The Thing About Writing Fandom Essays On Medium — and Social Media in General

Medium paints itself as an essay and response blog, but at the end of the day, it’s another form of social media with the same abuses and abusers as more obvious “social medias” like Tumblr or Twitter.

The biggest one is the assumption that because someone writes something, they are:

A: Obligated to engage with you
B: Obligated to engage with you in the way that you want

So you read my essay! Great! Awesome. But having put my essay into the public sphere doesn’t mean that the way you want to interact with it and me is something I’ll entertain.

Before writing my most popular essay on medium to date, I left a long list of rules of engagement, because I know fandoms…and I know how they act. The essay was written in a casual analytical framework…in other words it’s an unedited version of the kind of paper you’d write for your undergrad college English classes.

Literary essays exist in a particular framework that makes allowances for certain types of arguments and certain types of questions. The vast majority of fandom doesn’t engage fandom this way, because frankly it’s a completely useless skill to have that doesn’t help you in life in any way, shape, or form.

However, it’s still fun to use that framework to suss out meaning from a text.

That said, it’s not fun to get 100 comments that blatantly lack knowledge of the framework…or any argumentative rhetoric required by most students with ANY Bachelor degree.

Thus, I set rules. The sort of arguments I’d entertain, and those I wouldn’t waste time on. Most of the ones I refused to bother with are arguments that essentially don’t exist and cannot exist inside literary analysis because they’re inconsequential or a flat ad hominem. In turn, of course, most of the commentary I received fit warmly within ad homs and non-discussions, though some people tried to paint my refusal to engage as “not wanting to be disagreed with”.

Let me make something very clear.

1. I make the conscious choice not to do battle with the unarmed. If you aren’t even in the same universe as me during this imaginary battle you’ve made up in your head, I cannot help you.
2. So you think an argument that I ignored was really well-worded. That’s nice. I don’t care. I set boundaries for a reason, regardless of whether you understand the reason or not. If you try to cross them, you just get blocked.
3. My choice not to engage a particular, actually relevant line of arguing doesn’t mean that I can’t. It means that I’ve likely argued this point a million times and the energy to go back into it is worth less than the value of the time wasted. Fear not, there is always the offer to pay me to engage with you.

At the end of the day, just like I don’t owe you time on Tumblr, or on Twitter, I don’t owe you time because I wrote a Medium essay about your favorite children’s cartoon. I block fast, often and liberally. I don’t care that you think my clearly stated boundaries are unreasonable; your only job is to obey the fucking laws of the road.

Or get blocked and ignored with your likely elementary arguments.