They’re about to start astroturfing fandoms and it’s our job to make it the worst experience possible for netflix
The concept of astroturfing fandom is so fucking funny. Imagine them hiring some poor intern to crank out slash fic to upload to the archive so it can look like more people are writing fic for their shitty shows to get people interested. They have a staff whose full-time job it is to make gif sets and mood boards.
The best part will be when they manage to get the ball rolling with their planted stories only to watch in horror as the ABO starts rolling in, the serial killer AUs, their villains getting shipped and written into florists and baristas, the tentacle fan art, the biggest ship will be two rando side characters without last names who they’d planned to leave out of S2 but now they can’t, the show’s social media gets inundated by over-invested fans screaming at them and canceling them every day and they’ll be all WAIT WAIT NO NOT LIKE THAT THAT’S NOT HOW THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO GO and it’ll be like look buddy, you asked for this…
Well, fuck. I was heavy into fandom many years ago, but got caught up in one of those really brutal fandom conflicts in which a certain fansite decided they would kick the shit out of me. The savaging went on for literally hundreds of posts; I left, traumatised. But today I found myself missing the fun and being bored with the fogies (many beloved) on Facebook. I thought, “Hey, why not go dip into Tumblr and restart the joy?” I’ve been scrolling for about 20 minutes, getting more and more and more anxious, and now I think I need to throw down this phone and go for a run or something. Adrenaline urge to ESCAPE. Don’t know if I can take it; bloody isolating disappointment. Fuck. If you don’t think fandom PTSD is a thing, honey, it is.
Fanfic is the triumph of character-based relationship building over the need for clever plot or pretty cinematography. It says “I don’t care what they do; I care about what they feel, and how that makes me feel.”
