Creators and Fans – a guide

As a creator, it’s a privilege to find an audience. To discover a group of people, heck even a single person, who appreciates what you do. It’s a gift. Sharing your creativity is a nerve-wracking endeavour, so seeing a positive reaction, reading good feedback, it all makes a huge difference. Often it can be the difference between pushing forward with something new and losing motivation.

Being a creator is also terrifying. Suddenly you go from a person with a fun thought in their head to someone with followers, and fans, and listeners. There’s expectation, and pressure to deliver on it. On top of that, there are times when the interaction between the creator and the audience can become problematic and upsetting for both sides.

So I want to offer some guidance to both creators and their fans to help make the experience more positive.

For the Fans

Let’s start with how fans engage with creators. In the early stages of jumping into the comments, discord server, or DMs of a creator, many fans can be a little overzealous. This is particularly true with erotic hypnosis. I think there’s a good reason for that – you’ve found someone who shares a niche kink, and you’re giving a lot of trust in them in a way you don’t with say, watching a YouTuber in a vlog.

This leads to some nice moments, and often I get very sweet feedback and messages which I appreciate. Sometimes though, a person will overwhelm a creator with attention, seeking answers to numerous questions, looking for more of what they experienced in content through contact and feeling quite a connection with someone they’re yet to speak to.

Worse than that, a fan can get angry, upset or otherwise emotional if they don’t feel their interest and effort is reciprocated. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that creators are people too, they have private lives, often they have jobs, families, responsibilities.

When a fan treats a creator as someone who they are entitled to time from, they are dehumanising that creator. They are not respecting the boundary between fantasy and reality. Of course we blur the lines with hypnosis, and dominant scenes and roleplays, but if a creator does not actively offer private chats or one-to-one sessions, a fan should not expect it.

That’s not to say creators don’t want to talk. Anything but! I love chatting in Discord, talking on social media, and sharing our love of this kink we have. I want feedback, I want people to engage.

What I don’t want is someone to assume they deserve my time, my attention, or my body. Creators are not objects, they are people, and it’s important to treat them as such.

For Creators

On the other side of the coin, creators would be lost without their audience. We love what we do, and love it more when people appreciate that, so it’s important that fans get respect.

Creators can easily forget, after negative interactions, that most people are just enthusiastic and interested in what we do. They want to be part of it, to enjoy not just the experience of consuming content, but a little bit of the person behind it too.

That’s an entirely natural reaction, but creators don’t always know the difference between a genuine fan who is just a teeny bit enthusiastic, and someone who will become problematic, and lash out if they don’t feel their needs are met. I have had people go from excited fan to aggressive threats when they don’t get what they feel they deserve from me, and it is very, very scary.

But that’s the minority.

Creators need to give the majority of fans the benefit of the doubt. Now that obviously doesn’t extend to obvious trolls. What I mean is that when someone new reaches out to say how much they love what they’re seeing from a creator, that creator responding with rudeness or anger is unnecessary. Some space to express their admiration, I believe, is important for the people enjoying the content we make.

That doesn’t mean anyone is guaranteed a reply to a message – it means fans shouldn’t be met with hostility from creators.

It’s Complicated

This all gets complicated with dominance, hypnosis and money. Hypnosis files create intimacy, but asynchronously. The listener of a hypnosis file is letting a creator into their mind while the creator is not present. It can lead to intense, unreciprocated feelings of lust, love, and companionship that are based on a piece of content. The creator is not present to share in those feelings.

Dominance also leads to some strangeness. A creator who plays the dominant role is catering to a real need in submissive people. Something they may be absolutely starved of in their personal life. Again, this is going to create an intense reaction.

Finally, money muddies the waters. Often fans will spend money to get a creator’s attention and be particularly aggrieved if that doesn’t play out the way they expect. Gifts and tips, however, are not a guarantee of getting someone’s attention and in the context of hypnosis creators, most are not financial dominants. That means we aren’t looking to exchange money for time. We’re just making things we feel passion for, and any gifts resulting from that is a bonus.

If you wouldn’t expect the waitress to give you her number just because you tipped well, don’t expect a creator to give you their time just because you bought them something, basically.

All of these aspects of what we create, the dominance, the hypnotic intimacy, the gifts creators are delighted to receive, can lead to unhealthy levels of obsession. I’ve seen it happen and in a very, very frightening way that involved self-harm, threats, anger, toxicity, and manipulative behaviour. All that happened because I didn’t put a like on a Patreon comment fast enough.

Things can get ugly, fast. Most creators have some stories to tell about unhinged followers, so if you’re a fan, take it slow and understand that creators are naturally wary of new people who want to talk – we deal with a lot of people who just want us to be kink dispensers, so while you may be very genuinely excited to share just how much you loved the latest thing you heard, rein it in and introduce yourself first.

If you feel you’re getting a little too invested in a creator, that’s relatively normal. Lots of people get what’s been described as hypnoamory and you are not the first to experience this. Take a break, step away from the content for a bit, and ask for help from the community if you think things are getting a little too much.

Positive Engagement

How then, do creators and fans engage in a positive way?

I’m lucky to have a great community of people who I interact with almost every day via Discord and Patreon. I’m also unlucky to have a pile of messages I can’t make time to read and a constant stream of trolls and threats. That makes it hard to gauge positive versus negative interactions, but I’ve built up a good sense of when someone might be about to go from fun and friendly to absolutely the opposite.

For creators. Encourage fans, particularly new ones, to keep communication minimal. Ask the overzealous to wait for a reply before another message, and not to spam your channels. If you have a discord server, make sure there are rules about tagging you and spamming channels looking for attention, that way you can ask the person to stop without singling them out.

Be kind, but firm. You can say no without being rude and you shouldn’t feel bad for saying no, whether someone has just messaged the sweetest piece of feedback in human history, dropped fifty grand on your Throne page, or just said ‘hey’. There is no obligation to give your time.

If the fan is not respectful of that, you will very likely see problems arise with them. Be cautious of anyone who is willing to push past your boundaries.

For fans, respect the creator you follow. Remember they’re human, and not always available. They are not there to service your kink outside of the content they make, unless you have an explicit arrangement for them to do so, and then it is only as far as that arrangement goes.

Don’t send a lot of messages hoping for a reply or extra attention, it usually puts creators off talking to you at all. The best fans are those who respect boundaries, and don’t feel entitled to time or attention.

If you see a creator at an event, remember; If you don’t have a dynamic you’ve already negotiated directly, approach them as you would any other attendee. Many creators attend community events to see friends or learn things or play with pre-existing partners and may not be “in role” or in the role that you expect from them. It’s usually ok to say hi and give a compliment (and that’s often even welcomed!) – but respect their boundaries, and remember, just because they act a certain way with some people in public (such as play partners), doesn’t mean they will act that way with the general public.

If you’re joining a Discord, remember you’re joining a community. Do not focus on the person who started the server, but on the people in it. You might find you make some new friends that way, and an active, friendly community is a delightful place for a creator to engage with fans and followers in a relaxed way. Unless the space is about the creator as a dominant, don’t put them on a pedestal, just join the conversation and you’ll have a better time.

Do not assume that you can buy a creator’s time. I know every creator appreciates gifts or tips, but again unless there’s an arrangement in place, you are not entitled to anything. Time is a precious commodity with content creation and most of the creators I speak to have very limited amounts of it.

We work, we create, we engage, we edit, we promote, we repeat. It’s hard, and it’s time consuming, and when a fan demands more than we can give, it’s going to lead to that fan upsetting their favourite creator.

And be grateful for those creators who do engage with their audiences. Who jump into the fray on social channels and talk within groups and in private messages. Just don’t expect it all the time. We’re often just as enthusiastic about hypnokink as fans of our content are, and want to share that, but the more negative interactions we have, the more we recede, the more we go back into our shells and shy away from the potential for disaster.

A great way to start a positive interaction with a creator is just to ask if they’d like your feedback on a piece of content, or if you can chat with them about a specific topic. Coming in with respect from the start goes a long way to making the creator comfortable and less worried you’ll act in an entitled, aggressive, or otherwise worrying manner.

Respect Each Other

The reality of it all is that we should have mutual respect. If you want to engage with your favourite hypnokink creator, be nice, be respectful, and don’t be entitled. Be patient, despite your excitement, and wait for them to reply. Engage how they would like to be engaged with, and don’t expect it to lead to anything sexual. If you have ulterior motives for reaching out, you’ll end up disappointed.

And remember – you aren’t available all the time, you have a life outside your kink too, and you don’t feel you need to reply to a creator when you’re busy at work or home, so don’t expect them to be any different.

I have a great relationship with fans who have built trust over time and listened when I stated my boundaries. We have built that trust on a foundation of mutual respect. Creators and fans value one another, and it’s a reciprocal relationship that benefits both parties, if we understand and remember to be kind.

We’re all just people, and both creator and fan can have positive, uplifting and enjoyable interaction if we keep that in mind at all times.