I have a motorcycle. It’s a Harley-Davidson. Immediately, everyone is picturing a large and unpleasant looking bearded man riding a huge, noisy, vibrating, chrome bedazzled air cooled motorcycle without a helmet from one bar to the next.
My harley makes about as much noise as a Toyota Camry. I wear full protective gear when riding it, including a bright and attention-getting helmet. It doesn’t get ridden to bars, because drinking interferes with my motorcycle addiction.
The large and unpleasant looking bearded man part is accurate, though.
I never understood the " I’m so badass I’m going to ride without the only thing that can prevent my skull from cracking like an egg" I guess live fast die young, but in the event you don’t die the only way we will know where your mouth is, it will be following the feeding tube.
I mean, some dudes won’t use environmentally friendly grocery bags because they’re afraid to appear “gay”. Some men’s masculinity is oh so fragile. Like a human skull in a motorcycle accident perhaps.
It has been my long-standing belief that a motorcycle helmet can prevent an accident. I’ve had too many things hit my visor while riding. Imagine taking a june bug in the eye with nothing but a set of oakleys for protection.
I love comedy podcasts, The Jeselnek and Rosenthal Vanity Project, a favourite. His style is dark humour and it seems that a significant proportion of the audience actually believe some of the things he jokes about. I think it’s one of the reasons they rarely field audience questions and never phone calls.
Comedy can be a minefield for this type of stuff. I’m a big fan of the comedians that can dance around the edge, or seem to cross it and then bring the audience back, eg: Mark Normand, Bill Burr, Jimmy Carr, a lot of the old Norm MacDonald stuff, etc.
But I’ll see some fan compilations with titles or comments that make it clear that they don’t get the style of humor… Like “[comedian] DESTROYS feminists!!1!”
When, to anyone with a reasonable level of social intelligence, it’s abundantly clear that that’s not what’s happening.
Oh man, I really like One Punch Man, and I’ve always been a fan of the whole “poking fun at anime tropes thing”, but if you spend 30 mins on the subreddit for that subject you find a lot of people that don’t really see that the “child that’s actually much older than they look” thing isn’t a justifiable excuse for filling your sub with subjective images of a child.
At a certain point, it basically became trolling to raise that these people needed their hard drives checked by law enforcement professionals, and less to do with the thing that I actually enjoyed.
The Metal Gear Solid fanbase is probably the one of the few respectful and wholesome gaming fanbase I have seen. While most male gamers are drooling and oogling their eyes on any sexualised female characters, MGS fans question and reject the scantily clad female character in Metal Gear Solid V and always meme about this woman being fully clothed.
Ah yeah, I don’t think the community ever bought that one, since (for context for those that don’t know MGS) this was after MGS3 that had The End, an old man that also breathed through his skin, and he was clothed.
Oh yeah. I did not hang out in Star Trek groups for many years despite being a fan - I didn’t near to hear a million times why Enterprise sucked or Discovery sucks or whatever. I enjoyed both and don’t need to listen to someone screeching about continuity errors or whatever in a fictional TV show.
And they can’t help themselves, more than once I’ve made a comment like this only to have someone reply, “Well, Discovery sucks because blah blah blah!”, and it’s like, “THANKS FOR DEMONSTRATING THE POINT I WAS MAKING. YOU’RE THE PROBLEM. YOU.”
No one hates Star Trek more than Star Trek fans.
I joined a group on facebook that is called “Wholesomeposting” and that kind of shit is not allowed. It’s much nicer that way. The noise level on Lemmy hasn’t been too bad, fortunately…so far.
I wouldn’t say either are ruined. They just attract some fucked up people. I don’t think any media should be judged based on what kind of person obsesses with it and how they express that obsession.
With those two, you can even laugh knowing the people who make/made those shows don’t think highly of those fans.
I got that sense from the new Star Wars trilogy, too, especially ep 7 where Kylo is an obsessive Darth Vader fan who wore a helmet for no reason and wasn’t nearly as effective as his hero was (he loses a lightsaber duel to someone who hadn’t ever used a lightsaber before and his most destructive action in that movie is throwing a temper tantrum and destroying one of his own rooms).
Looking at VTuber fandom out there. Two weeks ago, a famous female VTuber called Ironmouse (who, BTW, has an immune disease and cannot leave her house) won an award, and you know what the fans of other candidates did? They sent her death threats.
I only saw hate from people outside the vtuber community, specially on tiktok since people over there already went through a hate wave of vtubers after a popular male one made a concert without having a 3D model. Several people going “who?” afther she won in the live comments.
VTuber fandom has the extreme opposites. By just being in the Hololive community I’ve seen people being absolute gems and creating content that everyone loves (Kay Yu, Kanauru, 2ManySnacks)… and on the other side people gatekeeping everything, way too parasocial fans, thirst everywhere and extreme tribalism.
If you stop at top comments/posts it’s usually a great experience, you just have to learn to stop scrolling when the toxicity begins.
Easiest way to start hating your new hobby is visiting it’s subreddit.
It’s obvious for video games because you can assume anyone that wants to be active on a specific game sub is probably a try hard that talks about the meta, or max DPS builds, or other annoying stuff. But then you visit something like the carbon steel pan subreddit, or grilled cheese, and you’re continually assaulted with this idea that there are only specific pans and oils that are correct, or that your grilled cheese isn’t actually a grilled cheese because it was cooked too close to an open pack of salami.
I can just imagine the person writing that with a smug grin on their face, nodding slowly as they finish with a “you don’t deserve to own them” and feeling all good about themselves.
Video game communities suck, and it makes playing them worse.
You play an FPS and everyone uses the meta gun at the time, then it gets nerfed and they use the new meta gun. Same with RTS and any other multiplayer game. Somehow StarCraft 1 pulled out a perfect rock paper scissors balance, but nothing else really has that so meta is what people do.
And because everyone is so busy grinding and min maxing, that’s what the game developers design for now, and it sucks the fun out of games because you just grind hours to get some new items to have the best items in the game.
Occasionally game communities are good. The Chivalry 2 subreddit had a bot that would use GPT to answer questions and then on every post go on about how the polehammer is the best weapon in the game, which was so over the top it made fun of the whole meta idea. The Breath of the Wild communities doing crazy rube Goldberg machines are always fun. And I’ll never not enjoy the weird hellscapes people create in the Sims.
You play an FPS and everyone uses the meta gun at the time
This is why I miss arena shooters (Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halo, etc.) being in vogue. There are no loadouts, no inherent differences between players, you’re all equal, and any weapons, ammo, grenades, powerups, vehicles, whatever, must be picked up from the map itself. This map doesn’t have a lightning gun/rocket launcher/banshee? Well tough shit, you’re going to have to do without.
These are games where you must fight with whatever comes to hand, no matter how much you dislike it, and that leaves almost no space for a meta. The closest thing that can exist is a general consensus of “for this situation, these are the weapons you want to have, and these are the weapons you really do not want to be in this situation with”.
OMG, this was what killed overwatch for me. I’m disabled and can’t play games that require fast paced precise and concise actions. So Symetra was my jam. I tried other characters like torbjorn but the all had the same problem. Some 13 yo genji prick would hop circles over my head while my health ticked away and I shot sporadically around at the sky before I inevitably die. But not Sym. All I had to do was backpedal and keep that grasshopper mf’er in my general view. And pop. Pulling him into a doorway with 6 kill lasers was the best feeling the in the world. But that enabled me to be useful to the rest of the team. I occasionally did good enough that I ranked in the top of the match, but I was almost never carried.
And then they nerfed sym because, “nOt EnOuGh PrO pLaYeRs PiCk HeR!!¡!!” No more walking shield. No more turret web. No more over shield for the team. No more wide lock on gun. They turned her into just another precision shooting player. She had a Halloween bag of tricks and they swapped it for a tooth brush.
Last time this happened to me was when I said I liked an experimental musician’s youtube channel cause he has a lot of content about his process etc. Got reamed in the comments by a salty user cause the musician once featured a product in a video made by a brand that it’s popular to hate, yet used by many musicians. One of the most reddit things ever.
The same subreddit heavily discouraged me, in classic reddit style, from getting a product once. I did anyway following my intuition. Then a year later it became the most recommended product for that purpose.
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