A few days ago I saw a post that quoted
this one, which ultimatly inspired this post now lol. TLDR of it, specifically for Heated Rivalry, there's not enough people creating fanworks and engaging with fandom and there's a lot more people who just generate discourse instead of loving the source material. This is a sentiment that can be applied to most fandoms in the current day and age, especially if you're main outlet for fandom is social media. Things work a little bit different on dreamwidth, as if I'm not wrong, i've seen more event focused stuff regarding that fandom over here than on twitter for sure.
This is something very common though, as I've noticed an overall lack of events in certain fandoms, especially the ones I participate in the most, those being Identity V and Limbus Company. There's a lack of anything besides a ship or character week, and nowadays I don't even see IDV events at all and for Limbus just recently there were 2 ship weeks close to a character birthday, which were probably why they were there in the first place.
But the truth still stands - there's hardly any bangs or reverse bangs, month long events besides kinktober (which is a general event and not fandom specific), no exchanges even. I was very lucky to find both the project moon one and a limbus one here, done for their respective anniversaries, only for the limbus one to have me and the host participating. There's very few people wanting to engage with general fandom in these cases.
Obviously, there are fandoms where participation still stands high. My first thought are the my hero academia fandom and at times, bungou stray dogs. There's a lot more there than when I was active in the fandom, that's for sure. Maybe because there's a lot more anti-harassment spaces now than back then, I can't say for sure. But there are exchanges, ship weeks, character weeks, things that initiate specific fandom participation.
As much as I love general events like ones at
ficwip or
allbingo , there's a huge lack of fandom specific events in my main fandoms, so I can feel for Heated Rivalry fans who do want to participate and do stuff, but can't even think of it due to how bad fandom spaces have gotten in the past few years.
I think there should be a conversation on how we treat creators, especially fic writers, because my god, things have gotten so much worse over time for us. But that's not today's topic. Maybe some other time.
TLDR there's a huge lack of fandom events becuase people are being ass about the things they like and hardly want to do things at times.