#literally after the shitshow dumpster fire they went through they fucking deserve to have fun

[amaranthdahlia]

post canon/war where bkdk gets to be normal teens for a day and go on a blissful first date. forgetting for a day of what happened, no worries of heroing or fighting villains, just them being teenagers in love going for an amusement park date and sharing crepes ♡

#finally did the obligatory bkdk amusement park crepe sharing date #i honestly REALLY love the idea that they go on one #literally after the shitshow dumpster fire they went through they fucking deserve to have fun #be fuckin ignorant teenagers for a day #and just be happy ykno #and ooo i LOVE the flavor of ktdk being new boyfriends #like theyd be so dorky about it theyd be like 'wow.......... my rival is my bf.... #i can kiss him all willy nilly ......' #theyd be soo cute #(but i also rlly like the flavor of them being casual ab it they just have the status of boyfriends next to the rivals status #along with now being able to kiss and more intimacy than ever #ahhh i love bkdk when theyre at their highest of their development #bkdk #ktdk #katsudeku #bakudeku #decchan #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #bakugou katsuki #midoriya izuku #mha #bnha #bakugou x midoriya #dahlia.art

[kaoru-chibimaster]

How Not to Run an Event

Don’t Do What The Kingdom Hearts Big Bang Did.

Just Don’t.

Rant under the cut, so like... Seriously, scroll past this. This is me letting my feelings out and I doubt anyone’s interested in that.

-o-o-o-o-

So basically this event started out pretty hype. I was super excited to join in with something related to the Kingdom Hearts community. Before this, I just wrote fic. Like, I was so far in my bubble, I wasn’t aware of zines, I wasn’t aware of other collabs, I wasn’t even aware of some BNFs (so I’m sure I got weird looks for asking who some people were when basically everyone knew who these “some people” were). I just wanted to write and I crossed my fingers and hoped at least someone might enjoy it when I posted it. 

Joining fandom was not a sudden life-changing event for me or anything like that. I was 13 and just getting into forums and had essentially only had knowledge of the KH fanbase through gamefaqs, youtube, kh-vids and kh13 (and fanfiction.net a little later). Before then, my “fandom” was my close friends and I all being fans of the games. I saw posts and read fics and sometimes commented in forums but I was not involved. For the longest time I’d never really been involved.

Big Bang felt like a way to change that. I was so looking forward to the people I’d meet and the art and fics I’d get to see. I’d made friends over the past few months and I’m so, so grateful to BB for that. I was excited for all of the up and coming events planned for Dreamwidth. I’d started out in DW for FFXV related stuff but I’d never actually used my account, so I’m thankful for the opportunity to really learn DW and start using it more extensively. I loved the little events and activities like the posts where we could share our works in progress. That’s another thing I’m grateful for; there are a number of fics of mine that would’ve never gotten off the ground if not for WIP Wednesdays. I also really appreciated that this was set up as a pro-shipping community and that it emphasized that participants could ship what they wanted without being harassed.

Aside from that? 

Downhill. 

Like, at first it was a slow roll down the hill: the discord server would have some channels overrun with discussion I was either uninterested in or outright made me uncomfortable. I’m not going to name drop what these discussions were and who had started them but I muted them one by one until there were only maybe three or four channels (out of a good chunk, I didn’t count but it was a hell of a lot more than three or four) that were unmuted. It’d devolved from a lot of genuine and interesting discussions where we helped each other out with fics/art and just had general fun talking to each other into channels full of the same handful of people talking over each other or venting. Not at all what I was interested in from a community. It wasn’t too bad though because the server wasn’t necessary for the BB so if the people still there needed that space then it’s not my right to give them shit for it. It was, however, totally within my right to remove myself from it, just as it was my right to feel uncomfortable with it.

That was then though.

Right here and now? 

It’s a shitshow. It’s a dumpster fire. It’s basically anarchy.

My discomfort with the direction the server went in was hand in hand with my loss of motivation for my participation. I can’t even look at the fic I was writing for this event without feeling upset and stressed over it. So I dropped. 

And apparently, so did a good number of other people.

The mods made a post about how We’re Committed (which no one can find now because they deleted all their social media but I’ll get to that). They urged other people within the server to stay dedicated to the event. A rebuttal was made that pointed out the sort of environment they’d created that’d made a lot of people feel the same way as me: uncomfortable. The event mods were understaffed and constantly diverting attention to other/future events and one of them didn’t even communicate with the rest of the server save to make announcements, and the cherry on top? 

They expected the participants to make the effort. They expected to create a server and essentially let everyone grope around in the dark until they found a handhold. They outright told us they wouldn’t hold anyone’s hands, which was as condescending a statement as one could get, and then somehow expected the whole thing to work out? When the rest of the server occupants, including people who hadn’t spoken for ages and people who hadn’t spoken at all, started voicing their complaints, the mods acted like they were being backed into a corner they’d already placed themselves in.

They lashed out. Like children. Like a little kid on the playground confronted by their teacher after they pushed another kid and then loudly proclaimed “He pushed me first!”.

They backed out of the event and left it to the server mods. They, after having made a big deal out of commitment to the event, dropped it like a hot potato. 

And then they sent this nonsense:

Just. Out of nowhere.

It might’ve been salvaged if they left it in the hands of the other mods, but they cancelled it. They fucking cancelled all the people who put hard work into making fics and art and put time into this. Every single participant wasted their time on this. And it wasn’t just a few weeks, this fucking event started in April and they had the gall to just up and cancel it.

The rest of the email below, which is just as much a wall of text as this rant is, is essentially an overly worded temper tantrum in which the mods blame the participants for everything that went wrong. Like, I get it. You’re only human. You’re stressed too. You suffer anxiety like the rest of us. I get it. Yes, it was on us to communicate with our partners. But when we come to the mods for help? The last fucking thing you should ever tell us is “we don’t hold your hands”. No wonder no one ever came to you guys for help. 

But what really gets me is the fact that not every participant in this event was in the discord. Not everyone saw the drama that went down. Not everyone saw this coming. Imagine having joined this event only to find an email in your inbox a month before we were supposed to start posting telling you that the event is cancelled and it’s all your fault.

Makes the mods come across as incompetent at best. Malicious at worst.

And seriously, regardless of what’s going on in your life, what sort of hangups or problems you might have...

YOU DO NOT START AN EVENT LIKE THIS WITHOUT BEING READY TO FULLY COMMIT YOURSELF TO IT. IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE CRITICISM, IF YOU AREN’T GOOD AT COMMUNICATING WITH PEOPLE, IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE IDEA OF MODDING FOR AN EVENT THAT YOU STARTED THEN MAYBE YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE STARTED IT.

This is common sense. Seriously. I’d never put myself in a position of leadership without being able to accept the responsibility that comes with it. Because it leads to shit like this.

I’m upset. I’d dropped the event a few weeks ago and still I’m genuinely upset. Because nobody deserved this. None of the participants deserved to have their time wasted like this. Nobody deserved the drama and the bullshit that was dredged up from this. Nobody deserved to have this bomb dropped on them literally a month before posting was going to start.

It was supposed to be fun. For me, a chance to finally contribute something in the Kingdom Hearts fandom as part of a fandom effort. A chance to reach outside of my bubble and make friends and create. And while I did get to reach out, I did get to create, and I’m going to continue to contribute on my own as I always did, I can’t say anything good about the Big Bang beyond that. All good will there might’ve been for it was ruined the moment the former mods sent that passive aggressive email.

Who the hell wants to see that nonsense in their email anyway. Aren’t they grown ass adults? They ought to know better. A simple “We regret to inform you that we’re cancelling this event” would have been enough. The rest was unnecessary and, quite frankly, downright nasty and that was honestly what pissed me off enough to make this rant. 

In the end if it had silently died, I wouldn’t have even minded at this point.

But, well...

The Big Bang had to go out with a bang, I guess.

Too bad it was a shit grenade and now there’s shit all over the walls and I’m just glad I’m not the one who has to clean all that shit up.

#rant #khbigbang