FINAL POST
All right, it’s been 5 or so months since I last posted here.
The long and short of it is that SnK wasn’t the only reason I left this blog. Real life/work stress was a big part of it on top of SnK’s clumsy handling of delicate subject matter and the SnK fandom’s overwhelming insistence that the author of SnK was a genius (and I was the dumbass who just Wasn’t Looking Closely Enough to Realize It).
It was just too much to deal with all at once.
Y’all know my stance on how fiction can and does affect reality, so let’s not go there. The issue I have was that all of these negative things wadded themselves up into a giant hateful ball in my mind. This blog, and the fact that its very foundation was almost entirely based on being an SnK blog...made me feel gross and ugly. Look, I don’t think it’s silly to be disappointed or put off by something you’ve been thinking about and dissecting and having fun with for literal years of your life. It’s been something like 4.5 years I’ve been following this series! I’m upset that something I thought might do a 180 and be great...ended up feeling bad to me. It’s hard to see something with potential lambaste itself like this, especially when I’ve spent four and a half years following it and defending it.
You are free to disagree. I totally understand that some of you adore the series for the good parts, or you ignore the hateful things; maybe you’re just here to see how it ends. I can respect that.
But I literally can’t exist without being critical. I know a lot of my followers resented my posts because it makes them feel stupid or weird for liking the things that I criticized. I tried to stop being negative (because constant negativity is a downer), but it was hard to exist in a fandom space where I felt I couldn’t say my piece any longer without putting off people who followed me.
But hey, after a break... I feel a lot better! I think I’ve come to terms with wanting to like a series/a world/characters/whatever, but struggling to because of fandom opinion and my personal discomfort, not to mention the frustration and uncertainty of the series itself.
SnK isn’t any different than Harry Potter or RK or Twilight or any other series where the author turned out to be shitty or misinformed or just generally an idiot.
If my salt makes you uncomfortable or uneasy, this is goodbye. I had fun here! I enjoyed interacting with you guys, talking characters and meta with you. It was lovely. But if reading my meta and posts makes you feel bad about yourself or uneasy or just awful? It’s okay to break ties. Sometimes it’s necessary and I want you to take care of you; have a good one!
For those of you who would like to follow my new blog, the url is @mannatea.
Please view this blog as an archive. I hope some of you will still find it useful. :)