The difference between having an opinion and being a horrible person

(Photo by Ivo Jansch, CC 2.0)

It's been a while since I've been on a good rant, but an interesting thing happened to some of my friends earlier today, and that's what prompted me to make this post. See, my other big social crowd besides the goth-industrial scene is the anime convention scene. I have a significant number of friends and associates who are active within the anime scene and are involved in a number of ways, including cosplay. As it so happened, some of my friends did group costuming at this year's Katsucon. For the most part, these people received praise for their costumes, but one incident that happened on Facebook today made for the entire spark for this entry.

There was this one person who was supposed to be a friend of one of my friends who did the cosplay. Apparently, this guy didn't like the cosplay and thought the majority of the cosplayers looked subpar. What was particularly tactless and odd was the fact the perpetrator told my friend that he looked fine, but all his friends who were part of the cosplay with him were awful to look at. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where this is going, particularly after the person making tactless comments about the cosplay threatens to put the pic in question on 4chan.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Cosplay is one of those small-time community art scenes, a lot like the goth-industrial music scene. There are a few people high up on the food chain, like Jessica Nigri and Yaya Han, who really make a decent living out of what they do, but most of the people who "make it" within the scene are still people who are close enough to the realities of the world of the common people that they aren't above feeling the sting or elation of what others say about their craft. If you keep up with cosplay, you sometimes see the same people get featured all the time on the big and semi-big geek portal sites, and they're the people who are really popular cosplayers who people enjoy seeing. These people may have a considerable number of followers on their cosplay pages on Facebook. But when Monday morning after cons hit, these people who are not the Jessica Nigris and Yaya Hans put their pants on one leg at a time and go to mundane jobs or classes like the rest of us.

In the goth-industrial scene, it's no different. For instance, while Brittany Bindrim might be telling you about how things were "not [her] plan" and letting you know over and over again that "[she] did this" after work, her mad skills with Photoshop are what pay the bills. I can guarantee you that nobody in I:Scintilla gets treated like Hollywood royalty. Those people shop at the grocery store and pump their own gas like the rest of us. As such, they're more like us than you might think.

We're quick to detach ourselves from artists, particularly in the age of the Internet, and we have kind of thrown decorum out the window. As a result of this detachment, we forget that someone who is a lot like ourselves worked hard on the thing we're consuming. It's one thing when someone who is very famous has a product that has been exposed to the masses, because when someone is at that level, he or she isn't even going to notice what individuals other than people with comparable clout have to say. Someone with that level of success will only notice macro-level trends from the masses, so noticing one person's flippantly biting remark is like noticing a single particular drop of rain within the context of a thunderstorm. But when it comes to most people within the indie scene, up-and-comers, and other people who haven't made it to the big time yet, those people do notice criticism on a much more micro level. Regardless of whether or not they've learned to deal with the criticism, they still notice it.

Of course, none of this is to say that I believe you shouldn't ever criticize artists below a certain level of fame. As a matter of fact, I think that idea is completely absurd. Good, constructive criticism is necessary for artists to improve and gain fame over time. Artists gamble when they completely ignore the input of their fans. Angering your fanbase is a great way make your artwork no longer financially viable. It's better to get constructive criticism now and be able to make adjustments than to wonder why your fanbase simply dwindled over time. That's not to say artists should never take risk, not is it to say that the fans are always right or perfect seers of the future, but public opinion is very important to consider when trying to peddle one's work.

But the key term within the last paragraph was "constructive". If there is something you didn't like about a song, a video, an album, a show, or anything, you need to explain what you didn't like in as direct and non-confrontational as you can. "I didn't like this, because..." or "I would have preferred if you have done this, because..." works a lot better than "Your album sucks!" or "Don't quit your day job!" (An exception to this is if the artist actually did something you deem wrong or offensive. (e.g. took your money and didn't give you product in return, said racial slurs on stage, etc.) In those cases, being a bit more confrontational, without doing something that will get you arrested, mind you, may be more in order.) Artists who want to continue to be artists are remarkably receptive of feedback. You may think some of them are aloof, but they listen to what you have to say. As such, you need to not treat them like garbage. Talk to them like human beings, as if they were standing in front of you in a room.

In summary, I suppose the whole point of this rant is that you shouldn't treat artists within the scene poorly. They actually notice what you have to say. Even if they may not address you directly, they pay attention. Don't be a jerk, unless you just want the scene to dry up and die.