Minding the gate are too many unworthy of the task.
If you are a creative, and anything like me, you too often go online to see the unfiltered criticism of so many gatekeeping Shadowtrolls. Performative dismissal of the work of others has become something of a cottage industry online, an entire genre unto itself filled with dark aspirational influencers whose sole contribution is unfiltered judgement.
Criticism is essential to any art form, but open critique meant to foster the talents of a creator who has hung their work out for public adjudication is vastly different than tearing those same offerings to shreds while glorifying the corpse of someone else’s creative efforts. Shadowtrolls feast on the pain of the latter, giving no value to the community they critique and farming adulation from those who giggle at the imperfection of others.
Art is always imperfect. Even the rare examples that we hold up as so are also the source of flaws and must be subject to evaluation to particular tastes.
Criticism is inescapable, and I am not here to simply say it shouldn’t exist.
Rather, as a creative who is among those offering our own imperfect samples to the world, that when met with the ravings of a Shadowtroll seeking to bar the path and slam the gate closed, we should do something besides hear and recoil at the critical rage. We should make our own evaluations of the source of those barriers and judgement, and discard such opinion with a ferocity met equal to the unworthy.