You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll plotz
August 31, 2016 10:55 AM   Subscribe

Anon and his hermit crabs is an emotional roller coaster and might even be true.

h/t MeFi's own Miss Cellania
posted by Johnny Wallflower (21 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
> The posts are dated this past March but I feel like I read this ages ago.
> Although timestamps on /b/ check out.
> So maybe I'm just forgetful
posted by GuyZero at 11:14 AM on August 31, 2016


What is a VN?
posted by INFJ at 11:31 AM on August 31, 2016


VN = Visual novel (probably). Think 'text adventure with limited illustrations'. Visual novels are often (a) illustrated in an anime/manga style (b) romantic or pornographic. (Not always; Long Live the Queen is a visual novel where you try to avoid getting a princess killed before her coronation; We Know the Devil is a visual novel about fighting off the devil at summer camp...)

The most popular VN right now is Hatoful Boyfriend, where you romance sentient pigeons in an implied post-apocalypse. Because it's weird.
posted by flibbertigibbet at 11:35 AM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]


That quickly turned depressing, gross and misogynistic...

...it being 4chan, I'm not sure what else I expected.
posted by edheil at 11:50 AM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]


Aww. If it's good for the crabs, it's good for you.
posted by Secretariat at 11:57 AM on August 31, 2016


I could have done without the "pussy," "ass," "n***er" and other offensive stuff.
posted by AFABulous at 12:00 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


I could have done without the "pussy," "ass," "n***er" and other offensive stuff.

Sooooo... 4chan. This was actually pretty polite by 4chan standards where many of the posts are just a combination of those three words.
posted by GuyZero at 12:03 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]


Yeah, so why does it need to be posted here?
posted by AFABulous at 12:05 PM on August 31, 2016 [8 favorites]


I was pretty grossed out by the misogyny, but took it as a snapshot of a pretty young guy growing as a person. He's learned how to take care of himself (through taking care of the crabs), but not yet how to have empathy for other people. Hopefully he keeps growing.
posted by lunasol at 12:06 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


Hmm. If anything it was an interesting look into how a negative attitude toward the opposite sex can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: your relationship is a clear case of DTMFA, but you are so convinced all women are evil creatures whose only function is "pussy" that you don't see the point in trying to seek out someone who can clean up after herself and avoid harming your pets. So you never find anyone better, and eventually all your relationship experience is with terrible women, therefore all women are terrible.
posted by sunset in snow country at 12:26 PM on August 31, 2016 [14 favorites]


"I got my shit together by learning to rise above the evil seductive powers of a materialistic woman" is pretty much the ur-genre of greentext stories; if anyone is feeling bad for the hermit crabs, don't worry, this story is probably at least 80% fiction
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:36 PM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]


>If anything I could say that these crabs were rare, but I thought "Nah, forget it! Yo homes, to Bel-Air!"

(seriously expected that or similar)
posted by comealongpole at 12:44 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


Guys, don't you get it? He stopped using the n-word!

What if the REAL hermit crab was friendship???
posted by Mayor West at 12:48 PM on August 31, 2016 [9 favorites]


hermit, crabs
posted by atoxyl at 1:11 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


A lot of kids are being raised by video games, and strangers they game with. So, getting in touch with something real, and using it as an anchor, or reason to be, is not so far fetched.
posted by Oyéah at 1:33 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


As long as that's what it was, Oyeah, it was fine. But then there was a quick swing from "hey, this is a real and beautiful and alive thing in my life, this makes everything better" into "but that GIRL used me and took advantage of me and ruined everything and I had no choice in any of this because sex, and if you didn't hate her for what she did to me, you should hate her for what she did to my precious, innocent arthropods."
posted by edheil at 1:38 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


4chan. I have a soft spot for those guys.

It's a safe, reliable space where nothing ever happens, /b/ is cancer, /k/ is always the same, there's obsessively categorized threads on /s/

When you've got no friends, no one to talk to, 4chan meets you where you are. They're accepting. They don't have it figured out either, but hermit-anon has a story. Be like hermit-anon. Be brave.

I haven't been back there since 2012, but at the time it felt like a safe space and peer support group for painfully isolated, often autism-spectrum young men which, I'd just moved out of my parents basement for an internship in $outlying suburb of a 2nd tier city. It filled a need at the time

I'm kind of worried with kids coming online to reddit nowdays, the racism and misogyny there seems less innocent. I mean, hermit-anon is lonely. r/redpill is a whole worldview.

one of my life goals is get where I'm able to model healthy interpersonal relationships for some of these guys

and @lunasol, yeah.
posted by pseudanon at 2:41 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


I won't lie, I would have liked the story more if it had ended with: hermit crabs helped me become the type of person that my amazing wife could fall in love with, and who knows...maybe eventually it will, taking the story at face value* this kid is what, 20-21 years old right now?

But, for now, he spends significantly more text on how horrible his ex was than how great his hermit crabs are (or even how great she was in the beginning -- she seemed pretty good). Which is not a good look, but also not necessarily misogynistic (unless it's misogynistic to call horrible women horrible).

*on the one hand, greentext always lies, on the other, even fictional characters can teach us something.
posted by sparklemotion at 2:49 PM on August 31, 2016


folks, I feel like we're listening to Eddie Vedder covering "Last Kiss" and wondering whether his girlfriend really died in a car crash

like pseudanon, I have seen redeeming qualities in what goes on in /b/ but let's not kid ourselves that the misogyny isn't totally indispensable to the formula that's being followed here
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:04 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


"The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
posted by hellphish at 4:23 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]




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