I am talking about, my points, and my own experiences.

This is a subject that I was introduced to in the summer of 2013 when a particular actress left a highly popular series. That created a lot of useless petitions, angry comments, social media blocks, and a lot of … “butt-hurt” among the fans. Words such as “hater”, “righteous anger”, “shipping”, and “antis” (those against such “ship” pairs) entered the vocabulary.

As it turned out, here recently, the actress stated her position – and the matter was all but dropped by those few fans.

By “few fans” … less than 90,000 fans made Twitter and Facebook such an unbearable place to discuss the series and had a petition. A useless one at that now given the situation of the actress’ departure.

And, quite frankly … I lost interest in viewing it with others.

I lost interest in sharing it with others.

But, what I thought was a confined situation, was really a deep look into the fact that other series (Supernatural, The 100, Once Upon a Time, and Outlander) have the same issues plaguing it.

I’ll explain in the next “installment” …