Like @BobbyjoeXforgotensb said. You don't need much to be toxic. It takes just 1 person to get aggressive and weird to make it all toxic. My first comic had a following of maybe 10 active "fans." and about half of them viciously tore into my pages, questioning every choice I made. When there were less than a dozen pages even posted.
right now Doxxing, reading about the craziness on the internet and one group and particular harassing and threatening a 5 year old child just turns my stomach >.<
I really hope never get that in my life.
welcome to the internet where no matter what people will ship anything with everything, from planets to the literal embodiment of the natural forces nothing is safe from the shippers XD.
in all fairness I would actually be weirded out about that happening to me, but as long as they don't go too crazy with it I could just ignore it.
I have two major fears.
Someone who is so anal with their criticisms that they will go full executive meddling and take over my work.
Being called "overrated"
I've seen the first happen at face value.
The weird thing is, in my case, almost none of these people were trying to make me feel bad. Some of them were trying to be constructive and just... missed the mark by a wide margin. Others didn't realize how serious I was about those specific aspects they criticized. There were also a couple of cases where my work was being praised for all the wrong reasons (imagine like "what a lovely abstract painting!" when it's supposed to be an attempt at painting in a realistic manner...)
So while I'm glad I haven't had truly vicious haters... it still makes me feel bad. That these people said such things about my work even when they weren't trolls. I can't even use the 'haters gonna hate' shield. But what am I gonna do, other than continuing to do my best?
To use your arena analogy: I'll admit, I won't be happy to lose. I won't be happy to be able to say "well, I've lost, but at least I gave it my all." But if I don't even try, then I lose by default, right? Soooo here I am. My chances may not be great, but simply by trying, it's higher than 0%.
I have some fun mental health and physical ailments. I live in fear they will take over my creative endeavors.
I've already dealt with a negative fanbase and half expect it to be unavoidable if it comes back.
My biggest concerns are often being chalked up as being branded a terrible person because someone decided to read my work despite content warnings and threw a fit because of said content.
Bigger, even more constraining readers platforms.Total inability to express different style or stories. Absolutely crushed under zombies climbing over each other for speck of attention, guided by some conglomerate to their eminent failure.
(Hopefully I'm posting this right, never been on a forum before... 
)
My biggest fear as a creator that haunts me every day and night is that I'll be attacked for the content within my comics. It gets to the worst of the worst, and I try and slather this thing with warnings to try and keep as many people sensitive to the subjects presented away as possible. I try and reassure myself that this is my own story and I can do as I please, though I know that isn't the case because I'm going to have to deal with things that will ruin me forever if I don't handle it correctly.
Good thing from how the pacing is at, it'll take a year or two to get to the truly bad stuff. One of my friends tried to encourage me at one point saying that since I'll be working on it for so long, I'll be able to gather a larger readerbase. Though the thought is risky, as the more people viewing the material means my mistakes will be that much worse.
And I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so this is a death sentence. I really don't want my creative works to perform harm on someone's wellbeing to such an offended extent. Hopefully I can get over my insecurities, as I'm sensitive myself and it was hard for me to even publish an episode mentioning a word that will be a problem in the future. I'll just have to develop an insanely thick skin to make this comic go forwards.
My fear as a creator is to get tired of it. You know, to not finish my story because i got tired of it, i hope it never happens, i have no problem with it right now, but it scares me
One of my major fears, like a couple others have said, is just losing passion for my comic and not being able to finish it. This has happened with a lot of projects that I've wanted to make, where I try super hard in the beginning and just end up not caring about it after a few months and forgetting about it.
Another fear is that some bad ships will get popular. There's an... uncomfortable age gap between some of the main cast and the idea of some people shipping them just makes me uncomfortable as a result.
My fear?
My biggest fear possibly sounds ridiculous (especially for author with 150 subs 
), but...
What if someday I'll become famous, and some comics/manga/anime company will convince me to sell them rights for using my characters and setting, and... and...
...they will take a SOUL and INDIVIDUALITY away from them?!
Like... they will turn my MC into stereotypical "cool guy" and "computer genius". He will slap her ass, call her "baby", tell Cool Jokes in the middle of the battle. She will perform absurd "genius" hacking, typing at keyboard at the speed of light and saying nonsense with randomly mixed IT words. And then, instead of the normal plot, they will go into standard pop-style adventures, at the end of which they will fight GREATER EVIL and save the world!!! (of course, in the final battle boi will fight evil boi, hacker girl will fight evil hacker girl, and cat will fight evil cat) But the most horrible it will be, if they will win that final fight... OMG... BY THE POWER OF THEIR LOVE?!!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You probably laughed, but one night I've accidentally imagined it, and couldn't sleep... 
on the other side, a small fandom can also be an awesome and motivated one 
but yeah, there is always the risk of toxic people enjoying your work and end up saying in your mind "your aproval fill me with shame"
My greatest fear is passion fatigue. I've devoted my life so far to two careers that both have major problems with it and I'm so scared I'll fall prey to it eventually.
I love what I do, and I've invested a lot of time and effort to it. I've dealt with a lot of backlash over it too (shakes fist at wattpad) and it's helped me through a lot of hard times.
My fear is coming to a point where I don't even WANT to create anymore because it's taken all my life from me.
On another note I definitely relate to the fear of a toxic fanbase. Part of the reason why I left wattpad was because I had somehow attracted a few nasty readers who were prone to attacking my other fans and I hated it. It tears down the creator a lot because you can't help feeling like it's somehow your fault, even though it's not.
1) Not reaching the goals/getting to where I want to be as a comic creator. I just wanna get to that level and be happy that people are reading my comics.
2) That I wont be able to do all the stuff that I want to do as a creator- part of that fear is that I'm getting older and RL job work, while the other part is that I feel like with all the aches & pains my body is falling apart faster than I want it to.
This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.
i think im scared of burning out so bad that i quit out of the industry entirely, or finding myself in a place where i can make good work but i just dont have the skills or the energy to market it
This thread gives me anxiety! 
I am mostly afraid of burning out. It is very hard sometimes to draw the same characters in kind of the same environment over and over again and to do it within deadline. Sometimes I want do draw something else for a change, but I simply can't find time or desire to do it.
Also, I always fear that I am not doing good enough job at delivering the plot. As I am an artist for my husband's stories, I really love all those stories so much. But here I am, not such great of a comic maker... I sure hope I am becoming better with time, yet I'm never satisfied.
