First of all, when you dogpile/drag someone who belongs to one or more marginalized groups, even if you yourself claim to be an ally and wouldn't want someone to get harassed on the basis of gender orientation, disability, etc... it doesn't matter, the TERFs and the ableists and so on are all going to come out of the woodwork and play Let's Pick On The Disabled Trans Person For Funsies. And because I write kink and incest ships, I was suddenly Seen and the antis came out to play as well.
Since Ao3 implemented the ability to turn off comments on works, I have gone back and forth between leaving comments off and turning them back on only to turn them off again a few months later - even though I have never allowed anon comments, I still got rudeness, peaking with someone's sock/throwaway leaving me a comment referencing the drama [and their support of Spiced] and calling me a transphobic slur telling me to kill myself just before the holidays in December 2020 and saying they hoped I died of COVID [I ended up getting COVID for the first time two months later just before the vaccines rolled out and I did almost die, because I am in a high-risk group for severe COVID]. After that comment, I couldn't deal with comments for awhile. Then when I tried to accept comments again, I got yet more pro-Spiced, anti-trans trolling [with bonus antisemitism in early 2024 after I announced conversion to Judaism]; comments have been off permanently since spring 2024.
While I write for myself, I share my work in the hopes that other people will enjoy it, and having to close comments altogether because after I turn them back on, inevitably someone rolls up to talk shit. Imagine working hard on fiction and fanart and not allowing other people to comment and tell you "hey, nice job" because you're worried you're going to have to play whackamole with assholes again. Welcome to my life.
If this wasn't bad enough on its own, a lot of people in my fandom never bothered to get my side of the story of what happened, even though I have posted it on the public Internet for everyone to see. Tolkien fandom, and more particularly Silmarillion fandom, likes to go on about how "welcoming and inclusive" it is. Well, I feel unwelcome in any/all Tolkien fandom communities on Dreamwidth or outside of Dreamwidth, because the people who run them are buddy-buddy with the people who made my life hell for years - and there's no way they don't know about the drama - which I feel is basically coddling them like they did nothing wrong. That's a hostile environment for me, I've read the room and I know I'm not welcome.
When the shit first hit the fan in 2020, I ended up losing about 1/3 of my AO3 subscribers at the time. People who used to leave kudos/comment on my work in 2019-2020 went away and never came back [and then a couple more of them fucked off in 2021 as they got more involved with the fandom clique and it wasn't seemly to associate with me anymore]. In 2020 I went through a kudos/comment drought even before I ended up disabling comments, though I began to rebound over 2021-2022 with people outside my fandom [see further down] once I began to write A/B/O and also some o-fic.
I eventually stopped reading Silmarillion fanfic altogether because I would leave people short-but-nice comments and either not get replied to at all [while they replied to other comments] or in some cases, my comment was deleted without ever being replied to. There'd been a few exceptions to this but mostly it'd been more shunning. I have social anxiety so commenting to people is not easy for me, and to go out of my way and get that kind of treatment made me stop bothering because I don't want to leave kudos/comments and have the person be like "oh no, not Verhalen" like I'm the thirteenth fairy godperson showing up at the christening uninvited.
I also feel like I can't make new friends in my fandom because of this, and in early 2023 someone said to me "you don't need a lot of fandom friends" and OK, I'm not asking for a lot, but also it gets lonely to only have one or two people I can nerd out with.
Over 2020-2021 I got defriended or ghosted on Dreamwidth by people who were friends with the other side and, again, did not bother to listen to my side of the story. There was also at least one person who broke lock and shared personal stuff for cringe purposes, which ended up making me feel unsafe and I took a hiatus from Dreamwidth for months in 2021 because of it.
And the thing is, this isn't just a Tolkien fandom problem anymore. Spiced's friend AnnEllspethRaven has decided to use the world's longest fanfic to do PR for Spiced [and AER has used her fame to talk shit about me on other platforms without knowing me or hearing my side of the story], so people across multiple fandoms have heard about it. In late December 2023 I got banned from the mod team of Snowflake Challenge without warning or explanation because the head mod is buddy-buddy with Spiced.
I ended up going on permanent hiatus from Dreamwidth in fall 2024 after I found out I'd been doxxed and there are people in Tolkien fandom involved in the dogpiling and making fun of me for being trans** and being disabled/autistic/mentally ill. I have since that time taken steps to reduce my Internet footprint without deleting my creative works and without deleting what needs to be a public record of Spiced's harassment and cyberstalking from other shitty people I've encountered, and I refuse to stop writing and making art, some of which is Tolkien-themed, but I'm done with the concept of "fandom" at this point.
**Note: After 11 years of identifying as transmasc and living as male, I desisted in meatspace and online for safety reasons after the 2024 election [red state, no option to leave] but I still strongly support LGBTQIA+ rights.
Whether or not Spiced was directly involved in the 2024 post-Snowflake round of bullshit, there was definitely stochastic bullying happening here - for all that Spiced has cried victim since 2020, because she can't stop talking shit about me and got her friends involved this is the end result of what happened and I think this is what she wanted all along, or even for me to unalive myself.
This means I can't use social media like Tumblr or the bird app even if I wanted to because I know I would get harassed over there, and I don't feel safe engaging in parasocial relationships and sharing personal business. That limits my ability to self-promo my works, make new connections, etc. Ditto for Discord. I am on deviantART, but I have to disable comments over there too, and I've been harassed with slurs in DMs already [I've only been on the site since September 2024] so I can't look at my DMs.
I don't feel safe participating in exchanges/fests/kink memes because even if I strictly adhere to someone's list of likes and DNWs, I'm still going to have brainweasels that I did something wrong or they secretly hate it and are pretending to be nice [due to what happened]. That further limits my interactions in fandom.
You might see my kudos/comment count on Shades Of Silver-Gold or other fics and think I have nothing to complain about. Well, number one, getting 1000-something kudos on one of my fics is not the same as being Slate magazine famous/having your OC in the world's record for longest fanfic or running a fandom archive that many other people contribute content to [the now-defunct Faerie], so if we're going to play the "fame means you were actually the bully" game [which isn't even a valid argument IMO, name recognition has nothing to do with the actual facts of the situation], they are technically more well-known BNFs. Furthermore, I wrote Shades Of Silver-Gold in 2022, during a "dry spell" for the drama [since it started back up again in late 2023 I am getting fewer kudos these days, while definitely not none]. Most of my kudos are guest kudos [yes, that's common for porn, but] and in terms of logged-in username kudos and comments it's people from porn-heavy fandoms [like The Witcher, Game of Thrones, and Supernatural] who are reading me fandom-blind, or people who are Tolkien fans but are reader accounts only and not writers/artists or people otherwise involved in the fandom. The content creators in the fandom [writers/artists] mostly don't kudos/comment to me. And this isn't because I write smut, kink, or incest, because a lot of people do and still get kudos/comments from the mainstream of the fandom. This is because, again, people have never bothered to get my side of what happened or they don't care, and have shunned me.
In 2023 I mused that if I were a cis woman instead of transmasc and/or neurotypical instead of autistic and socially awkward, I wondered if more people would care. [Then in 2023 sometime after I made that comment in public, I heard through the grapevine that AER suddenly started going on about being queer and neurodivergent, as if to prove it has ~nothing to do with that~ because if she's that way then Spiced must be 100% the greatest ally who ever lived or whatever.] It is what it is. And to be quite blunt, anyone who says "it's not because you're trans/autistic/whatever" is blowing smoke up my ass. I've seen enough "allies" who say the correct thing in public and are bigoted assholes in private, to automatically distrust anyone who replies to this by saying the shunning has nothing to do with me being Whatever. Maybe it doesn't for some people, but you're being disingenuous if you tell me it's 0%.
Then when I vented about it on Dreamwidth in 2020-2021, I got the very unhelpful and - I'm just going to call it - shitty advice of 1. delete everything and start over again under a new username, 2. "just go to a different fandom."
Now, in December 2023 I did switch to a different username, because I was tired of using the name Verhalen. [I was fairly transparent about the change.] I did not, however, delete any of the works there, because I have over three million words on that account. I'm sorry but no, that is not an acceptable solution to just throw all that away.
Also, trying to start over again with a "clean slate" means I would never be able to write my OCs again and would never be able to ship certain rare pairs again because I would get recognized immediately. I'm not abandoning any of those things, especially not my OCs who I worked so hard on developing and feel like family to me.
"Just go to a different fandom" doesn't work when you're hyperfixated on this one particular canon and set of characters. Some people do the Migratory Slash Fandom thing and their ideas plug-and-play well across different fandoms. Mine do not. I shouldn't have to give up something that's been meaningful to me since the 1990s because of this, either, that's letting them win.
"Just go to a different fandom" operates on the assumption that there's not wank in other fandoms and there sure is. As an example of this, one of the reasons why I don't write more for Game of Thrones fandom is because I've seen the ship wars that go on there and Jon Snow is my fandom bicycle and I really don't want the Jonsas to subscribe and give me hate for writing Jonerys, or vice versa, or the Jonsa and Jonerys people to get assmad when I write Jonmund. At least in my fandom I know who to block and avoid, going to an entirely new fandom where I'm not sure what the fandom culture is like is basically being thrown into the deep end of the pool not knowing how to swim.
In early 2024, after the Snowflake drama happened and suddenly I had a bunch of randos roll up visiting @ex-flameandsong751 [my OG journal] and my Neocities site, my anxiety got really bad. I'd started using weed more heavily to self-medicate after the drama started in 2020, and by early 2024 it wasn't working anymore - I'd developed a huge tolerance to it, enough where it gave me palpitations, high blood pressure spikes, and panic attacks. When I ended up in the emergency room on May 3 2024 thinking I was having a heart attack, they told me it was "just anxiety" and I knew the weed was exacerbating the paranoia. When I quit on May 4 2024, I spent an entire month having severe withdrawal symptoms - night sweats, GI disturbances, mood swings, intrusive thoughts, and insomnia. [If you're going to say "that isn't real, nobody gets addicted to weed", actually yes people do, and I am one of them, I was diagnosed formally with Cannabis Use Disorder in 2024. For the record, I am not anti-cannabis-for-everyone, I am still pro-legalization; I have a prior substance abuse history and was "Cali sober" with weed but ended up getting addicted to that too.]
After the withdrawal got so bad I couldn't sleep for four days and couldn't stop crying, I finally checked myself inpatient for a week in early June 2024 to get on appropriate medication and get the ball rolling to start therapy.
To be fair, my breakdown in the first half of 2024 wasn't 100% the fandom bullying. I have C-PTSD from growing up in an abusive family, being severely bullied in school and at work, having been in ABA as an autistic kid in the 80s, being in several abusive relationships in my early 20s then married for seven years to an abuser and then having to crawl back home to my mom for five years for more abuse because I couldn't afford to live on my own. Also, every trans person in the US has trauma from the MAGA cult. But what happened with Spiced, and the subsequent fallout, definitely contributed to the deterioration of my mental health, as her behavior triggered me into flashbacks of other bullying experiences as well as my mother's abuse. My OCD symptoms intensified as I asked myself "am I a narcissist?" [For the record, my therapist says no.] No, Spiced is not entirely to blame for why I went inpatient for a week in June 2024, and I am grateful to finally be on meds that work and I now have a good therapist who is helping me process the trauma instead of just shoving it under the rug.
But she absolutely has some of the blame here, one more abuser who heaped trauma atop my huge-ass pile of trauma.
So there's my screaming into the void. Silmarillion fandom likes to pretend that it's this great, close-knit place full of warm, friendly people, and whenever someone gushes about it I think to myself "there is no clique in Ba Sing Se". It's like being in high school all over again. I will keep writing and making fanart, because I can't just make my brain focus on other fandoms and making fanfic/fanart is therapeutic for me, but I'd be lying if I said I don't feel backed into a corner. And now you know why I just do my thing with posting my work and I'm done sharing my personal business and keep to myself apart from the very few friends I have.
