I think more creators should openly tell their fans to fuck off and stop being weird
We can’t. If you seem a bit mean to someone then somebody lies that you’re a pedophile in a callout post and you start getting death threats everywhere.
dude, this happens anyway. you might as well tell people to fuck off while you’re at it
Part of the issue is that it’s not just callout posts, though.
Ages ago now, I had someone ask me a question about a character death, and the only accurate answer I could come up with was stolen from Stephen King–“I didn’t kill her. She just died.” This had the benefit of being 100% true! I didn’t kill that character out of malice or to be hurtful. The story, which had me so tightly by the time she died, told me she died, and so I dutifully wrote it down.
The person I answered did not like this. And after calling me a flippant cunt whore and various other nasty things which hurt my feelings but did no damage, went around one-starring all my books, claiming that they contained things they didn’t.
This hurt my overall ranking, and may very well have cost me readers. And that was one person, who decided I was being disrespectful, not even mean!
Quite frankly, neither my career nor my constitution can handle the consequences of being sincerely mean.
This.
And—I’m just going to whisper it—if you’re a female writer and you dare speak your mind too loudly, the blowback is twice (or three times, or ten times) what you’d get if you were male. The inevitably gender-linked descriptor “meltdown” comes to mind.
So forgive us for mostly staying as publicly courteous as we can, and only sharing what we’re actually thinking with those already committed to causing us no more difficulty than we already deal with on a day-to-day basis.