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On ending friendships with antis/fanfom assholes

So I get a lot of asks abt friendships fracturing in the current fandom, and feeling bad about being unable to just “block and move on” when dealing with people they know. and I have an experience with that that i think might help people feel less alone in it?

So: once upon a time a few years ago I made a new friend in a fandom I was really excited about. We were both writers who were active in the still-small community and who loved each other’s work. In the course of about a week we added each other on skype, started collabing on a fic, started a new edit trend in the fandom, and talked basically daily.

And then she asked me to edit a story, in which a character that I read as an abuser gets together with his victim and they are much happier and sexier together than the main ship.

I tried at first to just say I didn’t like the ship and didn’t think I was the person to edit it, but on pushing admitted that I read him as an abuser in canon and wasn’t comfortable with how dismissive her fic was of his behavior. She took this………. poorly. Basically said I was accusing her personally of being an abuser, because she related to this character, and that I was trying to manipulate her into only writing the pairing we had in common. I said “no, I just don’t want to beta this fic for you”, and we….. sort of dropped it.

But - and you may have noticed this about me - I can’t leave a topic well enough alone if my life depended on it, and her insistence that I was reading him as an abuser to spite her annoyed me, so I wrote a post breaking down basically everything the character had done so far, how his ex acted and spoke around him, and how those look a lot like abusive behaviors and trauma. And… well, let’s just say just about everyone in the tumblr fandom saw it within the next couple days.

I spent about 12 hours getting positive responses and “I don’t agree but I appreciate the thought you put into this”. And then his stans found me.

I…. don’t think I need to go into how this went? We know the song and dance; I had to shut down my askbox, locked my social media profiles, stopped accepting Skype friend requests, and endured a ton of people telling me that I was A) calling them, personally, abusers or B) was trivializing abuse and was the worst kind of tumblrite or C) should just choke and die already. Sometimes all three, it was a very fun….. 72 hours or so.

Anyways. After the initial backlash, there was a group of about 8-9 people who were still stubbornly going after me and anyone associated with me on every platform they could find. (I would find out later that they made a group chat and all became friends over their hatred of me, which is kind of flattering and kind of fucking obnoxious.) One charmingly implied, after I admitted to being an abuse survivor, that either I was lying or I deserved it. My new friend, who’d been mostly silent through all this, was mutuals with all of them.

I went to her with their behavior, and she said, essentially, “it’s not my business, you said stuff that really hurt them” and I said “I literally wrote meta, it is not my fault that they took it this personally. I’m a real person, this character they’re defending isn’t.” and she…. wasn’t willing to talk to them, or ask them to stop, or even just not share my content with this group (god, remember when tumblr’s blocking features were even worse somehow? Me too). After about a week and a half I decided I had to just block her too and move on with my life, because I was miserable and anxious and wanted to unlock my damn accounts.

It hurt. I guess that’s what I’m getting at. I knew her for maybe 20 days total, and we barely spoke for the last 10, and yet it still hurt, y’know? It can really, really suck, to have people you connect with turn out to be totally willing to hurt you, or leave you out in the cold, because of an opinion about fiction. If I was younger when this happened, I may well have backed down on my opinion to save the friendship. As it was I had to get a LOT of reassurance that I hadn’t done anything wrong and didn’t deserve what happened.

This isn’t something with a grand solution. It sucked, I got hurt, I had to end a friendship for my own health and lean on my other friends while I got over it. If I’d known her for months, or years, I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been. “Block and move on” is ok advice when it’s strangers shouting at you; it is infinitely harder when it’s mutuals, friends, people you trust and like doing this to you. I have nothing but sympathy for people who struggle with leaving friends because those friends are being assholes about fandom opinions. Cutting friends off is hard, of course it’s hard, and it’s a personal decision. Just because it’s technically easier to cut someone off online doesn’t mean it’s emotionally easier. Be kind to yourself about this stuff.