“Use some mercy, human.”
August 21, 2017 12:02 PM   Subscribe

The Undertale Drama by Chloe Spencer [Kotaku] “Undertale’s stigma as a toxic fandom arose after incidents involving harassed YouTubers, pornography, and fans who plastered the internet with in-game jokes. Over time, a game that started out as heartwarming and lovable gained infamy for supposedly having one of the worst fandoms on the internet. Undertale’s descent into online infamy was largely due to the pervasive thought that there was only one way to play the game.” [Previously.]
posted by Fizz (45 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Why does it seem like the more a piece of work tries to champion the ideals of tolerance, mercy, and love, the more the fandom becomes a toxic piece of work? It's like the milkshake duck rule of communities. Granted, you could say that a couple of thousand years ago, a guy got famous for speaking about love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness and faithfulness, and rival fan clubs of his have been killing each other over the precise way to go about doing that.
posted by zabuni at 12:26 PM on August 21, 2017 [33 favorites]


> Why does it seem like the more a piece of work tries to champion the ideals of tolerance, mercy, and love, the more the fandom becomes a toxic piece of work?

I'd love to find a meditation on that aspect that is a little less porn heavy to share with friends who are a little less porn friendly as a discussion point.

Any suggestions on in-depth articles about the complexities around 'purity tests' in gaming?
posted by CheapB at 12:29 PM on August 21, 2017


So you can only get the good ending to the game if you're absolutely 100% peaceful from the beginning? Maybe part of the problem is that this game doesn't give you the opportunity to ever redeem yourself after making a decision you might come to regret. It sounds like this community has had a lot to offer people over the years, but if everything is framed around this black-and-white logic, it's no wonder people are willing to berate each other over the tiniest of things.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:32 PM on August 21, 2017 [8 favorites]


Why does it seem like the more a piece of work tries to champion the ideals of tolerance, mercy, and love, the more the fandom becomes a toxic piece of work?

Nazi Bronies, y'all.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:36 PM on August 21, 2017 [6 favorites]


apes that haunt the dusk , the game strongly encourages you to do multiple playthroughs--in fact, you cannot get the 100% good ending on a single play to the end (though you only have to replay a small section). Some characters in the game are, to some limited extent, aware of it if you replay sections.

I was introduced to the game by my ten-year old, who insisted on playing it through all the way with me. I've never been exposed to the deep fandom, just been in discussions of it in other places, but the "recommended" play style I've seen in those places is to play through as you would any game, which includes making mistakes and killing in a few places, then go back to play the Pacifist Route to the end, finally going back to play the True Pacifist route after that.

To really experience all the game has to offer, you'd go back to play a Genocide route after that (since it blocks the True Pacifist route from being possible)...but most people, even completionists like me, decide not to do that.

Edit: I feel like I'm just repeating the article in a slightly different way, so this is an eminently deletable comment.
posted by Four Ds at 12:39 PM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


Here are my hobbies that currently have mind-bogglingly toxic portions of their fandom:

SF/F
Photography
Gaming
Basketball

Here are my hobbies that don't:


.

If you get at all invested in something you want to talk about online, it currently feels almost impossible to engage without wading through mountains of horseshit.
posted by selfnoise at 12:42 PM on August 21, 2017 [21 favorites]


Maybe part of the problem is that this game doesn't give you the opportunity to ever redeem yourself after making a decision you might come to regret.

That seems to perfectly capture most online discourse these days.

fandom becomes a toxic piece of work

The best you can expect from almost any fandom seems to be "unbearable". It's just a short step to "toxic" from there.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:43 PM on August 21, 2017


Why does it seem like the more a piece of work tries to champion the ideals of tolerance, mercy, and love, the more the fandom becomes a toxic piece of work? It's like the milkshake duck rule of communities.Granted, you could say that a couple of thousand years ago, a guy got famous for speaking about love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness and faithfulness, and rival fan clubs of his have been killing each other over the precise way to go about doing that.

As Douglas Adams pointed out, the guy who talked about that stuff got nailed to a tree in the first place.

Fandoms of anything seem to become toxic over time; there's an impulse that seems to run towards feeling ownership and control over the thing that has been created, rather than being just glad that you had the experience of that thing in the first place.
posted by nubs at 12:44 PM on August 21, 2017 [7 favorites]


I was reminded of this recently in playing the remastered Final Fantasy 12, which among other things removes a certain deal from the original FF12 where in order to get like the best weapon in the game, you had to NOT open certain chests. If you didn't find out information from elsewhere prior to playing and then sit there with a list of what chests not to open, you were going to miss out. Undertale felt like it was making moral virtue a thing that was locked to being properly In The Know. That plus the lack of ability to redeem yourself if you were bad enough... left me with some very conflicting feelings about it. It doesn't surprise me that the fandom got bad with a game this, well, hyper-Calvinist. Spread the pacifist Good News to make sure that the Elect get the good ending, use shame if you have to to keep people from going genocide, because they'll thereafter be excluded from the tribe forever.
posted by Sequence at 12:44 PM on August 21, 2017 [7 favorites]


One thing to note: the real genocide route, the one that locks you out of the good ending--it's hard. Not just emotionally--you might not feel anything for these characters, after all--but you have to be very, very persistent, and you may need to go online to seek out how to make sure you kill *everybody.*
posted by Four Ds at 12:53 PM on August 21, 2017


"I WON'T WATCH THIS BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT GOING PACIFIST."

Okay, so... Don't?
posted by delfin at 1:12 PM on August 21, 2017 [4 favorites]


The worst part about the moralizing about Undertale is that it's a short game! I played my first run blind in seven hours. I played my second run as a True Pacifist Run in about another seven hours.

IMO, playing the game like a normal RPG and finding out the nature of violence in that universe at the end (or eventually cluing in earlier) is the first half of the game. The Pacifist Run is the second half.

Telling players new to the game that they should start with a Pacifist Run is basically spoiling the first half of the game for them. The game is about making mistakes and doing better. Why the fuck would you take that away from someone? It's not like you're saving them 40+ hours! You're saving them 7 hours.
posted by explosion at 1:15 PM on August 21, 2017 [12 favorites]


With regard to fandoms and communities, I've always been kind of uncomfortable with communities based around common consumption of media. I love Steven Universe, I love Undertale, I love Magic: the Gathering. It doesn't mean I share the same values as others who love these, and it doesn't mean we love them for the same reasons. I know awesome people who share these interests, but also some truly loathsome people.

Assuming you share the same values as someone because you share the same interests, especially something so shallow as media, is a really strange assumption. It leads to real disappointment and disillusionment, and strange gatekeeping about how, when, and why to enjoy that media.

It's why I've resisted calling myself a "gamer." I play games, tons of them. Board games, video games, card games. But it's a useless term to me, because it describes my hobby, not my culture or community.
posted by explosion at 1:21 PM on August 21, 2017 [21 favorites]


Truthfully, the Undertale fandom and memes I was unwillingly exposed to made me decide not to pursue the game.
posted by Samizdata at 1:25 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


The worst part about the moralizing about Undertale is that it's a short game! I played my first run blind in seven hours. I played my second run as a True Pacifist Run in about another seven hours.

Telling players new to the game that they should start with a Pacifist Run is basically spoiling the first half of the game for them. The game is about making mistakes and doing better. Why the fuck would you take that away from someone? It's not like you're saving them 40+ hours! You're saving them 7 hours.


But did someone tell you how to specifically get a True Pacifist instead of just a Pacifist? Because, I have to say, I thought there was a lot to like about this game, but its expectation that you're going to play (almost) the exact same game three times was pretty maddening to me.

When I got to the end of my second (pacifist) playthrough and the game was like "ok, do that again but do these few things slightly differently") I was super irritated, and I still haven't bothered to go back and do the True Pacifist. I wouldn't have minded having someone tell me "by the way, make sure when you do the pacifist run you also do x, y, and z so you don't have to do it again."
posted by Ragged Richard at 1:28 PM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


I wonder where the Bioshock fandom lands on rescuing or harvesting Little Sisters and draining them for Adam? That's a pretty horrid choice and I know it filled me with a lot of guilt. I still chose harvest, but I felt bad about it for a few minutes....but then I used my new abilities to freeze/burn people to death.
posted by Fizz at 1:32 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


I wonder where the Bioshock fandom lands on rescuing or harvesting Little Sisters and draining them for Adam? That's a pretty horrid choice and I know it filled me with a lot of guilt. I still chose harvest, but I felt bad about it for a few minutes....but then I used my new abilities to freeze/burn people to death.

Hmm, interesting comparison, considering that Undertale ultimately seems to treat your choices as important, whereas Bioshock seems to have as its thesis statement that moral choice in video games is always an illusion.
posted by Ragged Richard at 1:36 PM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


There's no real tension in that decision in Bioshock. The rewards for not harvesting Little Sisters are dramatically better than the rewards for harvesting them. So you only do a "harvest" playthrough if you're curious about the "bad" ending or, I guess, if you're deliberately trying to play suboptimally.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:37 PM on August 21, 2017


I've avoided Undertale because all I knew about it was that teenagers were being extremely dramatic on the internet about it. I avoided Homestuck for the same reason, although someone did try valiantly to explain it to me and I couldn't understand. This is unfair of me, but with so much negativity in the world, it's natural to wade past what you see. This article actually encourages me to give it a try, though.

When fandom is good, it can show you fics, theories and art that surpass the work of the original creators (especially if those creators were phoning it in all along), and romance that leaves every grocery-store novel in the dust. When fandom is bad, it is enough to make you wish that ARPANET had never developed outside of the military and a few universities. A needle in a cookie! A god damn needle in a cookie! (It says a good deal about how long I have been around fandoms that I can equally well believe that this needle incident happened or that it had been faked, because of the depth of the human capability for batshit. Since it's reported on here, I will believe it.)
posted by Countess Elena at 1:49 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's been...ten years since I've played Bioshock, but, iirc, that is exactly contrary to what the game itself actually tells you, iirc: you get an option to harvest for more benefit, or not harvest for less benefit (as an explicit choice). But the game's prompt is lying to the player by omitting that -- if you don't harvest -- you'll get the balance made up, with a bonus, later on at a different time.

This was widely spoiled at the game's launch, though, and a lot of reviews mentioned how not harvesting was the strictly better choice, so I don't know how many people have ever actually played it without knowing the choice was a false one; and -- broad caveat -- I may be mis-rembering this. But the parallel is actually a good one, in that it's a case of meta-knowledge changing how you see the game.


I, for one, did not find that out until after I was well into the first run of the game. But I still couldn't do it.
posted by Samizdata at 1:52 PM on August 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


Why does it seem like the more a piece of work tries to champion the ideals of tolerance, mercy, and love, the more the fandom becomes a toxic piece of work?

I've had to think about this a lot lately not just in terms of my favorite fandoms (TAZ I am looking at you) but at the natural circular firing squad of the left. Hurt people hurt people. It's human nature. And when we take a swing, we can only hit whoever's in reach of our fist, and that's liable to be someone close to us, not a faraway enemy. So a young person won't bother to try to get at her MAGA-ass brother, and if she does he won't hear, but by God she can spend her time on Tumblr yelling at somebody for not drawing Rose Quartz the way she's designed, and that person is going to hear.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:57 PM on August 21, 2017 [21 favorites]


But did someone tell you how to specifically get a True Pacifist instead of just a Pacifist? Because, I have to say, I thought there was a lot to like about this game, but its expectation that you're going to play (almost) the exact same game three times was pretty maddening to me.

Assuming I understand you right... you don't have to. If you play Pacifist (killing no-one) and beat the after-Asgore Boss, you can reload your save (regardless of what that boss says in his fight about erasing your save). If you spared him after the fight he'll give you a clue about it, but I think you can do it even if you don't spare him. The clue: after the ending call with Sans he'll show up and suggest that there's a couple more people you can befriend. That's the part that leads to the True Lab. It doesn't require restarting the game from the beginning.

If you have played through True Lab and then gone through to the ending from there, then you've done a True Pacifist run. There should be nothing more to do.

I've written quite a lot on fandoms here before. I had a long rambly comment written here, but then deleted it as, eh, not really on-topic. But a summary might be useful. I think the problems with these excellent games having toxic fandoms boils down to three things:

1. "That thing is everywhere so I hate it." That's kind of snobbish but understandable.
2. Toxic fans are much MUCH more visible than normal fans.
3. When people like something a lot, they get really protective of it, sometimes overly so.
posted by JHarris at 2:21 PM on August 21, 2017 [7 favorites]


The clue: after the ending call with Sans he'll show up and suggest that there's a couple more people you can befriend. That's the part that leads to the True Lab. It doesn't require restarting the game from the beginning.

Wait, but don't I have to restart the game from the beginning to befriend those people? That's what I thought I had to do...
posted by Ragged Richard at 2:30 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Nope. Reload the last save before the final fights and start walking back to the first part of the game and you get a phone call that points you to how to befriend them.

Come to think of it, knowing *that* is a bigger metaknowledge thing than figuring out you want to avoid killing anybody at all.
posted by Four Ds at 2:37 PM on August 21, 2017 [6 favorites]


AHHHHHH! Thank you! Doing that tonight.
posted by Ragged Richard at 2:38 PM on August 21, 2017 [5 favorites]


Why does it seem like the more a piece of work tries to champion the ideals of tolerance, mercy, and love, the more the fandom becomes a toxic piece of work?

This also brings to mind a passage from George Orwell's "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool":
The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power. There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.
I believe that there is a certain line of thinking that goes: "If I like this good thing, that means that I am a good person. If someone else doesn't like this thing or doesn't like it as I do, then they must be a bad person. Ergo, they should be opposed or punished."
posted by Sangermaine at 3:04 PM on August 21, 2017 [10 favorites]


I'm clearly in the minority here, but I don't think this article proved its thesis about the fandom being toxic. I mean...some people made negative comments on your Let's Play? Some people in fandom got emotionally overwrought?

I'm not saying it's not a toxic fandom, just that this piece (by a j-student) is...a nothingburger
posted by radicalawyer at 3:09 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Nope. Reload the last save before the final fights and start walking back to the first part of the game and you get a phone call that points you to how to befriend them.

Yep, Four Ds is right. In fact, you still have some of the best moments of the game ahead of you. And also right about that being significant metaknowledge. In fact, my first play I did as a pacifist, because I was somewhat spoiled, but also because I've played the whole power fantasy kind of RPG thing a lot, but going through as a pacifist from the start was appealing to me. It's actually not that hard, relatively speaking.

In fact, I'm not sure if it's possible to lose the final "anime cliche" ultra boss fight. The game has a number of tricks to make it seem like you take damage when you get hit when it's not really so bad. The number gauge for your health disappears here and you only have your health bar to go by, and it seems the lower it is, the less you lose from it. The one or two times I actually did run out of health, it just put me back to life again.
posted by JHarris at 4:26 PM on August 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


Hurt people hurt people. It's human nature. And when we take a swing, we can only hit whoever's in reach of our fist, and that's liable to be someone close to us, not a faraway enemy.

-----

I believe that there is a certain line of thinking that goes: "If I like this good thing, that means that I am a good person. If someone else doesn't like this thing or doesn't like it as I do, then they must be a bad person. Ergo, they should be opposed or punished."

-----

I think the toxicity on the left comes from a combination of these two, and then compounded if the person doing the harassing is younger and/or very new to politics and activism. You look for someone to hurt because you do, you find the target based on the One True Best Belief that you own, and you haven't the experience that might either teach you to appreciate nuance and compromise or realize that abuse is not an effective form of persuasion.
posted by Anonymous at 5:06 PM on August 21, 2017


Having been in some fandom or other for like half my life now (I'm in my 30s) the whole "certain ships normalise incest and paedophilia!!!" ruckus on Tumblr right now frustrates me to no end. The Harry Potter fandom had those kind of ships in bulk and hardly anyone became more sexually depraved as a result, we didn't have a sudden rise in IRL incest and paedophilia as a result. And also paedophiles using fanart to groom kids - what? Just...what?
posted by divabat at 5:20 PM on August 21, 2017 [6 favorites]


Why does it seem like the more a piece of work tries to champion the ideals of tolerance, mercy, and love, the more the fandom becomes a toxic piece of work?

Because so many vile, broken people are really into video games.
posted by thelonius at 5:22 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


You know, I've had this in my steam pile of unplayed games for years. Maybe ill dust it off and see what the fuss is about.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:44 PM on August 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


Why does it seem like the more a piece of work tries to champion the ideals of tolerance, mercy, and love, the more the fandom becomes a toxic piece of work?

I'm not sure it's really like that so much as we just kinda give a pass when something shitty has a shitty fandom, because it's expected. I recall, for example, hardcore fans of Star Wars and Mass Effect sending death threats and other such nonsense at the creators when they made content they didn't like. And if a problematic thing has problematic fanart/fics/etc then who's going to complain? The fans who like that kind of thing?
posted by picklenickle at 6:18 PM on August 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: If you get at all invested in something you want to talk about, it currently feels almost impossible to engage without wading through mountains of horseshit.
posted by HeroZero at 6:21 PM on August 21, 2017 [2 favorites]


I wonder where the Bioshock fandom lands on rescuing or harvesting Little Sisters and draining them for Adam?

I only played through once, but I wouldn't have been able to do that. I'm actually a bit disappointed to learn that it actually made the game easier.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:10 PM on August 21, 2017


Yeah, it's a kind of bad, but frustratingly common, mechanism for games to make the good playthrough easier than the evil one. This kind of misrepresents evil, as you have to have a determined commitment to being shitty to have any reason to be bad. It makes a lot more sense for the evil playthrough to be easier, since evil is usually less a determined commitment to hurting others than apathy + expedience.
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:45 PM on August 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


Dishonored is a great example of the game responding to your gameplay and moral choices (and they are often the same choice) by changes to more than the story's end. The levels change, the weather changes, all kinds of little details effect all kinds of little details, and the last level is totally the same and completely different at the same time, not just because of story. Its really great. I think the only bad part of the first Dishonored is some of the characterization and most of the voice acting.
posted by kittensofthenight at 11:18 PM on August 21, 2017 [3 favorites]


Countess Elena: I've had to think about this a lot lately not just in terms of my favorite fandoms (TAZ I am looking at you) but at the natural circular firing squad of the left. Hurt people hurt people. It's human nature. And when we take a swing, we can only hit whoever's in reach of our fist, and that's liable to be someone close to us, not a faraway enemy. [emphasis mine]

This is something that I have to remind myself of pretty often when I'm working through my tumblr feed and come across something pretty awful that's being reposted by someone that I otherwise respect and admire.

Also, WRT one choice in a game being obviously better than another, it reminds me of the Paragon/Renegade choices in the original Mass Effect trilogy. The choice is originally presented as basically being Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Good, but some of the Renegade options are pretty awful, especially compared to the Paragon one, or just not as satisfying. In the second game, when you're helping Zaeed complete his loyalty mission, you can help him get his revenge on the former colleague who betrayed him and left him for dead... but that involves taking a path during which you can hear innocent civilians screaming as they're burning to death in this industrial plant because you're helping Zaeed instead. If you save the civilians, and have a sufficiently high Paragon score, you can get Zaeed's loyalty anyway. What kind of a choice is that? And there are parallel situations with Garrus' and Jack's loyalty missions, where they can either straight up kill the person for revenge or have a really interesting discussion with Shepard about healing and moving on. I mean, there are certain NPCs where it's really tempting to use the Renegade interrupt to punch them in the face, but in terms of the decisions in the game, playing full Renegade makes you feel like an amoral monster sometimes.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:03 AM on August 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Games never have satisfying moral systems. It's just too hard for developers and writers to put together a satisfying decision tree where paths diverge, but neither choice feels like Good or Evil.

Jade Empire did a good job obfuscating theirs for the first half of the game. It was Open Palm versus Closed Fist, and initially appears to be the difference between giving a man a fish, or teaching him to fish. But by the end of the game, it devolves to good altruist or evil, selfish libertarian stereotype, but with an Eastern, martial arts bent. It saddened me that Bioware never really got any better from there.
posted by explosion at 7:53 AM on August 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


Yikes. Undertale is a cute charming game, but I'm happy to have heard it from friends who played it because it's a great game, but we don't hang out with the internet Fandom for it. We may be too old and busy for it, since we are in our mid 20s. It's a wonderful game, don't let isolated suburban teenagers ruin your perception of it.
posted by yueliang at 9:42 AM on August 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


Games never have satisfying moral systems. It's just too hard for developers and writers to put together a satisfying decision tree where paths diverge, but neither choice feels like Good or Evil.

I alluded to this above, but I think that Bioshock probably has the best engagement with this, since it makes the impossibility of a satisfying moral system an issue in the game itself.

Spoilers for Bioshock:

The game gives you the kind of choice that other games often do - do you harvest the little sisters or let them go? The game initially presents this as you giving up a reward for doing the right thing, but people who have played this kind of game before might suspect that this is just a Marshmallow Test, and that foregoing the immediate reward will lead to a greater one later. They are correct - the supposed moral system turns out to be a little bit of a sham.

But then the 'would you kindly' reveal indicates that all of your choices are a sham. Importantly, after Ryan tells you what's going on and commands you to kill him, the game gives control back to you, and just won't move forward until you do what he asks. It's always seemed to me that the hollowness of the moral system with the Little Sisters is essential to making this point - that choice in games is always an illusion, because you're constantly forced into actions because otherwise the game doesn't progress.
posted by Ragged Richard at 1:46 PM on August 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


I'm reminded of the alternate beginning/ending of Far Cry 4 ( I fpp'd it back in the day - does that count as a self-post?) Most Far Cry games begin by you meeting the big bad and then escaping to join the rebels, but in FC4 if you follow his instructions and wait where he left you instead of taking off the game proceeds to end, then and there, in a much more peaceful ending than if you followed the action game trope and spent the next dozens of hours killing thousands of people.
posted by thecjm at 5:38 PM on August 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


I couldn't play this game. I despise games which present you with massively contrived moral choices. With the limited number of options that programmers can plan for, the questions always come off as, "What would you choose to do if you were suddenly rendered moderately incoherent, couldn't think of actual options, and found yourself in this situation you'd never, ever get into in the first place?"

The fact that the game was aware that it was being morally manipulative was in no way redeeming. The fact that it's sold as a sort of morality simulator is downright disturbing. Why would I take moral instruction from someone with a junior-high sense of humor?

It should have a Not For Curmudgeons warning on it.
posted by MrVisible at 6:10 PM on August 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Wait, are you talking about Undertale, MrVisible? Because the only real moral choice it gives you is kill these monsters or not. In most video RPGs, the only real choice is to kill them, but it soon becomes obvious that the game is about rejecting that. Unspoiled players will probably get a normal game, or a slim chance at a Pacifist game if they take Toriel at her word (and reject Flowey's advice). The Genocide route is really more of an easter egg.

You have to be pretty darn curmudgeonly to kill everyone you meet.
posted by JHarris at 8:24 PM on August 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


1. "That thing is everywhere so I hate it." That's kind of snobbish but understandable.

For me, when this sort of thing happens it's generally because I've checked it out and decided it's not for me. Sometimes you can get people who INSIST you must like what they like (a different kind of toxic fandom, I guess), which is so frustrating.

"You should watch X!"
"Oh, no thanks, I don't really like that sort of thing."
"But X is really, really good!"
"That's okay, It's not for me."
"BUT X IS SO SMART"
"That's cool, it's just not my thing."
"BUT YOU REALLY SHOULD SEE X IT'S SO GOOD"
"I FUCKING HATE X, ALL RIGHT!"

But the interesting things with brains is that at least in my case, I sort of BELIEVE that I hate whatever it is with the fire of a thousand suns in that moment and have to remember that honestly, I don't really have any feelings either way other than boredom w/r/t it?

And the thing is, too, I know I've been the "YOU SHOULD WATCH X!" guy before too.

HUMANS!
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 8:30 PM on August 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


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