Glitch and backing up their showrunners
This is something that was originally posted over on r/thedigitalcircus as a comment, but it's prolly worth having it here expanded as its own post.
Gooseworx just posted this on Bsky:
https://bsky.app/profile/gooseworx.bsky.social/post/3mmdo6xwck227
> I know people are upset with my response, which is fine, but I kind of just wanted to make a cartoon, & it's ended up being way more trouble than it's worth. I really just can't keep my heart in this thing anymore. It's gotten too much bigger than me, & I probably shouldn't be the figurehead of it.
That's… incredibly disheartening and hopefully Goose will recover and rediscover her creative passion again. But I want to focus on what Glitch could do to prevent this from happening again.
Among other things, Glitch should provide PR/marketing people as buffers between showrunners and fanbases, along with offering media training. Parasocialism goes both ways and ends up causing grief for creators and fans alike. I get why some folks don't like it when celebrities and other public people have everything go through PR managers and teams, but at a certain scale of popularity this is needed to prevent things from getting out of hand.
As much as it may hurt or take time to get used to, future Glitch showrunners need to limit online interactions significantly going forward; hopefully Goose will also do this to get better too. This was a lesson Toby Fox learned during his first Homestuck era, since then mostly only posting teasers and announcements. At a certain point of mass popularity, any creatives should prolly do the same too.
With regards to other upcoming Glitch show creators:
- Dana Terrace (KoG) - already has media training from her time at Disney TVA, especially while The Owl House was on the air
- Nick Szopko (TGD) - prolly the least experienced with mass online popularity (please correct if I'm wrong), will likely need lots of support
- Ross O'Donovan (Gameoverse) - was already somewhat popular online during the original run of Homestuck and saw what happened there, knows Toby Fox, and has expressed relief that he no longer has to be a YouTuber and streamer, prolly will be okay
Glitch cannot afford having creatives keep getting burned out or disillusioned due to overexposure with Internet Discourse.