A weird thing happened to me. A couple of years ago, I met someone and fell in love, and it turned out that person was kinda famous on the Internet.
Not like Justin Bieber famous on the internet, thankfully, but still the kind of internet famous that involves “fans” and “haters” and other random strangers paying a lot of attention to their activities, and sometimes writing them fanmail, or hatemail, or having sexual fantasies about them, or making parody blogs about them, or both. In fact, there is now an entire bully blog devoted to “interpreting” maymay’s work in insulting ways. It’s fucking weird.
Sometimes, I fantasize about a world in which nobody knows who “the infamous maymay” is and we just stay at home, and cuddle, and build cool things to distribute on the Internet anonymously, and hang out and cook food and have good conversations with our mutual friends. In reality, I understand why having such a polemical high-profile is both important to, and an unavoidable consequence of, maymay’s current work. I love them for who they are and I wouldn’t trade my real relationship with maymay for my fantasy one — although I would definitely agree to a version with more cuddling.
That being said, since I can’t (and don’t want to) take maymay off the Internet, I decided to put something on the Internet that can serve as a kind of psychic antidote for the torrent of concern trolling and negativity that gets directed at me and other people who love maymay. That swirl of negativity, misrepresentation, bullying, and bullshit can sometimes make me feel very solitary, like I’m alone in my affection for and appreciation of this person I love. Feeling that way is rough.
And I know that’s not the reality. There are lots of other people who love and support and value maymay, including family, friends, and fans. I’ve been collecting comments etc. that are supportive of maymay and/or their work for a while now. But, at least online, maymay tends to engage with their “haters” more than their “likers” — which means that, even if I don’t go looking for it, a disproportionate amount of the awful accusatory stuff gets signalboosted into my stream while the appreciation and support gets kinda buried. I want to gradually counterbalance that skewed representation with concrete pointers toward how much good their work and their outspoken and unorthodox tactics have done and how many people they’ve helped.
Anyway, this “fan” blog is basically a mental health resource for myself. But if other folks who appreciate or care about maymay want to participate, you’re welcome to follow or submit links. :) Thanks!
So, I started this blog. I’ve had it in my project queue for a while. I think I’m actually going to remove the above Intro post and just link to it here instead. I really do want that blog to be “Nice things about maymay reblogged without comment“ because I don’t want it to become another political platform where I go off on rants about stuff. I’ve got enough of those. I just want it to be a Happy Place where I can "go” to take a little break from the trenches. :)
You are such a wonderful embodiment of “the solution to bad speech is more speech.” Much ♥ to you.
For readers who want more context, have a read through my “Thank you, hater” post, for starters.