(Originally appeared on my Dreamwidth in January 2023, thanks to a prompt where I found I had more to say about the situation.)
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.
For several months I had comments disabled on AO3 entirely because 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 the other side] 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. While I write for myself, I share my work in the hopes that other people will enjoy it, and closing comments for months was very discouraging.
Now I have comments enabled but only on WIPs. I turn off comments pretty quickly on one-shots [if I allow them at all] or once a WIP is done, because it's been my experience that trolls always roll up on the older stuff for some reason. 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.
Also, 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 the better part of two 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 for the most part 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's been a few exceptions to this but mostly it's 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 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, which ended up making me feel unsafe and I took a hiatus from Dreamwidth for months in 2021 because of it. [Even now in January 2023 I feel like I have to watch what I say behind a lock, out of paranoia.]
I also feel like I can't make new friends in my fandom because of this, and I had someone say to me recently "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. I have a lot of friends on Dreamwidth but the overwhelming majority of them are not in my primary fandom - I did realize in 2022 that I crave friendships with writers/artists more than sharing a fandom because there is something universal about the creative process and its joys and frustrations, having said that, I still feel lonely and isolated over here with my nerdish obsession and not many people who actually get that same obsession.
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. That limits my ability to self-promo, make new connections, etc. Ditto for Discord.
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 900-something kudos on one of my fics is not the same as being Slate magazine famous or running a fandom archive that many other people contribute content to, 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, after the drama had mostly died down [is still going in a less obvious way], and the overwhelming majority 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.
...If I was a cis woman, I wonder if more people would care. It is what it is. [And to be quite blunt, anyone who says "it's not because you're trans" 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 trans. Maybe it doesn't for some people, but you're being disingenuous if you tell me it's 0%.]
This is discouraging enough in and of itself, but also, I was bullied in school severely growing up, and even into adulthood at the workplace. I've also been verbally abused by parents and partners. The first couple years after I came out as trans I did activist work and I got bullied doing that, too. Between playing whackamole with trolls and seeing nasty shit about me said elsewhere on the Internet and all the shunning, I started having flashbacks of all of that, my PTSD symptoms got worse, which in turn made my OCD symptoms worse. The suicide baiting comment I received in December 2020 gave me one of the worst panic attacks of my life and I ended up throwing up. The stress on my mental health, unsurprisingly, also made my physical health worse as I lost sleep, my appetite was affected, I had GI distress, and so forth. No joke, in the course of two years I feel I physically aged about ten.
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."
1. At the time of this post, I have 3.8 million words on AO3. When I got the advice to delete and restart, I had about 2 million words give or take. I'm sorry, but no, that is not an acceptable solution to just throw all that away.
1a. 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.
2. "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.
2a. "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.
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.