Lord Galdbrand's Journal #5
Entry 5: Fandoms Suck
This is a phrase that has always been true, but in recent years it has gotten a lot worse. Fandoms are now a mix of fans, dick riders, boot lickers, fake fans, and retards. People are now at a point where they refuse to engage with the original work and treat everything in the franchise like it’s perfect.
Quickly let me go over the collective of crap for the uninitiated. Dick riders and boot lickers are much the same creature with a minor difference. Dick riders will love anything and everything produced by a company related to the franchise and will run defense for it regardless of quality. Boot lickers do all of that and they also will praise the company for all of its decisions regardless of if they are good or not.
Now fake fans are simply people who claim to be a fan and are not. The way you know who is fake and who is not is simple. Do they actually read, watch, play the media in question? If the answer is no they are fake, if the answer is yes then they are not fake.
If a fan engages with the media but says things that are not in it and are not reasonable inferences these are the retards. People who create fan theories that come out of left field and make zero sense. People who insist on twisting lore to fit culture war idiocy. People who reject everything because they are trying to push a narrative? All retards and not worth engaging with.
Having gone over this there are a number of questions. What can be done about it? Does this mean engaging in fandom is bad? From my perspective the answers are simple. Just find the people you like and stick with them.
Fuck all the fandom wars and infighting. If you like a piece of media, find like minded people who also like it and don’t engage with the rest of the morons. If a franchise is going down the drain then just enjoy the good parts in ways that don’t support the company that owns them. Sure you and your ten friends may not represent a lot of money lost, but you won’t feel any guilt by not supporting these mouth breathers.
The main point is that we live in an age where everyone wants to be right and wants to push their ideas. If you reject that and have fun despite that it will piss people off. But think about it for a second. You can see the quality of a product is getting worse and yet you sitting down and enjoying the thing at its best makes others mad?
What kind of loser gets mad about that? The kind that is one of the people I listed at the start of this journal entry. These people are soft and weak. They get worked up because you are enjoying the hobby wrong. They will also claim that you are telling them the same thing when you point out that they got something wrong.
So what? Ignore them, mock them, whatever you want to do. They don’t matter. The sooner people realize that, the better. Fandoms are basically fragmented at this point. There is little to be done about it and it really doesn’t matter. The only important thing left is to have fun.