Tumblr crosspost (15 December 2020)

[anghraine]

I’ve been thinking back on the Fandom Experience, and was remembering the opposite of the vanity searching—some of the odder experiences of being told things directly:

• I got a comment on a fic asking if leaving it unfinished made me feel desired.
• I got a comment on a different fic telling me that they knew I wasn’t writing for the ’95 mini-series and that I dislike it, but that they always pictured my Darcy as Colin Firth anyway. Darcy is a) blue-eyed and b) a woman in that fic.
• I got anonymous hate because I headcanon Luke Skywalker as asexual.
• A troll apologized for missing my birthday.
• A random person informed me that my fic was Wrong and Darcy’s mother wouldn’t be Lady Anne but Mrs Darcy, and his uncle should be Lord Matlock. [ETA 3/13/2024: Lady Anne being called "Mrs Darcy" and her brother being "Lord Matlock" are both from the ’95 mini-series and not in the novel; the first seems to be a mistake and the last an invention.]
• Someone on AO3 told me that my fic was great, and also, it was shitty of me not to respond to comments.
• Someone told me they had been sent by an anonymous group of haters who wanted me to tag my Silmarillion posts so they didn’t have to see them. (I already was tagging them.)
• Someone told me that calling The Horse and His Boy racist made me the racist one, actually.

None of these were the end of the world, and my general experience of fandom has been mainly positive, but sometimes it is … really strange.