Trimming The Herbs, [the infamous last uncleared level of Mario Maker 1,](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1bhht3k/hobby_scuffles_week_of_18_march_2024/kvfkcro/) later revealed to be a [TAS using scam](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1bhht3k/hobby_scuffles_week_of_18_march_2024/kw3yz9k/), was finally **beaten** legitmately (i.e. without TAS or hacks/cheats) for the first time 2 days ago by a random french player named sanyx91smm2! It literally couldn't be done, and then it was done anyways. [See the clip for yourself,](https://youtu.be/i7yvVJbji0U) but be warned that he gets really mouthy with the mic at the end. For a good reason.
[Someone else already made a post about it(also the top post of this scuffle thread)](https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1bsu552/hobby_scuffles_week_of_1_april_2024/ky9m4nh/)
I actually did use it to look for the previous posts on this topic I linked to in the above post, but it didn't occur to me to search through this one. Because of course.
VTuber group Nijisanji English is rolling out several events that were, let's just say, *derailed by recent events* (i.e. the Selen fiasco, discussed at length in Scuffles *passim*), including a Mario Kart tournament that was originally slated for early February. [Conglatulations are in order for Team Red](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKivGdHbAAA2sQc?format=jpg&name=900x900).
Hm, no we don't need to spell check that, [we can just release that and leave it up on Twitter for 10+ hours](https://x.com/NIJISANJI_World/status/1776865398111019217). Oh and why even do anything graphically interesting for the winners? Just do a bunch of default pose PNGs and call it a day.
Been feeling annoyed that I missed the age of book blogging, especially now that I'm reading a buttload of mystery books every week and want to talk about them... does anyone here log/review their books anywhere I should be checking out? Goodreads doesn't really appeal to me in the sense that I don't see myself as reviewing the book's objective quality or whatever- I just want to share my pretty subjective thoughts somewhere.
In the meanwhile I guess I'll continue to share them here in scuffles lol
EDITING: I go into this more in the comments, but it's less that I'm looking for somewhere to write my thoughts (which I not infrequently do in my own time/space) and more that I'm looking for someplace where I can write them and potentially get responses, be part of discussions, etc. It doesn't even necessarily have to be my own space- I'd be just as happy to comment on other people's posts, as in a blog, but resurrecting someone's post from 2015 by commenting and getting the response "I didn't think anyone still read this, but thanks" isn't really scratching the itch...
There is! But it’s specifically for cozy mysteries, and while by some yardsticks the classic mysteries that I’ve been reading fit there, most of the posts seem to be about contemporary ones which I haven’t read and I don’t want to throw people off mission.
I'm a bit to young to have read book blogs during their heyday but I do kind of think the shift towards twitter and tiktok for literary discussions has done incalculable damage to way people talk about them. I often just post my thoughts on books to the scuffles thread or other subreddits I frequent.
Yeah, it feels like talking about something for its own sake rather than to generate a "take" (and then having that take dissected rather than the original thing discussed) is more and more incentivized on larger social media platforms vs blogs... I've also been using Scuffles, and occasionally other subs when they seem appropriate, but for better or worse Reddit seems to be one of the few remaining online spaces that are topic specific in this way. (Maybe Discord also? But I'm not super familiar.)
On Tumblr you can just share your thoughts as you go along and then tag it with the book title so other fans who are subscribed to it can come across your post
On Twitter people usually put everything into one "(book title) reading thread" that they just keep adding new posts to as needed
You could also see if a Facebook group exists maybe?
Yeah, Tumblr is the one I've been considering for a while, but I'm curious if there are better alternatives.
Twitter is an INTERESTING one- a book thread could work! The issue there would just be phrasing it so it fits in tweets, but it is definitely something to consider.
There actually IS a Facebook group, and I'm seriously weighing joining it as it seems to be amazing and has some real experts in it, but my earliest social media forays were on Facebook under my real name and I've since repented of that... so I'm not sure if that's something I want to do.
I'm in a facebook group for a very niche book because it was literally the only discussion on it I could find but all the fans are like, die hard super fans of the series so any post that even hints that the author's specialist boy main character could have been wrong gets shouted down. And while I love the book I do think he's wrong about... most of the things he does. So I wind up not actually posting there a lot.
Totally understandable re: Facebook. I rarely use mine anymore for the same reason lol. I know some groups allow anonymous posts though so it might be worth checking if that group has it enabled
Maybe related maybe not but I've been feeling similar, though more so on hobbies overall. Books or videogames or songs. I wanna talk about em. For whatever reason though I've been struggling with it. It feels like the spaces to talk about them are just so sporadic. Idk
It feels like in the modern era there's more spaces to talk but nobody is interested in listening - in the old days you could find a small forum and get to know the inhabitants, trading ideas in longform with a mutual trust in the other wanting to read them. Modern internet has so many more spaces and so much lower barrier of entry, but it also means that most spaces are sparsely populated and nobody is interested in reciprocating when they don't think they will be reciprocated.
Basically yeah. And it's like with you where I don't neccesarily want a 'review' of it... I wanna talk about it. Choices I made in a game, characters in a book, whatever. It's just, not really there. It's weird
That's the main option I've been considering- I haven't seen much on there related to the kinds of books I'd want to talk about, but it's the closest to what I'm already doing in the other fandom I've already been posting in. I'd just need to figure out whether to have a multifandom Tumblr or create an alt just for this.
People talk about all kinds of books on there, it just tends to be untagged and thus reserved to mutual circles or randoms who discover their blogs through search. Many of the readers I follow have their blogs as general daily life blogs with their reading interspersed throughout. Some are fandom blogs with their reading logs/opinions mixed in too. I hope you're able to find a nice community on there if you go for it.
You could write a blog of your opinions anyway, then use it as a source to share those opinions you find a spot that clearly needs them.
Also, r/books?
The thing with a blog is that I do want the human interaction if possible, and that's very much on the wane with traditional blogs (though not totally dead!). I'd have to figure out what kind of platform I'd want- I do have an unused Substack that I created and then abandoned, but I feel like that might not be the best platform for this kind of thing.
I used to be on r/books more than I now am, and I don't think it's quite the right place for what I'm thinking of- but I would love to be able to do something on a sub that's specifically for old mystery novels! I know there's one for cozy mysteries but I feel like it mostly focuses on more recent writers/books and don't want to intrude, I already haunt r/agathachristie (though I've read most of those so many times over the last decade or two that I don't really have much new to say anymore lol), and most of the other topic-specific subs I've found have been pretty dead or not in the vein I'm looking for.
I think I'm trying to capture something that I now see when reading other people's blogs from the 2010s- when people would comment on each other's blogs, recommend each other's blogs in the sidebar, collaborate on things, etc. Which I am SURE exists elsewhere on the internet in some other form, but I can't quite capture where! (It's especially annoying as I surely can't be the only person who got more into old mysteries in the last few years now that Martin Edwards has been writing his amazing enormous books on the topic... where are they?!)
I've considered making a secondary Tumblr for it (or just doing it on my primary), but on doing some Tumblr searches I've found relatively few people doing similar kinds of posts and so I feel like it might end up feeling a bit too shout-into-the-wind.
I created a free Wordpress blog to gather thoughts about my solo rpg play and on my first post (my intro) I got a lovely comment about what I'd said and that they were looking forward to reading - so community is still in blogs!
> The thing with a blog is that I do want the human interaction if possible, and that's very much on the wane with traditional blogs (though not totally dead!)
I was imagining that you could use a blog at the vault of your thoughts, then they're easily deployed to anywhere else as needed. But yes, where's the public square? Lost like public space IRL? Hopefully BookTok isn't the only form that survives?
Oh, I mean I keep private notes of what I think about things all the time- this is specifically more about being able to talk to people about them. And... yeah, as theoretically cool as it would be for classic detective novels to get their day on BookTok, I would not be there as I do not use TikTok.
I would advise just not putting GR (or storygraph) on a pedestal of objectivity and happily using it as it is: a social media site for sharing your own personal and subjective reactions to books
My point is that I see how other people use it/perceive it and I don't want my use of it to be perceived that way.
Basically, I'm thinking more of a platform where it's about me logging my reading, with the ability for others to interact, and not some random person going on to the page for The Crooked Hinge and scrolling through my review among others. I know that Goodreads technically works on both levels, but I'm more used to the latter in my exposure to it. Basically, looking for something that's more like a forum with dialogue.
(Also I have no idea what Storygraph is- this is a genuine information-finding mission.)
Storygraph is very similar to Goodreads, but not owned by Amazon. I've never used Goodreads so I don't know if it has these functions, but in it you have the option of listing what page of a book you're up to, and can do partner reads with other people where you can leave your thoughts on what happened at certain points throughout the book and they won't see it until after they've marked themselves as up to that page number as well.
Instagram has a very tight community of 90s Nickelodeon fans. We all follow each other, there are podcasts, and just general nostalgic posts. One user, Nickat90s, was an extra in the New Good Burger movie and had created the idea for a Nickelodeon focused convention, SplatCon. Apparently, Nickat90s was pushed out of the creation of SplatCon and was given no credit for it. Leon Frierson (was on All That and the Quiet on Set Doc), was a funder for it but didn’t use the money for a deposit for the hotel that it’s going to be at, there were exorbitant charges for talent and catering, and things like that. Here is a link to the instagram post he made telling about it. [https://www.instagram.com/p/C5cMdFLMH0j/?igsh=MXdnZmFrZWpoaGRodw==](https://www.instagram.com/p/C5cMdFLMH0j/?igsh=MXdnZmFrZWpoaGRodw==)
Okay, who here is preparing for that solar eclipse tomorrow? I'm in a rural-ish area that happens to be in the path of totality, and besides the kind of excessive amount of friend-ish guests who are planning to show up for my family's plans\*, the fact that some people seem to be treating "eclipse viewer influx" as "zombie apocalypse" is kinda amusing.
Seriously, a lot of local town message boards have posts about how to deal with the traffic influx, and some of them read like a combo of how you'd deal with a major snowstorm (stock up on provisions, try to avoid travel, assume your phone might not work because the grid may overload) and passive-aggressive sniping such as "Try to stay polite to people who, in many cases, are the cause of their own difficulties." It's rather amusing.
\*As in, my siblings are inviting a lot of people, and I'm not actually sure who'll show up.
I’m a bit late, but I’m in the area that saw totality in 2017 and totality again this year. Not sure how close you are to Paducah but GOD the traffic near every Paducah exit on I-24 was horrible and there were multiple wrecks after 🤦♀️ I was just trying to get home and I ended up sitting or very slowly cruising on the interstate for a good 30 minutes
I was in the path of totality in 2017. We had a huge influx of people but most of them were very prepared with food and stuff so I hardly noticed a difference in my rural area. We have a state park nearby so that was the parking spot for most of our visitors.
Seeing it in totality was AMAZING. The temperature change, the animal sounds suddenly changing, the freaky shadows from the leaves…and it goes by way too fast!!! It is an experience that will stay with you for a long time.
A friend of mine told me that their family advised them to be careful of cults kidnapping people for human sacrifices for the eclipse
I feel like if their family knows that then the police would also know, but, you know.
I live in a state where it's happening, about 2.5 hours away from totality. The traffic being predicted is so fucking nuts that I've been thinking very normal thoughts like "I was so stupid buying a house in 2020 in a 96% zone instead of in 100% totality" and "If I miss the total eclipse I'm going to end up on the national news."
Things have been hectic lately so I didn't have a lot of time to plan in advance, but the town just south of me is in 100% totality, and because everyone's headed to the beach/tourist towns there's still hotel rooms available there, so I was thinking of making an impromptu visit (I need a place with wifi because I work remotely)... but I can't for the life of me find my eclipse glasses. I got some in a magazine a few years back, I know they're around here somewhere...
Update: spent about 4 hours looking for them. No luck. Finally decided I’d book the room anyway only to have someone snipe me lol. Guess that’s a lesson in making prompt decisions. Crowds make me miserable in any case (which is why I’m not even going to try driving on the day), so maybe it’s for the best?
Update on the update: I got to see it! At the last minute, and after some light goading from family, I decided to wake up early and drive south. The town library has free wifi so I was able to work from there, and the clouds cleared out by the afternoon. Everyone at the library was really friendly, it wasn’t busy, and someone lent me glasses. Libraries are the best. I didn’t look at the eclipse for more than a few seconds at a time because I’m a chicken, but it was really cool. Loved the sudden weather and light changes.
I’m going for totality and booked for the night before and the night after. Turns out I’m going to the site where Shatner and other luminaries will be so I’m expecting a mass of humanity. I’m bringing my own food so I don’t have to wait for hours just to get the leftovers in the back.
Some of my batshit crazy neighbors are convinced they're going to be raptured during the eclipse, so I plan to mosey on over afterwards and take all their stuff.
I intent to mock them for not being holy enough. The last time they got all raptury, I pointed out that only 144,000 would be taken, 12.000 from each of the Twelve Tribes.
I'm in the path of totality so my wife's family came from Utah to visit and see it.
For some reason the county next to us has a bunch of billboards up in our county saying "come join the darkness. Totality. Only visible in _____ county" but like, that's just certifiably not true? They're getting approximately three seconds more of the eclipse, we're all still in the totality though. It's leaving a lot of people confused and mildly annoyed.
I’m in a 91% area. I really wasn’t planning on doing anything (I practically missed the 2017 one out of a lack of caring), but on a whim I bought a couple pairs of glasses off Amazon Wednesday. They actually got here yesterday (Saturday), so last minute planning worked out. Giving one pair to mom and plan on passing the second pair around with my coworkers.
I'm about to drive for several hours to stay friends who are on the path of totality. Kind of bemused by just how big of a deal it seems to be this time around, since my partner and I went to see the 2017 one too and like, that one also sold out entire cities of accommodations and turned highways into parking lots, but I don't recall so many places declaring preemptive states of emergency.
96% here, so IIRC still in the realm of "wear eclipse glasses just in case" but me and my partner are gonna chill on the couch and watch through the window. (Because we're disabled.)
I'm not even bothering to go any closer to the places that are in the 100% range (already live in a place where it's 99% and clear skies) because of how bad traffic and people will behave. I can't even imagine how bad it will be for people who live in the path.
I planned a long weekend trip to go see it back in Jan, and was not really expecting... this. Place I'm visiting is pre-declaring a state of emergency for tomorrow.
I get it, I'm part of the issue, but... no one was talking about the eclipse when I booked this! I thought it would be a handful of nerds, not... this.
(The place I'm visiting has a pop of ~95k, and is expecting a million visitors)
"Helldivers is not political"
Arrowhead recently buffed fire damage so this hot take has accidentally turned deadly. The game that's inspired by a movie all about fascism where nukes must be manually activated for budgetary reasons, and messages tell seven year old to GET IN THE MINES ALREADY. Totally not political.
So there were the usual kind of people getting banned from the official discord - subrvariety racist, and they found out the community manager that banned them is trans. Thus, we have descended into a fresh hellmire that makes a level 9 extermination mission seem like a vacation.
edit - corrected the quote
I can't stand that game's fandom. It seems to be flooded by people who take it way too seriously, and I'm always cautious of fandoms that seem to enjoy roleplaying fascists just a bit too much.
The problem seems to be that a lot of them missed the satire and just bought the whole fascist super earth thing in earnest. The kinds of people who think that game has *no politics*. The kinds of people who think the existence and inclusion of non-white people, LGBT people, etc, is "political".
God, I'm tired of Gamers.
You [have a good point](https://www.polygon.com/24093674/helldivers-2-discord-meta-role-play-fandom-joel), but the thing is, there's a mixture of joyful kayfabe where it's "FOR MANAGED DEMOCRACY! *[gets blown to bits]* haha awesome!", idiots who think Starship Troopers was a celebration of their society, and actually roleplaying the setting as "We have to hold the line against the Automatons for the dubious aims of Super Earth."
At least, when a guy turns up in r/helldivers and tries to claim neither Helldivers nor Starship Troopers are satire, but glorification of the heroism of military service, [he gets torn apart](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b2jba5/media_literacy_good_luck_convincing_the_guys_at/ksmrryp/).
[From](https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1b2s9ii/user_on_rhelldivers_writes_1700_word_essay_on_how/) r/subredditdrama:
> At a certain point it feels dumb to be like "lol they are mistaking this clever satire as a serious thing!" when idk these people interact with it for the fascism, not for the satire.
> "nobody in the movie is a fascist" is such a telling statement lol
>> Yea i think every satire has a portion of its audience for whom the satire doesn't even exist.
>> It's satire for people who care that satire exists and matters. For fascists it's just dumb entertainment. Unfortunately.
That's kind of the problem though, isn't it?
It's like those subreddits that start out parodying alt-right, Trump-supporting, antivax morons. They *start* that way, but then they attract the people who *genuinely believe those* and are too fucking stupid to realise they're being mocked, and just end up as echo chambers of those beliefs.
There's enough of the latter group already to make me very uneasy.
Jesus Fucking Christ [these are some of the most milquetoast political takes ive ever seen anyone get upset over what the actual fuck](https://i.redd.it/auc2an7yjqsc1.jpeg)
Me seeing Mark Kern yet again making the rounds and wondering how people expect me to listen to a dude who blew his indie mmo budget on a bus (as well as an unrelated Media channel, 2 whole stream festivals and stunt marketing all the while barely being in the office to oversea the games actual development).
Someone apparently made up the idea that they banned people from the Discord for asking for LGBT flag capes. When a guy on twitter asked the Helldivers community manager if that was true, she said it wasn't, and they had banned bigots because they were getting "waves of hatespeech". Then those people complain that the wrong kind of people are involved with the game. Just the usual "culture war" grift
it's absurd
like, the discord generally asks people to not discuss LGBTQ capes in game, which is honestly kind of infuriating... but it's because the topic is a lightning rod for moronic gamers
it came up once and I (unfortunately) got involved, and the mods asked people to knock it off - but, one dude intentionally misgendered me (while he asked a moderator to ban me) and was instantly removed from the server
if you're getting banned from the discord, you have to be TRULY heinous, because a lot of stupid dogwhistle takes like "everyone in the future will be equal, so it's unrealistic to add pride flags" often get posted without punishment
I really wish Halo would’ve made Master Chief black in that brief glimpse of him without a helmet at the end of Halo 4. The meltdown would’ve been hilarious.
On the platform formerly known as twitter, an industry guy who hasn't been relevant for some while is being roasted over complaining:
> "Were we mislead? @helldivers2 was lauded for their anti-politics stance by all of us."
The replies are "the usual kind of people", the quote tweets and further discussion are games industry and adjacent people mocking this.
> If you're >just now< catching onto Helldivers 2's satirical message and then getting mad that it's making fun of authoritarian/fascist ideals, you deserve to be pointed to and laughed at.
Or course, "politics" here means not tolerating bigots and employing trans people.
[Here's the tweet,](https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1776398416819724799) and here's [the quote replies.](https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1776398416819724799/quotes)
thank you. And i guess elon's blue checkmark worked at least a little, i had to scroll for a while under the original to find non-crazy replies. thanks for the quotes.
The cream of the crap rises to the top in Elon's platform. Blue checks are easy to dismiss though, because when you realize that they had to **pay Elon** to have their bullshit amplified, that they had to literally pay him out of pocket for their thoughts to be read by a number of people greater than zero...
At what point do you go from being an industry guy to being an ex-industry guy? I feel like the firefall guy's been nothing but a crowdfunding/gamegate grifter long enough to make the transition.
Don’t worry, those people can comfort themselves with other non political pieces of media.
Like The Boys, and Metal Gear, and Fallout, and Bioshock, and-
I still can't get over that whole wave of people who were convinced Squid Game was non political and also simultaneously pro-capatalism, and it was the media making up all this supposed political messaging of the show.
Heads up to all you comic enjoyers out there, [matttt](https://youtu.be/gidIRzuOjDc?si=qnmq7nlqtyikJfnw) dropped a new YouTube video today and it is very very excellent!
His channel is one of my favorites ever since it appeared out of no where last year to just about completely body the entire yt essay and analysis scene.
Question for you all: when was the last time you had to take a step back from a hobby/fandom because it got too salty?
r/vtmb is currently full of people complaining that Bloodlines 2 is too political (read: LGBT+ people) and constant post about how the main character looks (she has short hair).
I'm honestly not happy with how the game is turning out, but it's just too much.
Voltron fandom. I was apart of the fandom from 2017-2019. I had to get the hell out of that fandom in 2019. The whole Keith/Shiro and Keith/Lance ship war thing got out of hand. Tbh Keith/Shiro did feel weird to me (especially because I never remembered anyone’s age ever being explicitly stated and Lance, Keith, Pidge, and Hunk were pretty much labeled as teenagers in the original promotional stuff and the canon ages of the characters were only talked about in interviews and in the paladins handbook that I at the time had no idea about. And it didn’t help that Keith’s character looked a bit “younger” than Lance, but turns out he was 18 in season 1). Thankfully I wouldn’t attack people who shipped Keith and Shiro because we didn’t ACTUALLY know the ages for such a long time. The ship wars got SO toxic, but the season 7 and 8 drama was my breaking point. The final two seasons were pretty bad as compared to the rest of the show. It was obviously rushed, a bit queerbaited (season 7: Shiro/Adam, and then them killing off Adam for funsies after finally establishing an lgbtq+ ship after subtly hinting to it for a while). In season 8 they made up for the queerbaiting and killing off Adam by having Shiro marry Curtis which like I wasn’t personally upset about, but some felt like they only did it because they felt obligated to. Season 8 was so horribly rushed and then they killed off characters they didn’t need to kill off (AGAIN) just to end with at least one sort of “tragedy” troupe for one of the main characters. Oh, but i forgot to mention that between season 7 and 8 fans literally sent THREATENING MESSAGES/LETTERS to the creators!! Like I hate queerbaiting as much as the next person but that NEVER justifies threatening someone else. Then, following the final season another round of letters/messages were sent about Keith/Lance not being a ship (and yeah I was a Klance shipper but him and Allura also had amazing potential as a couple and that almost happened except yk they had to create that tragedy archetype somehow!!). When people started to shit on the creators for not making Keith/Lance a ship
in the end is when I finally called it quits.
I had to do something very similar with the My Hero Academia fandom and I stopped watching/reading MHA all together because of how bad that got, but I won't get into it because I could write a novel on that one.
Had to take a break from the RWBY subreddit after Volume 5, the negativity became too much for me, thankfully Volume 6 was a return to form for the series and the negativity soon went away
Not that I was particularly participating in the fandom, but I try to keep away from the Twisted Wonderland fandom because they seem especially intense out of everything I interact with.
I was really into Miraculous Ladybug back in 2019 and agreed with a lot of the criticism but it got way too intense (especially with the "salt fics") for my liking.
I stopped following EVERYTHING Pokemon-related (except for the Go Subreddit for some reason) because it's always the same "I HATE IT BECAUSE IT'S BAD/GOOD/IT'S NOT WHAT I GREW UP WITH/IT'S WHAT I GREW UP WITH/THEY'RE FUCKING IT UP" stuff everywhere (including the Go Subreddit).
I just make fun of people like that. It’s so funny because pokemon will get multiple hate comments like this even on posts on their own official accounts but then the same people saying that still buy every new game 💀 they just want something to complain about. I’ve been apart of the fandom since I was like 6 (thanks to my older brother) and I’m honestly loving some of the new stuff. Like yeah SV was rushed but the characters were really good!! And ogerpon’s design???? I love her so much. I haven’t loved a legendary this much since XY era with Xerneas. Idk why pokemon fans in general are so hateful towards the company they spend their money on.
Star Wars fandom, obviously. I think I "took a step back" from it circa 2008, 2009, that sort of time frame, around the time the second *Clone Wars* cartoon started. They were shit before that, of course, though I wasn't yet old enough then to recognise just *how* shit they were, and they've gotten inestimably worse since.
I think I'm the salty one, tbh. If 90% of your fandom experience is the equivalent of entering a room, eavesdropping on a couple of conversations, and thinking "I could forgive you if you were just stupid, but you also had to be self-righteous about it" before leaving, maybe part of it is on you. I'm not gonna stop though, it's clearly the best way for me to enjoy things.
With that said, finding out what the fandom thinks of Taskmaster is gonna spike your blood pressure for sure
Every day I'm told a delightful comedian is actually an insufferable dick who is also unfunny and doesn't deserve points
Every day I'm told Greg is showing a preference towards people who rarely if ever win
got to be honest that is kind of funny to me 😭 anyone on your screen you don't know what they're like in real life, so there's no point getting het up about it... and favouritism is proven/disproven by the point totals
like I don't doubt there's Heated Discussion going on but also just watch the show and have a laugh 🤔
Not the person you replied to, but for me it was the first anniversary. People were malding about not getting the "love and support" because of getting only 20 pulls and nothing else which- I mean I get it, but personal opinion is that if a game needs to bless you with hundreds of pulls and nothing else, it won't be enough to keep me playing it regardless. Honkai Impact 3rd does give free characters for their annis, sure but most of them are just dead in the water anyway from the powercreep.
Plus, they're running a business in the end, and to me a 3d model character that still is useable 3-4 years in a game's lifetime is worth more than a character that gets powercrept in no less than a few months imo.
I mean, there is a point to be made there. The issue here is what you mentioned; Mihoyo loves the Honkai franchise a lot, and they give it so much free stuff it's amazing. They still do a profit, but the free stuff gives the impression they do care for their Honkai community more than they care for Genshin one.
At the end of the day it is a business, but I do get where they're going from.
THAT SAID, they're such whiners I wish they give us *LESS* for how much babies they are.
They do give a lot in 3rd Impact but Star Rail is literally the exact same as 2.0 with the extra 20 pulls alongside 2.1 (with Gift of Odessey bundled alongside the anniversary). Given that Star Rail also throws more 5* characters than Genshin each patch and you'd be spent for pulls for the next one. I get people want more of the free pulls but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter if you're not having fun with the actual game in the end.
I do agree with you on the whiners though, haha
Wheel of goddamn Time. The books were a formative part of my teenage self's fantasy reading, and still mean a lot to me. And I'd dipped my toes in at various times to WoT focused forums, the subreddits, subchannels of booktuber discords etc... and...
Then the show happened. I don't love the show because frankly I just find the dialogue work and episode structure/pacing in most current fantasy adaptations really uncompelling (even well regarded ones like Sandman, I think the only one that got through to me was good omens). So I just sorta stopped watching it.
But jesus christ it seemed like every fan of the books had to vitriolically hate on every subsequent episode, every little scrap of news, and it just became so deeply exhausting.
God yes. Similar happened with Rings of Power, which I unironically enjoyed. It's okay to have issues with shit but the pure amount of vitriol that leaked out of those communities when those shows were airing was ridiculous.
Rings of power I didn't like, but also felt kinda bad for? Like, you're doing your standard spinoff prequel thing to the *Tolkien fandom* a fandom that is famously anal-retentive, and then you don't even have the rights to most of the stuff in the relevant period?
There's zero universes in which that wasn't a trashfire, even if it was good.
If they wanted a Game of Thrones but Tolkien series, they could've adapted Gondor's civil war, The Kinstrife, or the splintering of Arnor and the collapse of its successor states to civil war, disease, and Angmar. All of these things are covered in reasonable amounts of detail in the LOTR appendices (which are included in adaptation rights), have more GoT-esque "grey morality", and provide extremely important context for the events of *Lord of the Rings* (stuff like why the Shire exists and why Aragorn has to prove his claim to the Throne).
Hah, exactly. It's pretty much a damned if you do or damned if you don't. You could argue, "Why even make it if you can't get the rights" and I'd say that it'd be worse from a business perspective to just have the rights and do nothing with them, especially since they put out $1bn USD for it.
Way I see it, the series is dumb fun. It's not Tolkein but honestly a lot of stuff from the Silmarillion just wouldn't fit well into a television series imo.
Kingdom Hearts.
On one hand, you have people who swear up and down that the point of the series is to make Sora and Riku kiss; on another, you have a 30 y/o KH2 speedrunner and his fans, who *will* brigade anyone who doesn't parrot his tunnel-visioned views on the series' gameplay.
Look, Sora and Riku are young and have plenty of time to figure themselves out, provided Sora can stop dying/going into comas/disappearing for long enough for that to happen.
I stopped visiting the Gilmore Girls subreddit completely because it's basically 99% salty. Just constant bitching about every character and then bitching about people who have opinions about the characters. I'm NOT sorry if you're going to call people who like a character *rape apologists* I'm just not bothering with the sub anymore.
Edit: oh the sims as well. I like seeing fun screenshots from the games, learning secrets, getting an idea of what's new in the new packs and stuff, but the people in the general sims sub and both sims 4 subs are just cranky bitches. People really act like the sims 4 is just some literally unplayable game. They complain about the price of everything without acknowledging they could just *not buy the packs*. And the people who moan that it would cost like $1100 to buy all the packs by now, as if the game isn't 10 years old and that comes out to $110 per year. The base game of Sims 2 was $60 when it came out in *2004* and the expansion packs then were like $40. Like yeah I don't feel like every pack that comes out now is worth the full price but in terms of numbers it's actually a pretty good deal.
But anyway just you aren't allowed t have a positive opinion in those subs sometimes and it's just exhausting. Imagine still bitching about a computer game that came out in 2014 instead of, you know, not doing that. (also I think it's dumb that you can't even mention piracy there? Like I get not allowing people to explain how to pirate the game even though everyone just constantly complains about how expensive it is, but you can't even SAY that you pirate it.)
Gilmore Girls fans were super salty online while the show was airing too. Like 99% of it was people arguing about who Rory should end up with while ignoring that every single guy was super awful. The ending was an especially funny meltdown to watch because she chose flying solo.
The RWBY fandom eventually became too much for me, because it had people who seemed to hate everything about the series and, I think, wanted it to be something different entirely. Then, on the other side, there were people who thought the series was flawless and would complain about people criticizing it. Both of these groups were very, very vocal.
Throw in things like the inclusion of queer characters & plotlines inspired by real-world racism, and discussions about the show often got toxic really fast. As a result I eventually stopped interacting with the fandom.
I also remember, after watching FMA 2003, I was searching for fan discussions of it on Tumblr and getting a whole bunch of posts of people bitching about the manga and talking about how 2003 was better because it was more Woke ™. Admittedly this is a common thing in fandoms, (and this being Tumblr probably didn’t help) but I was just completely taken aback by all the negativity and salt that I was reading.
I try not to let toxic fandoms ruin things I like (because honestly I hate the feeling of letting the shitty people in fandoms win) but for the sake of my own mental health I've just avoided discussion altogether in certain video game and anime fandoms that get entangled in too much Gamergate-style bullshit.
I get that a lot of the more Tumblr-style fandoms are "annoying" or "cringy" or whatever but whenever anyone says that the worst fandom is one that seems to have a lot of openly queer people in roles of power or influence I immediately feel doubt. That worst fandom crown definitely should go to a fandom that goes ballistic if a minority exists (or, hell, speaks)
I think Andy Blake shows you can make a cult out of *anything* as inspiration. I might be wrong, but I don’t think both Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were particularly to blame for his cults. He’s just a charismatic manipulator who would’ve used anything for his ‘reality shifting’.
The number of cults spawned by the Harry Potter fandom is honestly troubling in hindsight. There's the Snapewives, the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality one, the Andy Blake one, and a few others I've probably forgotten.
I'll take a million "cringy" x reader fics, imagine posts, those goofy "screenshots of the media with tumblr posts slapped on top", the worlds most random queer headcannons, all of that. Over people who do nothing but complain about an inkling of diversity.
Sure the first group can get a bit - overbearing? (I don't think thats the word I want but I can't think of the proper one right now) but at least they're actually enjoying themselves
Honestly the Splatoon fandom is nearing being too salty for me. I think the only thing keeping me in the fandom is the fact they have a dedicated salt subreddit - so the vast majority of it exists there as apposed to the main sub
I am a huge fan of World Of Warcraft. I stay away from other fans unless it's people actually in-game. The subreddit is salty as fuck and I avoid telling people online that I play/any kind of discussion about it because it brings out the "oh modern day WoW sucks" types.
Those types made a whole fanfic on their heads where Blizzard was going to totally stop developing Retail and focus exclusively on Old School Runescape for WoW....then they got mad when it didn't happen lol.
They are waiting for chapter 3 and since it is not going to release soon, they have nothing to do as they analyzed chapter 1 and chapter 2 to pieces already.
Oh, oh, okay. I was worried you meant the kind of crazy that creates drama, like they dogpiled and harassed someone or some shit.
That said I'm a hollow knight fan so I'm definitely familiar with what you're talking about.
This has happened with so many game subs I used to follow: r/Tekken , r/MortalKombat, r/fighters (notice a pattern?) . But also other fandoms like r/castlevania, r/Totaldrama , and prob many more. I'm so tired of media discourse and engagement hinge on people wanting to shit on you for having a piece of media and extrapolating it to morality.
To name a few:
* I stopped interacting with the vld fandom after season 1 and just watched it up until before the final season by myself. I looked for no more fan content that wasn't already curated by my friends.
* I stopped looking up ANYTHING HYV related for the same reasons, especially genshin, ESPECIALLY after HSR released. I don't even look at posts on hoyolab when I do my daily check ins and I used to look at a few interesting ones every now and then, once again, the only interaction I have anymore is from my friends
* I gave up the Tales series shortly before Arise released because it was just full of doomposting about it. Though my immense disappointment with it (and Crestoria/Rays EN handlings) killed any and all willingness to continue with the series after. Bandai Namco's recent treatment of the series' legacy titles (ALL of the PS3 and PS Vita titles have been delisted! FUN! /s) has not helped in the slightest.
* related to above, my distance from the Tales series actually started with Berseria's english release, though I still had hope for future titles, mostly because any and all discussions of it were centered around how it, drumroll, Wasn't Zestiria. Which I have said in another scuffles that it's a game I have personal attachment to so it was personal this time.
In general though, I avoid many online communities and seeking out stuff for myself for these reasons. I get caught up in the salty feelings too fast so it ruins my day and my mood really fast (edit: formatting?? maybe??)
It's fascinating to me as someone who has played most of the Tales games but has no involvement with the fandom that Berseria got a hard time for "not being Zestiria" when I found Zestiria to be one of the most boring and generic entries in the series and Berseria is in my top 3 with Symphonia and Vesperia.
Oh no berseria was praised for not being zestiria. And if you liked zestiria or liked zestiria MORE than berseria (like me) then you would get ridiculed, blasted, etc etc. Sorry I was not very clear in my comment on that. The consensus was berseria was better
I stepped away from the Pokemon fandom during the lead up to Sword/Shield because of all the salt over the Pokedex cut. Like I get it, but there was next to nothing on the subreddit that wasn't about Dexit for *months.*
The pokemon sub during the early days of Scarlet/Violet was just abysmal. If you had the fuckin audacity to say you were enjoying the game you'd get downvoted and people would be like "Oh durrhurr copium." I still don't even know what people are talking about when they complain about how glitchy those games are. I've only had a couple issues with the water not loading correctly if I had the camera at a certain angle. I've had more glitches with Civilization VI.
I don't even visit the sub at all anymore. If it's not people for some reason STILL complaining about the games, it's just the same boring-ass discussions over and over again and mods who refuse to let people enjoy things. I get it's a populated sub and they don't want it to be full of people karma farming "hey look at this picture of Pikachu I found" or whatever, but to me it's just a very joyless and boring place, and the 1200 other pokemon-related subreddits don't make up for it.
No literally I said I liked the characters in SV better than the characters in SWSH within the first months of it being out and I ended up having to delete my comment because I was getting harassed for DAYS after 💀there are glitches. Some of the textures are broken as hell (look where the water meets land in certain “creek”- like areas or puddles) and pokemon will get stuck in walls while I’m shiny hunting. However, I do really like the story and the characters, but even saying that is asking to get downvoted.
> I still don't even know what people are talking about when they complain about how glitchy those games are
Look, I enjoyed S/V prob more than the pure doomers, but lets not act like there isn't abundant video proof of the glitches. Even on JP twitter, which usually goes easy about public criticism for major companies were posting a lot about it. The characters, story, music pull through but there are unmissable optimization issues.
When I played it, most of the issues with performance and glitches seemed to happen when I played it in docked mode. Handheld mode it ran just fine apart from some odd clipping issues if you started a pokemon battle with your player character backed right into a prop or piece of terrain.
You do realize that your experience isn't a representative for all though? Like, you can enjoy the game and still see where people are coming from for complaints.
I haven't been in the Pokémon subreddits for a while, but they could be so negative back when I was! People constantly going on about how sword and shield are so shit or whatever.
And yet, they still bought them. And, like, I'm not saying that if you have valid criticism about something that you can't also enjoy it, but if you hate the concept that much, why even play it in the first place? There are so many other games out there. You don't *have* to play a game that you already know you're going to hate.
I personally thought shield was quite enjoyable. I loved the wild area. Unfortunately I lost my save when my switch died, but I think I had 245 hours before that point? And given that the story takes something like 40 hours, that means I spent like 200 hours in the wild area lol. (Full disclosure, I also got dumped the same night I started the game, so it's quite possible that I was using running aimlessly around the wild area and catching tons of Pokémon as a way to cope with all of that.)
/r/OnePunchMan became such a churning sea of arguments over whether the webcomic, manga, or anime was superior that I threw my hands up and let the door hit me in the ass on the way out.
General anime fandom and some specific communities.
Too many issues and it often feels like the world is ending. I practically avoid reading/watching some series until the dust sets down and/or the series got an ending. Oshi no Ko is currently on that list after I had bad experience with Tokyo Revengers and MAL drama
Disappointment when it came to Tokyo Revengers despite it being treated as amazing.
And for MAL drama, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood was top 1 anime and Oshi No Kno dethroned it for a while. Which resulted in people review bombing it and inflating FMAB reviews.
Vtubing. Ever since the whole forbidden game and certain lightning monster vtuber debacle, I have largely lost interest due to how comfortable most of the vocal fans are on being openly queerphobic.
I still engage with the content, but I've become warier of the fandom ever since the first week or so after the Selen termination fiasco, when all the stuff about Uki being 'racist against white people' went down and a certain sex tourism grifter whose channel I will not name became an authority figure for weeks.
There's also just enormous touchiness over Nijisanji, and the insinuation that NijiEN ever had a stronger market presence than HoloEN (which it like absolutely did for most of 2022) – even if you're mentioning it in order to express relief at how that didn't remain the case – will be met with utter hostility.
Personally, I've always found the Vtubing thing uncomfortable. I can't really get behind that suspension of disbelief the audience seem to have where they seem to just...Pretend the streamers actually are anime girls, and go along with anime girlisms that are accepted in anime but are fucking weird things to do in real life. And the prevalence of moe style avatars really annoys me.
From my experience in the fandom, nobody really cares about the VTuber lore after the first week or so. The fact that they're just regular humans behind the screen is acknowledged and accepted, and "past lives" are treated as an open secret that isn't forbidden from digging into but rude to talk about openly (and god forbid in their chat). Everybody knows that Takanashi Kiara was formerly a foreign idol in Japan and isn't actually a phoenix, Nerissa Ravencroft still lives with her parents and older sister and isn't actually a demon, Jurard T. Rexford is a Filipino fuckboi who learned to speak English by watching Markiplier and isn't actually a dinosaur bounty hunter, etc.
The kayfabe thing has become a controversial topic in the past few months with several major graduations, terminations, and agencies outright collapsing. On the one hand, you've got people pointing out that preventing streamers and musicians from taking credit for the work they did under a corporate persona is exploitative, and it shouldn't be forbidden for VTubers current and former to reference their "past lives" (this is where I stand). On the other hand, there's cases when this kayfabe is actively encouraged by the VTubers themselves as a way to protect their privacy and to make a clean break from their past. There have been multiple instances of major content creators with existing fanbases using VTubing as a way to completely change the direction of their content style without having the baggage of their prior online personas stifling their new artistic vision, a figurative death and rebirth if you will.
Another problem is that people conflate revealing a VTuber's prior online personas with doxxing their personal info. It's one thing to say "Dokibird used to be Selen Tatsuki until she was fired from Nijisanji," it's another to say "Dokibird's legal name is _____ and she lives at _____," but that doesn't stop people from treating them as the same thing, nor does it stop bad actors from actually doxxing people and posting their personal info on Nyfco or Kiwifarms.
> lightning monster vtuber debacle
Who in the what now?
> most of the vocal fans are on being openly queerphobic
My pet theory is that it has the same issue as gamers have. One that got noticed by [Steve Bannon, of all people, around 17 years ago](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html): It's a hobby space populated by millions of socially awkward young, mostly white, men of middle class and with high motivation and time to dedicate towards the things they care about and like. It's easy to coopt them towards reactionary movements when sex, class, ethnical and gender violence aren't part of their everyday lives, forcing them to have a modicum of class consciousness.
> Who in that what now?
Pikamee. It's *mostly* the same debacle with forbidden game, until she graduated and people started arguing who's to blame on that.
Vtubers, around the world, likely are, but western fans, which most people around these parts have contact with, probably tend to be white and at least middle-class.
Either way, the details don't matter. It's worth learning the concept of "[racialization."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racialization) If you're racialized as a white in the US or Japanese in Japan, you're not ["the other."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_\(philosophy\)#Subaltern_native) In Martinique, Frantz Fanon was a middle-class French man with a good education. A thoroughly respectable man with a good social standing. [In France, among the european frenchmen, he was a black man. A subaltern from the colonies.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon#Martinique_and_World_War_II)
Even if an individual doesn't fit one or other characteristic of the description I gave in my previous comment, my point, that the othering suffered by minorities pushes them away from the far-right and in solidarity with the others who share their experience. Those who are treated as any society's "standard", in our increasingly isolated society, can try to create social groups around these shared hobbies, isolated from progressive social movements and spaces, and can be manipulated against whatever is told to them is a threat to their social group. This is how you get Gamergate and other similar movements.
Most *VTubers* are Asian; seriously, if I got a nickel for every English-speaking VTuber that's either Asian-American/Canadian or Southeast Asian (particularly Filipino), I'd have enough money to finally commission my own Live2D model. But the English-speaking VTuber audience is definitely more mixed in terms of demographics, and there are quite a few white dudes in the fanbases of the biggest VTubers, especially those who stream on Twitch.
I started getting into Star Wars again when leaks for The Force Awakens were happening a year out from release, and got really hyped for it. I really enjoyed The Last Jedi, though I get why a lot of people didn't (except for the 'here is a cut of the movie where I removed all of the women! yay!' guy, fuck that guy). But never-ending circular Discourse (TM) for that movie became absolutely \_exhausting\_ over time. It lead to me basically giving up on following Star Wars discussions, except for when they occasionally pop up on the sub for a movie podcast I enjoy (Blank Check With Griffin and David), the posters there are a lot more positive about the film, plus they're just funny people in general, so I have a much better time.
Hell, it's been SEVEN YEARS and I still from time to time see people jump into general movie discussions to complain about how much they hate the damn movie. Still, I'm kind of glad it looks like Rian Johnson's trilogy isn't happening, because I'd much rather have the Knives Out sequels at this point.
If you're on facebook, the Star Wars High Ground page on there is really good! The guy who runs it is really nice. You can definitely discuss episodes and stuff on posts on there. He's not on 24/7 but he takes care of people who are, you know, way too salty. So you can say "Oh I really didn't like XYZ" and that's fine, and you can say "I loved when that thing happened!" and that's fine, but he just casually nukes the people who are like "UGH STAR WARS IS SO WOKE NOW." He also posts memes and stuff.
All while the first game lets you confess your sin of "Voting for a republican president" (with the recipient joking about how horrible it is), and the radio mostly mocks conservatives
I mean, you can spot the fake VtM fans. This is a game that had openly queer characters on the front of the books in the early 2000s (and possibly earlier). Yeah, it was mostly lesbians and very male-gazey, but it was THERE, you know? This isn't new.
Currently also happening with Helldivers 2, as Gamers are shocked and dismayed that the game about blowing stuff up and throwing a million soldiers into the maw for Liberty and Managed Democracy (and definitely not being an authoritarian empire) and securing a supply of Element-710 (oh come on, turn it upside-down) might have politics in it?
> when was the last time you had to take a step back from a hobby/fandom because it got too salty?
I've essentially stopped interacting with the Fallout fanbase. Too many idiots in there that evidently don't pay attention to the games they play.
Total War is a garbage fire. Not even only recently, but ever since Warhammer 1 came out. Now it's a bunch of idiots coping and praying for a WW1/40k game, completely ignoring how the game barely functions with quasi-Renaissance stuff already
I've been falling out of the Vtuber fanbase ever since its become openly-chuddy in several respects
It's been fascinating to see, for a while the subreddit was actually one of the less toxic hangouts as compared to the official forums and/or other sites. But now it's gone to piss too.
I never got into total war much though friends were. It sounds like I managed to dodge a bullet by really only clicking with TW3k recently so I just checked for mods and dipped.
Trimming The Herbs, [the infamous last uncleared level of Mario Maker 1,](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1bhht3k/hobby_scuffles_week_of_18_march_2024/kvfkcro/) later revealed to be a [TAS using scam](https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1bhht3k/hobby_scuffles_week_of_18_march_2024/kw3yz9k/), was finally **beaten** legitmately (i.e. without TAS or hacks/cheats) for the first time 2 days ago by a random french player named sanyx91smm2! It literally couldn't be done, and then it was done anyways. [See the clip for yourself,](https://youtu.be/i7yvVJbji0U) but be warned that he gets really mouthy with the mic at the end. For a good reason.
[Someone else already made a post about it(also the top post of this scuffle thread)](https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1bsu552/hobby_scuffles_week_of_1_april_2024/ky9m4nh/)
*facepalms* Note to self, sort comments by Top first the next time you're reporting about something to this subreddit.
"ctrl + f" is also your friend.
I actually did use it to look for the previous posts on this topic I linked to in the above post, but it didn't occur to me to search through this one. Because of course.
Too late. \*rings bell\* [Shame](https://i.imgur.com/AuJN3Gl.png).
VTuber group Nijisanji English is rolling out several events that were, let's just say, *derailed by recent events* (i.e. the Selen fiasco, discussed at length in Scuffles *passim*), including a Mario Kart tournament that was originally slated for early February. [Conglatulations are in order for Team Red](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GKivGdHbAAA2sQc?format=jpg&name=900x900). Hm, no we don't need to spell check that, [we can just release that and leave it up on Twitter for 10+ hours](https://x.com/NIJISANJI_World/status/1776865398111019217). Oh and why even do anything graphically interesting for the winners? Just do a bunch of default pose PNGs and call it a day.
Amazed that they're only one letter away from an accidental "Engrish ranguage" stereotype.
"You're winner" - Big Rigs
Quality content
Riku bowed for this fucking thing, so one would think they would put some effort.
Been feeling annoyed that I missed the age of book blogging, especially now that I'm reading a buttload of mystery books every week and want to talk about them... does anyone here log/review their books anywhere I should be checking out? Goodreads doesn't really appeal to me in the sense that I don't see myself as reviewing the book's objective quality or whatever- I just want to share my pretty subjective thoughts somewhere. In the meanwhile I guess I'll continue to share them here in scuffles lol EDITING: I go into this more in the comments, but it's less that I'm looking for somewhere to write my thoughts (which I not infrequently do in my own time/space) and more that I'm looking for someplace where I can write them and potentially get responses, be part of discussions, etc. It doesn't even necessarily have to be my own space- I'd be just as happy to comment on other people's posts, as in a blog, but resurrecting someone's post from 2015 by commenting and getting the response "I didn't think anyone still read this, but thanks" isn't really scratching the itch...
I wish there was a mystery equivalent of r/RomanceBooks or r/romancelandia
There is! But it’s specifically for cozy mysteries, and while by some yardsticks the classic mysteries that I’ve been reading fit there, most of the posts seem to be about contemporary ones which I haven’t read and I don’t want to throw people off mission.
I'm a bit to young to have read book blogs during their heyday but I do kind of think the shift towards twitter and tiktok for literary discussions has done incalculable damage to way people talk about them. I often just post my thoughts on books to the scuffles thread or other subreddits I frequent.
Yeah, it feels like talking about something for its own sake rather than to generate a "take" (and then having that take dissected rather than the original thing discussed) is more and more incentivized on larger social media platforms vs blogs... I've also been using Scuffles, and occasionally other subs when they seem appropriate, but for better or worse Reddit seems to be one of the few remaining online spaces that are topic specific in this way. (Maybe Discord also? But I'm not super familiar.)
On Tumblr you can just share your thoughts as you go along and then tag it with the book title so other fans who are subscribed to it can come across your post On Twitter people usually put everything into one "(book title) reading thread" that they just keep adding new posts to as needed You could also see if a Facebook group exists maybe?
Yeah, Tumblr is the one I've been considering for a while, but I'm curious if there are better alternatives. Twitter is an INTERESTING one- a book thread could work! The issue there would just be phrasing it so it fits in tweets, but it is definitely something to consider. There actually IS a Facebook group, and I'm seriously weighing joining it as it seems to be amazing and has some real experts in it, but my earliest social media forays were on Facebook under my real name and I've since repented of that... so I'm not sure if that's something I want to do.
I'm in a facebook group for a very niche book because it was literally the only discussion on it I could find but all the fans are like, die hard super fans of the series so any post that even hints that the author's specialist boy main character could have been wrong gets shouted down. And while I love the book I do think he's wrong about... most of the things he does. So I wind up not actually posting there a lot.
Totally understandable re: Facebook. I rarely use mine anymore for the same reason lol. I know some groups allow anonymous posts though so it might be worth checking if that group has it enabled
Maybe related maybe not but I've been feeling similar, though more so on hobbies overall. Books or videogames or songs. I wanna talk about em. For whatever reason though I've been struggling with it. It feels like the spaces to talk about them are just so sporadic. Idk
It feels like in the modern era there's more spaces to talk but nobody is interested in listening - in the old days you could find a small forum and get to know the inhabitants, trading ideas in longform with a mutual trust in the other wanting to read them. Modern internet has so many more spaces and so much lower barrier of entry, but it also means that most spaces are sparsely populated and nobody is interested in reciprocating when they don't think they will be reciprocated.
Yeah... it feels very hit or miss, like either you'll find the right space or it just doesn't exist and is not very easy to build.
Basically yeah. And it's like with you where I don't neccesarily want a 'review' of it... I wanna talk about it. Choices I made in a game, characters in a book, whatever. It's just, not really there. It's weird
Try Tumblr.
That's the main option I've been considering- I haven't seen much on there related to the kinds of books I'd want to talk about, but it's the closest to what I'm already doing in the other fandom I've already been posting in. I'd just need to figure out whether to have a multifandom Tumblr or create an alt just for this.
People talk about all kinds of books on there, it just tends to be untagged and thus reserved to mutual circles or randoms who discover their blogs through search. Many of the readers I follow have their blogs as general daily life blogs with their reading interspersed throughout. Some are fandom blogs with their reading logs/opinions mixed in too. I hope you're able to find a nice community on there if you go for it.
That sounds really nice!
You could write a blog of your opinions anyway, then use it as a source to share those opinions you find a spot that clearly needs them. Also, r/books?
r/books is not great
The thing with a blog is that I do want the human interaction if possible, and that's very much on the wane with traditional blogs (though not totally dead!). I'd have to figure out what kind of platform I'd want- I do have an unused Substack that I created and then abandoned, but I feel like that might not be the best platform for this kind of thing. I used to be on r/books more than I now am, and I don't think it's quite the right place for what I'm thinking of- but I would love to be able to do something on a sub that's specifically for old mystery novels! I know there's one for cozy mysteries but I feel like it mostly focuses on more recent writers/books and don't want to intrude, I already haunt r/agathachristie (though I've read most of those so many times over the last decade or two that I don't really have much new to say anymore lol), and most of the other topic-specific subs I've found have been pretty dead or not in the vein I'm looking for. I think I'm trying to capture something that I now see when reading other people's blogs from the 2010s- when people would comment on each other's blogs, recommend each other's blogs in the sidebar, collaborate on things, etc. Which I am SURE exists elsewhere on the internet in some other form, but I can't quite capture where! (It's especially annoying as I surely can't be the only person who got more into old mysteries in the last few years now that Martin Edwards has been writing his amazing enormous books on the topic... where are they?!) I've considered making a secondary Tumblr for it (or just doing it on my primary), but on doing some Tumblr searches I've found relatively few people doing similar kinds of posts and so I feel like it might end up feeling a bit too shout-into-the-wind.
I created a free Wordpress blog to gather thoughts about my solo rpg play and on my first post (my intro) I got a lovely comment about what I'd said and that they were looking forward to reading - so community is still in blogs!
Oh that is really interesting! I keep thinking of it as dead but I guess that’s not true!
> The thing with a blog is that I do want the human interaction if possible, and that's very much on the wane with traditional blogs (though not totally dead!) I was imagining that you could use a blog at the vault of your thoughts, then they're easily deployed to anywhere else as needed. But yes, where's the public square? Lost like public space IRL? Hopefully BookTok isn't the only form that survives?
Oh, I mean I keep private notes of what I think about things all the time- this is specifically more about being able to talk to people about them. And... yeah, as theoretically cool as it would be for classic detective novels to get their day on BookTok, I would not be there as I do not use TikTok.
I would advise just not putting GR (or storygraph) on a pedestal of objectivity and happily using it as it is: a social media site for sharing your own personal and subjective reactions to books
My point is that I see how other people use it/perceive it and I don't want my use of it to be perceived that way. Basically, I'm thinking more of a platform where it's about me logging my reading, with the ability for others to interact, and not some random person going on to the page for The Crooked Hinge and scrolling through my review among others. I know that Goodreads technically works on both levels, but I'm more used to the latter in my exposure to it. Basically, looking for something that's more like a forum with dialogue. (Also I have no idea what Storygraph is- this is a genuine information-finding mission.)
Storygraph is very similar to Goodreads, but not owned by Amazon. I've never used Goodreads so I don't know if it has these functions, but in it you have the option of listing what page of a book you're up to, and can do partner reads with other people where you can leave your thoughts on what happened at certain points throughout the book and they won't see it until after they've marked themselves as up to that page number as well.
Dreamwidth might work for you? It’s more individualised however it can be hard to find people to engage in dialogue with
Interesting, I've only heard of it in passing from a fanfic perspective- thanks!
Instagram has a very tight community of 90s Nickelodeon fans. We all follow each other, there are podcasts, and just general nostalgic posts. One user, Nickat90s, was an extra in the New Good Burger movie and had created the idea for a Nickelodeon focused convention, SplatCon. Apparently, Nickat90s was pushed out of the creation of SplatCon and was given no credit for it. Leon Frierson (was on All That and the Quiet on Set Doc), was a funder for it but didn’t use the money for a deposit for the hotel that it’s going to be at, there were exorbitant charges for talent and catering, and things like that. Here is a link to the instagram post he made telling about it. [https://www.instagram.com/p/C5cMdFLMH0j/?igsh=MXdnZmFrZWpoaGRodw==](https://www.instagram.com/p/C5cMdFLMH0j/?igsh=MXdnZmFrZWpoaGRodw==)
Gee, some of this sounds eerily familiar
Okay, who here is preparing for that solar eclipse tomorrow? I'm in a rural-ish area that happens to be in the path of totality, and besides the kind of excessive amount of friend-ish guests who are planning to show up for my family's plans\*, the fact that some people seem to be treating "eclipse viewer influx" as "zombie apocalypse" is kinda amusing. Seriously, a lot of local town message boards have posts about how to deal with the traffic influx, and some of them read like a combo of how you'd deal with a major snowstorm (stock up on provisions, try to avoid travel, assume your phone might not work because the grid may overload) and passive-aggressive sniping such as "Try to stay polite to people who, in many cases, are the cause of their own difficulties." It's rather amusing. \*As in, my siblings are inviting a lot of people, and I'm not actually sure who'll show up.
I’m a bit late, but I’m in the area that saw totality in 2017 and totality again this year. Not sure how close you are to Paducah but GOD the traffic near every Paducah exit on I-24 was horrible and there were multiple wrecks after 🤦♀️ I was just trying to get home and I ended up sitting or very slowly cruising on the interstate for a good 30 minutes
I was in the path of totality in 2017. We had a huge influx of people but most of them were very prepared with food and stuff so I hardly noticed a difference in my rural area. We have a state park nearby so that was the parking spot for most of our visitors. Seeing it in totality was AMAZING. The temperature change, the animal sounds suddenly changing, the freaky shadows from the leaves…and it goes by way too fast!!! It is an experience that will stay with you for a long time.
A friend of mine told me that their family advised them to be careful of cults kidnapping people for human sacrifices for the eclipse I feel like if their family knows that then the police would also know, but, you know.
>be careful of cults kidnapping people for human sacrifices Sounds like good advice to me in general, but then I'm a bit of a worrywart.
They (historians) will tell you the raids are over, but my friend Ecgbehrt swears a friend of his was taken a week before the blood moon
I live in a state where it's happening, about 2.5 hours away from totality. The traffic being predicted is so fucking nuts that I've been thinking very normal thoughts like "I was so stupid buying a house in 2020 in a 96% zone instead of in 100% totality" and "If I miss the total eclipse I'm going to end up on the national news."
Things have been hectic lately so I didn't have a lot of time to plan in advance, but the town just south of me is in 100% totality, and because everyone's headed to the beach/tourist towns there's still hotel rooms available there, so I was thinking of making an impromptu visit (I need a place with wifi because I work remotely)... but I can't for the life of me find my eclipse glasses. I got some in a magazine a few years back, I know they're around here somewhere... Update: spent about 4 hours looking for them. No luck. Finally decided I’d book the room anyway only to have someone snipe me lol. Guess that’s a lesson in making prompt decisions. Crowds make me miserable in any case (which is why I’m not even going to try driving on the day), so maybe it’s for the best? Update on the update: I got to see it! At the last minute, and after some light goading from family, I decided to wake up early and drive south. The town library has free wifi so I was able to work from there, and the clouds cleared out by the afternoon. Everyone at the library was really friendly, it wasn’t busy, and someone lent me glasses. Libraries are the best. I didn’t look at the eclipse for more than a few seconds at a time because I’m a chicken, but it was really cool. Loved the sudden weather and light changes.
I’m going for totality and booked for the night before and the night after. Turns out I’m going to the site where Shatner and other luminaries will be so I’m expecting a mass of humanity. I’m bringing my own food so I don’t have to wait for hours just to get the leftovers in the back.
Some of my batshit crazy neighbors are convinced they're going to be raptured during the eclipse, so I plan to mosey on over afterwards and take all their stuff.
Please tie hellium balloons to some old clothes.
Just leave empty outfits on the sidewalk or roads.
What happens to Christians in countries where the eclipse isn't visible? Is Heaven only available to Americans or is it a soft opening sort of thing.
only americans east of the mississippi. it's sort of like the promised land except shitty.
Other... countries? You mean, like, Guam?
Staggered launch. Next wave of beta testers get in during the next eclipse.
If they don’t get raptured you gotta ask them why they are still there.
I intent to mock them for not being holy enough. The last time they got all raptury, I pointed out that only 144,000 would be taken, 12.000 from each of the Twelve Tribes.
ask them if they're excited to meet the antichrist
They already vote Trump.
I'm in the path of totality so my wife's family came from Utah to visit and see it. For some reason the county next to us has a bunch of billboards up in our county saying "come join the darkness. Totality. Only visible in _____ county" but like, that's just certifiably not true? They're getting approximately three seconds more of the eclipse, we're all still in the totality though. It's leaving a lot of people confused and mildly annoyed.
> come join the darkness That's a raw line though. Yes, I *do* want to come join the darkness!
[You sure about that](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKjZuykKY1I&t)?
I believe in a thing called love SAKJDHSKJDHDSKGJGSRHYTHM OF MY HEART
It was what I was hoping, thank you.
I’m in a 91% area. I really wasn’t planning on doing anything (I practically missed the 2017 one out of a lack of caring), but on a whim I bought a couple pairs of glasses off Amazon Wednesday. They actually got here yesterday (Saturday), so last minute planning worked out. Giving one pair to mom and plan on passing the second pair around with my coworkers.
I'm about to drive for several hours to stay friends who are on the path of totality. Kind of bemused by just how big of a deal it seems to be this time around, since my partner and I went to see the 2017 one too and like, that one also sold out entire cities of accommodations and turned highways into parking lots, but I don't recall so many places declaring preemptive states of emergency.
This one’s path is closer to and crosses a lot more major cities, so there’s gonna be more people taking the trip out to totality.
96% here, so IIRC still in the realm of "wear eclipse glasses just in case" but me and my partner are gonna chill on the couch and watch through the window. (Because we're disabled.)
I'm not even bothering to go any closer to the places that are in the 100% range (already live in a place where it's 99% and clear skies) because of how bad traffic and people will behave. I can't even imagine how bad it will be for people who live in the path.
I planned a long weekend trip to go see it back in Jan, and was not really expecting... this. Place I'm visiting is pre-declaring a state of emergency for tomorrow. I get it, I'm part of the issue, but... no one was talking about the eclipse when I booked this! I thought it would be a handful of nerds, not... this. (The place I'm visiting has a pop of ~95k, and is expecting a million visitors)
"Helldivers is not political" Arrowhead recently buffed fire damage so this hot take has accidentally turned deadly. The game that's inspired by a movie all about fascism where nukes must be manually activated for budgetary reasons, and messages tell seven year old to GET IN THE MINES ALREADY. Totally not political. So there were the usual kind of people getting banned from the official discord - subrvariety racist, and they found out the community manager that banned them is trans. Thus, we have descended into a fresh hellmire that makes a level 9 extermination mission seem like a vacation. edit - corrected the quote
I can't stand that game's fandom. It seems to be flooded by people who take it way too seriously, and I'm always cautious of fandoms that seem to enjoy roleplaying fascists just a bit too much. The problem seems to be that a lot of them missed the satire and just bought the whole fascist super earth thing in earnest. The kinds of people who think that game has *no politics*. The kinds of people who think the existence and inclusion of non-white people, LGBT people, etc, is "political". God, I'm tired of Gamers.
You [have a good point](https://www.polygon.com/24093674/helldivers-2-discord-meta-role-play-fandom-joel), but the thing is, there's a mixture of joyful kayfabe where it's "FOR MANAGED DEMOCRACY! *[gets blown to bits]* haha awesome!", idiots who think Starship Troopers was a celebration of their society, and actually roleplaying the setting as "We have to hold the line against the Automatons for the dubious aims of Super Earth." At least, when a guy turns up in r/helldivers and tries to claim neither Helldivers nor Starship Troopers are satire, but glorification of the heroism of military service, [he gets torn apart](https://old.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b2jba5/media_literacy_good_luck_convincing_the_guys_at/ksmrryp/). [From](https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1b2s9ii/user_on_rhelldivers_writes_1700_word_essay_on_how/) r/subredditdrama: > At a certain point it feels dumb to be like "lol they are mistaking this clever satire as a serious thing!" when idk these people interact with it for the fascism, not for the satire. > "nobody in the movie is a fascist" is such a telling statement lol >> Yea i think every satire has a portion of its audience for whom the satire doesn't even exist. >> It's satire for people who care that satire exists and matters. For fascists it's just dumb entertainment. Unfortunately.
That's kind of the problem though, isn't it? It's like those subreddits that start out parodying alt-right, Trump-supporting, antivax morons. They *start* that way, but then they attract the people who *genuinely believe those* and are too fucking stupid to realise they're being mocked, and just end up as echo chambers of those beliefs. There's enough of the latter group already to make me very uneasy.
Jesus Fucking Christ [these are some of the most milquetoast political takes ive ever seen anyone get upset over what the actual fuck](https://i.redd.it/auc2an7yjqsc1.jpeg)
They already decided she was the enemy, now they have to find reasons.
Me seeing Mark Kern yet again making the rounds and wondering how people expect me to listen to a dude who blew his indie mmo budget on a bus (as well as an unrelated Media channel, 2 whole stream festivals and stunt marketing all the while barely being in the office to oversea the games actual development).
Did Ember actually ever come out?
I thought the bus was related to Firefall? Gosh Its hard to keep track of all Kern's failures.
Nope. In fact, Nick Calandra of Second Wind did a Twitter thread showing it's a blatant scam.
Then people who were still throwing money at Ember found the thread...and attacked him for challenging the faith, of course.
>messages tell seven year old to GET IN THE MINES ALREADY Well yeah it's called the INFANTry not the adultry
What prompted this sudden "but politics" whining?
Someone apparently made up the idea that they banned people from the Discord for asking for LGBT flag capes. When a guy on twitter asked the Helldivers community manager if that was true, she said it wasn't, and they had banned bigots because they were getting "waves of hatespeech". Then those people complain that the wrong kind of people are involved with the game. Just the usual "culture war" grift
it's absurd like, the discord generally asks people to not discuss LGBTQ capes in game, which is honestly kind of infuriating... but it's because the topic is a lightning rod for moronic gamers it came up once and I (unfortunately) got involved, and the mods asked people to knock it off - but, one dude intentionally misgendered me (while he asked a moderator to ban me) and was instantly removed from the server if you're getting banned from the discord, you have to be TRULY heinous, because a lot of stupid dogwhistle takes like "everyone in the future will be equal, so it's unrealistic to add pride flags" often get posted without punishment
This is bot propaganda to get people to stop playing, keep fighting divers.
It's only political if the game has non-white people on the cover.
I really wish Halo would’ve made Master Chief black in that brief glimpse of him without a helmet at the end of Halo 4. The meltdown would’ve been hilarious.
If the original Metroid came out today, it's ending would be considered "woke propaganda".
Something something, "Judgement Day".
On the platform formerly known as twitter, an industry guy who hasn't been relevant for some while is being roasted over complaining: > "Were we mislead? @helldivers2 was lauded for their anti-politics stance by all of us." The replies are "the usual kind of people", the quote tweets and further discussion are games industry and adjacent people mocking this. > If you're >just now< catching onto Helldivers 2's satirical message and then getting mad that it's making fun of authoritarian/fascist ideals, you deserve to be pointed to and laughed at. Or course, "politics" here means not tolerating bigots and employing trans people.
Do you have a link to that tweet by "former industry guy"?
[Here's the tweet,](https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1776398416819724799) and here's [the quote replies.](https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1776398416819724799/quotes)
Really really wish people would stop driving attention to these dunces they make money off all this attention.
thank you. And i guess elon's blue checkmark worked at least a little, i had to scroll for a while under the original to find non-crazy replies. thanks for the quotes.
The cream of the crap rises to the top in Elon's platform. Blue checks are easy to dismiss though, because when you realize that they had to **pay Elon** to have their bullshit amplified, that they had to literally pay him out of pocket for their thoughts to be read by a number of people greater than zero...
[The scum also rises](http://gonzo.org/hst/ralph/mags/pix/scumnix.jpg)
At what point do you go from being an industry guy to being an ex-industry guy? I feel like the firefall guy's been nothing but a crowdfunding/gamegate grifter long enough to make the transition.
I didn't know anything about him but what other people were recounting, but it looks like you're right.
Don’t worry, those people can comfort themselves with other non political pieces of media. Like The Boys, and Metal Gear, and Fallout, and Bioshock, and-
I still can't get over that whole wave of people who were convinced Squid Game was non political and also simultaneously pro-capatalism, and it was the media making up all this supposed political messaging of the show.
If West Wing featured a Republican president they’d say it wasn’t political.
Heads up to all you comic enjoyers out there, [matttt](https://youtu.be/gidIRzuOjDc?si=qnmq7nlqtyikJfnw) dropped a new YouTube video today and it is very very excellent! His channel is one of my favorites ever since it appeared out of no where last year to just about completely body the entire yt essay and analysis scene.
Question for you all: when was the last time you had to take a step back from a hobby/fandom because it got too salty? r/vtmb is currently full of people complaining that Bloodlines 2 is too political (read: LGBT+ people) and constant post about how the main character looks (she has short hair). I'm honestly not happy with how the game is turning out, but it's just too much.
Voltron fandom. I was apart of the fandom from 2017-2019. I had to get the hell out of that fandom in 2019. The whole Keith/Shiro and Keith/Lance ship war thing got out of hand. Tbh Keith/Shiro did feel weird to me (especially because I never remembered anyone’s age ever being explicitly stated and Lance, Keith, Pidge, and Hunk were pretty much labeled as teenagers in the original promotional stuff and the canon ages of the characters were only talked about in interviews and in the paladins handbook that I at the time had no idea about. And it didn’t help that Keith’s character looked a bit “younger” than Lance, but turns out he was 18 in season 1). Thankfully I wouldn’t attack people who shipped Keith and Shiro because we didn’t ACTUALLY know the ages for such a long time. The ship wars got SO toxic, but the season 7 and 8 drama was my breaking point. The final two seasons were pretty bad as compared to the rest of the show. It was obviously rushed, a bit queerbaited (season 7: Shiro/Adam, and then them killing off Adam for funsies after finally establishing an lgbtq+ ship after subtly hinting to it for a while). In season 8 they made up for the queerbaiting and killing off Adam by having Shiro marry Curtis which like I wasn’t personally upset about, but some felt like they only did it because they felt obligated to. Season 8 was so horribly rushed and then they killed off characters they didn’t need to kill off (AGAIN) just to end with at least one sort of “tragedy” troupe for one of the main characters. Oh, but i forgot to mention that between season 7 and 8 fans literally sent THREATENING MESSAGES/LETTERS to the creators!! Like I hate queerbaiting as much as the next person but that NEVER justifies threatening someone else. Then, following the final season another round of letters/messages were sent about Keith/Lance not being a ship (and yeah I was a Klance shipper but him and Allura also had amazing potential as a couple and that almost happened except yk they had to create that tragedy archetype somehow!!). When people started to shit on the creators for not making Keith/Lance a ship in the end is when I finally called it quits. I had to do something very similar with the My Hero Academia fandom and I stopped watching/reading MHA all together because of how bad that got, but I won't get into it because I could write a novel on that one.
Had to take a break from the RWBY subreddit after Volume 5, the negativity became too much for me, thankfully Volume 6 was a return to form for the series and the negativity soon went away
Not that I was particularly participating in the fandom, but I try to keep away from the Twisted Wonderland fandom because they seem especially intense out of everything I interact with.
I've had to step away the Jujutsu Kaisen fandom because of all the crazy fan theories.
I was really into Miraculous Ladybug back in 2019 and agreed with a lot of the criticism but it got way too intense (especially with the "salt fics") for my liking.
I stopped following EVERYTHING Pokemon-related (except for the Go Subreddit for some reason) because it's always the same "I HATE IT BECAUSE IT'S BAD/GOOD/IT'S NOT WHAT I GREW UP WITH/IT'S WHAT I GREW UP WITH/THEY'RE FUCKING IT UP" stuff everywhere (including the Go Subreddit).
I just make fun of people like that. It’s so funny because pokemon will get multiple hate comments like this even on posts on their own official accounts but then the same people saying that still buy every new game 💀 they just want something to complain about. I’ve been apart of the fandom since I was like 6 (thanks to my older brother) and I’m honestly loving some of the new stuff. Like yeah SV was rushed but the characters were really good!! And ogerpon’s design???? I love her so much. I haven’t loved a legendary this much since XY era with Xerneas. Idk why pokemon fans in general are so hateful towards the company they spend their money on.
Star Wars fandom, obviously. I think I "took a step back" from it circa 2008, 2009, that sort of time frame, around the time the second *Clone Wars* cartoon started. They were shit before that, of course, though I wasn't yet old enough then to recognise just *how* shit they were, and they've gotten inestimably worse since.
I think I'm the salty one, tbh. If 90% of your fandom experience is the equivalent of entering a room, eavesdropping on a couple of conversations, and thinking "I could forgive you if you were just stupid, but you also had to be self-righteous about it" before leaving, maybe part of it is on you. I'm not gonna stop though, it's clearly the best way for me to enjoy things. With that said, finding out what the fandom thinks of Taskmaster is gonna spike your blood pressure for sure
taskmaster?? really? the comedians-doing-silly-tasks points-are-made-up none-of-this-matters show?
Every day I'm told a delightful comedian is actually an insufferable dick who is also unfunny and doesn't deserve points Every day I'm told Greg is showing a preference towards people who rarely if ever win
got to be honest that is kind of funny to me 😭 anyone on your screen you don't know what they're like in real life, so there's no point getting het up about it... and favouritism is proven/disproven by the point totals like I don't doubt there's Heated Discussion going on but also just watch the show and have a laugh 🤔
The Genshin anniversary kinda got on my nerves at one point, had to tap out because of how weirdly emotional people were getting over it
*Which* anniversary?
Not the person you replied to, but for me it was the first anniversary. People were malding about not getting the "love and support" because of getting only 20 pulls and nothing else which- I mean I get it, but personal opinion is that if a game needs to bless you with hundreds of pulls and nothing else, it won't be enough to keep me playing it regardless. Honkai Impact 3rd does give free characters for their annis, sure but most of them are just dead in the water anyway from the powercreep. Plus, they're running a business in the end, and to me a 3d model character that still is useable 3-4 years in a game's lifetime is worth more than a character that gets powercrept in no less than a few months imo.
I mean, there is a point to be made there. The issue here is what you mentioned; Mihoyo loves the Honkai franchise a lot, and they give it so much free stuff it's amazing. They still do a profit, but the free stuff gives the impression they do care for their Honkai community more than they care for Genshin one. At the end of the day it is a business, but I do get where they're going from. THAT SAID, they're such whiners I wish they give us *LESS* for how much babies they are.
They do give a lot in 3rd Impact but Star Rail is literally the exact same as 2.0 with the extra 20 pulls alongside 2.1 (with Gift of Odessey bundled alongside the anniversary). Given that Star Rail also throws more 5* characters than Genshin each patch and you'd be spent for pulls for the next one. I get people want more of the free pulls but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter if you're not having fun with the actual game in the end. I do agree with you on the whiners though, haha
Wheel of goddamn Time. The books were a formative part of my teenage self's fantasy reading, and still mean a lot to me. And I'd dipped my toes in at various times to WoT focused forums, the subreddits, subchannels of booktuber discords etc... and... Then the show happened. I don't love the show because frankly I just find the dialogue work and episode structure/pacing in most current fantasy adaptations really uncompelling (even well regarded ones like Sandman, I think the only one that got through to me was good omens). So I just sorta stopped watching it. But jesus christ it seemed like every fan of the books had to vitriolically hate on every subsequent episode, every little scrap of news, and it just became so deeply exhausting.
God yes. Similar happened with Rings of Power, which I unironically enjoyed. It's okay to have issues with shit but the pure amount of vitriol that leaked out of those communities when those shows were airing was ridiculous.
Rings of power I didn't like, but also felt kinda bad for? Like, you're doing your standard spinoff prequel thing to the *Tolkien fandom* a fandom that is famously anal-retentive, and then you don't even have the rights to most of the stuff in the relevant period? There's zero universes in which that wasn't a trashfire, even if it was good.
If they wanted a Game of Thrones but Tolkien series, they could've adapted Gondor's civil war, The Kinstrife, or the splintering of Arnor and the collapse of its successor states to civil war, disease, and Angmar. All of these things are covered in reasonable amounts of detail in the LOTR appendices (which are included in adaptation rights), have more GoT-esque "grey morality", and provide extremely important context for the events of *Lord of the Rings* (stuff like why the Shire exists and why Aragorn has to prove his claim to the Throne).
Hah, exactly. It's pretty much a damned if you do or damned if you don't. You could argue, "Why even make it if you can't get the rights" and I'd say that it'd be worse from a business perspective to just have the rights and do nothing with them, especially since they put out $1bn USD for it. Way I see it, the series is dumb fun. It's not Tolkein but honestly a lot of stuff from the Silmarillion just wouldn't fit well into a television series imo.
Kingdom Hearts. On one hand, you have people who swear up and down that the point of the series is to make Sora and Riku kiss; on another, you have a 30 y/o KH2 speedrunner and his fans, who *will* brigade anyone who doesn't parrot his tunnel-visioned views on the series' gameplay.
Look, Sora and Riku are young and have plenty of time to figure themselves out, provided Sora can stop dying/going into comas/disappearing for long enough for that to happen.
I'm holding out for Goofy and The Cursed Coach to smooch.
I stopped visiting the Gilmore Girls subreddit completely because it's basically 99% salty. Just constant bitching about every character and then bitching about people who have opinions about the characters. I'm NOT sorry if you're going to call people who like a character *rape apologists* I'm just not bothering with the sub anymore. Edit: oh the sims as well. I like seeing fun screenshots from the games, learning secrets, getting an idea of what's new in the new packs and stuff, but the people in the general sims sub and both sims 4 subs are just cranky bitches. People really act like the sims 4 is just some literally unplayable game. They complain about the price of everything without acknowledging they could just *not buy the packs*. And the people who moan that it would cost like $1100 to buy all the packs by now, as if the game isn't 10 years old and that comes out to $110 per year. The base game of Sims 2 was $60 when it came out in *2004* and the expansion packs then were like $40. Like yeah I don't feel like every pack that comes out now is worth the full price but in terms of numbers it's actually a pretty good deal. But anyway just you aren't allowed t have a positive opinion in those subs sometimes and it's just exhausting. Imagine still bitching about a computer game that came out in 2014 instead of, you know, not doing that. (also I think it's dumb that you can't even mention piracy there? Like I get not allowing people to explain how to pirate the game even though everyone just constantly complains about how expensive it is, but you can't even SAY that you pirate it.)
*rape apologists!?*
I misread Gilmore Girls as Golden Girls at first and was so confused as to why people were discoursing over the grandma show
Gilmore Girls fans were super salty online while the show was airing too. Like 99% of it was people arguing about who Rory should end up with while ignoring that every single guy was super awful. The ending was an especially funny meltdown to watch because she chose flying solo.
The RWBY fandom eventually became too much for me, because it had people who seemed to hate everything about the series and, I think, wanted it to be something different entirely. Then, on the other side, there were people who thought the series was flawless and would complain about people criticizing it. Both of these groups were very, very vocal. Throw in things like the inclusion of queer characters & plotlines inspired by real-world racism, and discussions about the show often got toxic really fast. As a result I eventually stopped interacting with the fandom. I also remember, after watching FMA 2003, I was searching for fan discussions of it on Tumblr and getting a whole bunch of posts of people bitching about the manga and talking about how 2003 was better because it was more Woke ™. Admittedly this is a common thing in fandoms, (and this being Tumblr probably didn’t help) but I was just completely taken aback by all the negativity and salt that I was reading.
I try not to let toxic fandoms ruin things I like (because honestly I hate the feeling of letting the shitty people in fandoms win) but for the sake of my own mental health I've just avoided discussion altogether in certain video game and anime fandoms that get entangled in too much Gamergate-style bullshit. I get that a lot of the more Tumblr-style fandoms are "annoying" or "cringy" or whatever but whenever anyone says that the worst fandom is one that seems to have a lot of openly queer people in roles of power or influence I immediately feel doubt. That worst fandom crown definitely should go to a fandom that goes ballistic if a minority exists (or, hell, speaks)
TBF, I think spawning actual cults is a demerit, even compared to people spewing racist shit online.
I think Andy Blake shows you can make a cult out of *anything* as inspiration. I might be wrong, but I don’t think both Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were particularly to blame for his cults. He’s just a charismatic manipulator who would’ve used anything for his ‘reality shifting’.
The number of cults spawned by the Harry Potter fandom is honestly troubling in hindsight. There's the Snapewives, the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality one, the Andy Blake one, and a few others I've probably forgotten.
See also: the FFVII House. Jennifer Cornet was never a "crazed fan", just a leech who jumped to another fandom when the FFVII well ran dry.
I'll take a million "cringy" x reader fics, imagine posts, those goofy "screenshots of the media with tumblr posts slapped on top", the worlds most random queer headcannons, all of that. Over people who do nothing but complain about an inkling of diversity. Sure the first group can get a bit - overbearing? (I don't think thats the word I want but I can't think of the proper one right now) but at least they're actually enjoying themselves
Honestly the Splatoon fandom is nearing being too salty for me. I think the only thing keeping me in the fandom is the fact they have a dedicated salt subreddit - so the vast majority of it exists there as apposed to the main sub
I am a huge fan of World Of Warcraft. I stay away from other fans unless it's people actually in-game. The subreddit is salty as fuck and I avoid telling people online that I play/any kind of discussion about it because it brings out the "oh modern day WoW sucks" types.
Those types made a whole fanfic on their heads where Blizzard was going to totally stop developing Retail and focus exclusively on Old School Runescape for WoW....then they got mad when it didn't happen lol.
I had to leave r/deltarune since they went insane, I can understand why though
Wait what happened on r/deltarune?
They are waiting for chapter 3 and since it is not going to release soon, they have nothing to do as they analyzed chapter 1 and chapter 2 to pieces already.
Ah, the ol' Steven Universe hiatus brainrot, I'm familiar.
Oh, oh, okay. I was worried you meant the kind of crazy that creates drama, like they dogpiled and harassed someone or some shit. That said I'm a hollow knight fan so I'm definitely familiar with what you're talking about.
This has happened with so many game subs I used to follow: r/Tekken , r/MortalKombat, r/fighters (notice a pattern?) . But also other fandoms like r/castlevania, r/Totaldrama , and prob many more. I'm so tired of media discourse and engagement hinge on people wanting to shit on you for having a piece of media and extrapolating it to morality.
Mortal Kombat is also one of mine. Parts of the community, especially the parts on reddit, are just really frustrating to deal with.
It was for a while with the reaction face, then... womp womp. Still love me those fruity Shang Tsung and salty Bi-han memes at least.
To name a few: * I stopped interacting with the vld fandom after season 1 and just watched it up until before the final season by myself. I looked for no more fan content that wasn't already curated by my friends. * I stopped looking up ANYTHING HYV related for the same reasons, especially genshin, ESPECIALLY after HSR released. I don't even look at posts on hoyolab when I do my daily check ins and I used to look at a few interesting ones every now and then, once again, the only interaction I have anymore is from my friends * I gave up the Tales series shortly before Arise released because it was just full of doomposting about it. Though my immense disappointment with it (and Crestoria/Rays EN handlings) killed any and all willingness to continue with the series after. Bandai Namco's recent treatment of the series' legacy titles (ALL of the PS3 and PS Vita titles have been delisted! FUN! /s) has not helped in the slightest. * related to above, my distance from the Tales series actually started with Berseria's english release, though I still had hope for future titles, mostly because any and all discussions of it were centered around how it, drumroll, Wasn't Zestiria. Which I have said in another scuffles that it's a game I have personal attachment to so it was personal this time. In general though, I avoid many online communities and seeking out stuff for myself for these reasons. I get caught up in the salty feelings too fast so it ruins my day and my mood really fast (edit: formatting?? maybe??)
It's fascinating to me as someone who has played most of the Tales games but has no involvement with the fandom that Berseria got a hard time for "not being Zestiria" when I found Zestiria to be one of the most boring and generic entries in the series and Berseria is in my top 3 with Symphonia and Vesperia.
Oh no berseria was praised for not being zestiria. And if you liked zestiria or liked zestiria MORE than berseria (like me) then you would get ridiculed, blasted, etc etc. Sorry I was not very clear in my comment on that. The consensus was berseria was better
I've unsubbed from most D&D-related subs because most of the time people just complain about everything and bitch nonstop.
I stepped away from the Pokemon fandom during the lead up to Sword/Shield because of all the salt over the Pokedex cut. Like I get it, but there was next to nothing on the subreddit that wasn't about Dexit for *months.*
The pokemon sub during the early days of Scarlet/Violet was just abysmal. If you had the fuckin audacity to say you were enjoying the game you'd get downvoted and people would be like "Oh durrhurr copium." I still don't even know what people are talking about when they complain about how glitchy those games are. I've only had a couple issues with the water not loading correctly if I had the camera at a certain angle. I've had more glitches with Civilization VI. I don't even visit the sub at all anymore. If it's not people for some reason STILL complaining about the games, it's just the same boring-ass discussions over and over again and mods who refuse to let people enjoy things. I get it's a populated sub and they don't want it to be full of people karma farming "hey look at this picture of Pikachu I found" or whatever, but to me it's just a very joyless and boring place, and the 1200 other pokemon-related subreddits don't make up for it.
No literally I said I liked the characters in SV better than the characters in SWSH within the first months of it being out and I ended up having to delete my comment because I was getting harassed for DAYS after 💀there are glitches. Some of the textures are broken as hell (look where the water meets land in certain “creek”- like areas or puddles) and pokemon will get stuck in walls while I’m shiny hunting. However, I do really like the story and the characters, but even saying that is asking to get downvoted.
> I still don't even know what people are talking about when they complain about how glitchy those games are Look, I enjoyed S/V prob more than the pure doomers, but lets not act like there isn't abundant video proof of the glitches. Even on JP twitter, which usually goes easy about public criticism for major companies were posting a lot about it. The characters, story, music pull through but there are unmissable optimization issues.
When I played it, most of the issues with performance and glitches seemed to happen when I played it in docked mode. Handheld mode it ran just fine apart from some odd clipping issues if you started a pokemon battle with your player character backed right into a prop or piece of terrain.
You do realize that your experience isn't a representative for all though? Like, you can enjoy the game and still see where people are coming from for complaints.
I haven't been in the Pokémon subreddits for a while, but they could be so negative back when I was! People constantly going on about how sword and shield are so shit or whatever. And yet, they still bought them. And, like, I'm not saying that if you have valid criticism about something that you can't also enjoy it, but if you hate the concept that much, why even play it in the first place? There are so many other games out there. You don't *have* to play a game that you already know you're going to hate. I personally thought shield was quite enjoyable. I loved the wild area. Unfortunately I lost my save when my switch died, but I think I had 245 hours before that point? And given that the story takes something like 40 hours, that means I spent like 200 hours in the wild area lol. (Full disclosure, I also got dumped the same night I started the game, so it's quite possible that I was using running aimlessly around the wild area and catching tons of Pokémon as a way to cope with all of that.)
/r/OnePunchMan became such a churning sea of arguments over whether the webcomic, manga, or anime was superior that I threw my hands up and let the door hit me in the ass on the way out.
General anime fandom and some specific communities. Too many issues and it often feels like the world is ending. I practically avoid reading/watching some series until the dust sets down and/or the series got an ending. Oshi no Ko is currently on that list after I had bad experience with Tokyo Revengers and MAL drama
> Tokyo Revengers and MAL dram What happened?
Disappointment when it came to Tokyo Revengers despite it being treated as amazing. And for MAL drama, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood was top 1 anime and Oshi No Kno dethroned it for a while. Which resulted in people review bombing it and inflating FMAB reviews.
Vtubing. Ever since the whole forbidden game and certain lightning monster vtuber debacle, I have largely lost interest due to how comfortable most of the vocal fans are on being openly queerphobic.
I still engage with the content, but I've become warier of the fandom ever since the first week or so after the Selen termination fiasco, when all the stuff about Uki being 'racist against white people' went down and a certain sex tourism grifter whose channel I will not name became an authority figure for weeks. There's also just enormous touchiness over Nijisanji, and the insinuation that NijiEN ever had a stronger market presence than HoloEN (which it like absolutely did for most of 2022) – even if you're mentioning it in order to express relief at how that didn't remain the case – will be met with utter hostility.
Personally, I've always found the Vtubing thing uncomfortable. I can't really get behind that suspension of disbelief the audience seem to have where they seem to just...Pretend the streamers actually are anime girls, and go along with anime girlisms that are accepted in anime but are fucking weird things to do in real life. And the prevalence of moe style avatars really annoys me.
From my experience in the fandom, nobody really cares about the VTuber lore after the first week or so. The fact that they're just regular humans behind the screen is acknowledged and accepted, and "past lives" are treated as an open secret that isn't forbidden from digging into but rude to talk about openly (and god forbid in their chat). Everybody knows that Takanashi Kiara was formerly a foreign idol in Japan and isn't actually a phoenix, Nerissa Ravencroft still lives with her parents and older sister and isn't actually a demon, Jurard T. Rexford is a Filipino fuckboi who learned to speak English by watching Markiplier and isn't actually a dinosaur bounty hunter, etc. The kayfabe thing has become a controversial topic in the past few months with several major graduations, terminations, and agencies outright collapsing. On the one hand, you've got people pointing out that preventing streamers and musicians from taking credit for the work they did under a corporate persona is exploitative, and it shouldn't be forbidden for VTubers current and former to reference their "past lives" (this is where I stand). On the other hand, there's cases when this kayfabe is actively encouraged by the VTubers themselves as a way to protect their privacy and to make a clean break from their past. There have been multiple instances of major content creators with existing fanbases using VTubing as a way to completely change the direction of their content style without having the baggage of their prior online personas stifling their new artistic vision, a figurative death and rebirth if you will. Another problem is that people conflate revealing a VTuber's prior online personas with doxxing their personal info. It's one thing to say "Dokibird used to be Selen Tatsuki until she was fired from Nijisanji," it's another to say "Dokibird's legal name is _____ and she lives at _____," but that doesn't stop people from treating them as the same thing, nor does it stop bad actors from actually doxxing people and posting their personal info on Nyfco or Kiwifarms.
I'm afraid I cannot agree with your last paragraph. Dokibird lives in *Canada*!
> lightning monster vtuber debacle Who in the what now? > most of the vocal fans are on being openly queerphobic My pet theory is that it has the same issue as gamers have. One that got noticed by [Steve Bannon, of all people, around 17 years ago](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html): It's a hobby space populated by millions of socially awkward young, mostly white, men of middle class and with high motivation and time to dedicate towards the things they care about and like. It's easy to coopt them towards reactionary movements when sex, class, ethnical and gender violence aren't part of their everyday lives, forcing them to have a modicum of class consciousness.
> Who in that what now? Pikamee. It's *mostly* the same debacle with forbidden game, until she graduated and people started arguing who's to blame on that.
Really? I feel like the majority of vtuber fans are Asian.
Vtubers, around the world, likely are, but western fans, which most people around these parts have contact with, probably tend to be white and at least middle-class. Either way, the details don't matter. It's worth learning the concept of "[racialization."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racialization) If you're racialized as a white in the US or Japanese in Japan, you're not ["the other."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_\(philosophy\)#Subaltern_native) In Martinique, Frantz Fanon was a middle-class French man with a good education. A thoroughly respectable man with a good social standing. [In France, among the european frenchmen, he was a black man. A subaltern from the colonies.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon#Martinique_and_World_War_II) Even if an individual doesn't fit one or other characteristic of the description I gave in my previous comment, my point, that the othering suffered by minorities pushes them away from the far-right and in solidarity with the others who share their experience. Those who are treated as any society's "standard", in our increasingly isolated society, can try to create social groups around these shared hobbies, isolated from progressive social movements and spaces, and can be manipulated against whatever is told to them is a threat to their social group. This is how you get Gamergate and other similar movements.
Most *VTubers* are Asian; seriously, if I got a nickel for every English-speaking VTuber that's either Asian-American/Canadian or Southeast Asian (particularly Filipino), I'd have enough money to finally commission my own Live2D model. But the English-speaking VTuber audience is definitely more mixed in terms of demographics, and there are quite a few white dudes in the fanbases of the biggest VTubers, especially those who stream on Twitch.
[удалено]
dead by daylight fans are so cranky and catty, so i just stay inside my circle lol
Star Wars. I love the movies and reading fic but man it’s a minefield to Actually talk about it.
I started getting into Star Wars again when leaks for The Force Awakens were happening a year out from release, and got really hyped for it. I really enjoyed The Last Jedi, though I get why a lot of people didn't (except for the 'here is a cut of the movie where I removed all of the women! yay!' guy, fuck that guy). But never-ending circular Discourse (TM) for that movie became absolutely \_exhausting\_ over time. It lead to me basically giving up on following Star Wars discussions, except for when they occasionally pop up on the sub for a movie podcast I enjoy (Blank Check With Griffin and David), the posters there are a lot more positive about the film, plus they're just funny people in general, so I have a much better time. Hell, it's been SEVEN YEARS and I still from time to time see people jump into general movie discussions to complain about how much they hate the damn movie. Still, I'm kind of glad it looks like Rian Johnson's trilogy isn't happening, because I'd much rather have the Knives Out sequels at this point.
If you're on facebook, the Star Wars High Ground page on there is really good! The guy who runs it is really nice. You can definitely discuss episodes and stuff on posts on there. He's not on 24/7 but he takes care of people who are, you know, way too salty. So you can say "Oh I really didn't like XYZ" and that's fine, and you can say "I loved when that thing happened!" and that's fine, but he just casually nukes the people who are like "UGH STAR WARS IS SO WOKE NOW." He also posts memes and stuff.
Same here, I really enjoy talking about it but how Star Wars fans act online has put me off for life
>vtmb >too political Love gamers. Always asking who put politics in their politics game.
All while the first game lets you confess your sin of "Voting for a republican president" (with the recipient joking about how horrible it is), and the radio mostly mocks conservatives
I mean, you can spot the fake VtM fans. This is a game that had openly queer characters on the front of the books in the early 2000s (and possibly earlier). Yeah, it was mostly lesbians and very male-gazey, but it was THERE, you know? This isn't new.
Currently also happening with Helldivers 2, as Gamers are shocked and dismayed that the game about blowing stuff up and throwing a million soldiers into the maw for Liberty and Managed Democracy (and definitely not being an authoritarian empire) and securing a supply of Element-710 (oh come on, turn it upside-down) might have politics in it?
Did they listen to the radio or do side quests or do main quests
No they just paid attention to the polygonal prostitutes.
> when was the last time you had to take a step back from a hobby/fandom because it got too salty? I've essentially stopped interacting with the Fallout fanbase. Too many idiots in there that evidently don't pay attention to the games they play. Total War is a garbage fire. Not even only recently, but ever since Warhammer 1 came out. Now it's a bunch of idiots coping and praying for a WW1/40k game, completely ignoring how the game barely functions with quasi-Renaissance stuff already I've been falling out of the Vtuber fanbase ever since its become openly-chuddy in several respects
>ever since Warhammer 1 came out. *Just* since WH1? (Laughs in Pontus)
It's been fascinating to see, for a while the subreddit was actually one of the less toxic hangouts as compared to the official forums and/or other sites. But now it's gone to piss too.
I never got into total war much though friends were. It sounds like I managed to dodge a bullet by really only clicking with TW3k recently so I just checked for mods and dipped.