Rule one of fandom: there are some things that only exist for us.
Don’t send actors fics
Don’t give them explicit art ever
Don’t tag them in rpf questions or theories
Don’t try to bring them into fandom drama of any kind
Don’t hold them responsible for what the producers and writers decide
They’re still people. They have private lives, which do not include fandom.
Esp when you don’t even OWN the fics or arts you sent them
There are exceptions – there are actors who have embraced fandom and love to see fannish depictions of themselves. There are celebrities who love to see new twists on their work.
…but nobody needs their introduction to fandom to be “here’s a 25,000 word fic showing you in an ABO sex pollen orgy.” And they really, really don’t need to see the accompanying artwork.
Between the various ComicCons and talk shows, if they’re potentially interested in fandom, they’ll discover it – someone who knows them personally will mention, oh hey, did you know this exists? And if their response is “yeah, I know that stuff exists; I don’t care for it,” don’t pester them about it. Those who think it’s great, will say so. Let THEM come to US, not the other way around.
I feel like this used just be a known unknown rule in Fandom but in recent years people have lost all sense of fucking boundaries. It’s very weird and unsettling
Having been involved in Con running for a painfully long time, I think that there’s always been people with boundary issues. There have always been fans who miss social cues of ‘this is not the time.’
The difference now is accessibility.
When I was a baby trek fan, when I was scribbling little snippets of stories in notebooks, my ‘access’ to actors was the occasional interview in the official Star Trek magazine and maybe, if I was lucky, a convention. Fans would photocopy interviews and stories from local media and send it to each other. At the beginning of the internet, we created our own websites and web rings and archived official material along with our own stuff.
Sure, people sent fanmail to actors or creators even then. People dragged drawings and fic and things like that to cons. Hell, I have an early fic of mine that a friend had Peter David sign. Even then, I was horrified to find out she’d asked him to sign my non-smutty, humor based fic, even though he had laughed and signed it, but told her, for legal reasons, he couldn’t read it.
That involved her flying to a DIFFERENT country, with a hand printed copy of my story she’d scraped from my website without my permission.
The world is much different now. Now, you have creators tweeting pictures of their pets. Images of the writers room on Instagram. Answering questions on Tumblr or Reddit. Replying spontaneously to tweets sent @ them from random fans, and having that off the cuff response taken as canon. The response to a comic issue or a tv episode or a casting decision is immediate and amplified. The questions they answer, the things they share, the way they cultivate a connection with the fanbase, all of that would’ve been unbelievable ten years ago.
And people who have trouble with boundaries, or who have difficulty understanding or recognizing social cues, are now presented with a world where they can scan through their twitter page and find half of the posts be from people with blue checkmarks after their names.
What’s the difference between their best friend John showing off a picture of his dog and Chris Evans showing off a picture of his dog?
What happens when someone can’t tell the difference?
They start treating the actor like their friend, because the actor SEEMS like their friend. The one way valve of the internet has forged a connection that doesn’t exist, but which seems so real to the person experiencing it.
The unspoken rules of fandom have changed, because the reality of fandom has changed.
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