"having to deal with milk"

what are you, some kind of lacker of toast and tolerance?

Ooh, be the change you wanna see in the world, just knowing I've gotten you to talk about it like that is so nice.

And yeah. The bachi fandom are just... people. Some lame, some cool, all people doing and saying shit.

themselves as SURVIVORS of bad fandoms.

But there is no 'fandom', it was a specific set of things that happened to YOU.

I find that fascinating, and maybe slightly unhealthy...

I dunno...

specific events, which let's anyone interpret what you mean however they want, for better and worse.

And of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't acknowledge the real actions or their real consequences, both positive and negative. You do invest, and it IS like a relationship. People describe

Fandoms kind of aren't real things. They're discord servers and fandom dot com forums of HUGE amounts of people. Of course, we talk about fandoms as a shorthand in response to specific events, which is fine... Except, we also talk about those vague identities outside of

You can't really 'mentally overinvest' in getting hatemail or a bullet in your window y'know.

But let's be real, versus the millions of people who consider themselves to be in some kind of fan community, how often does that actually happen?

Obviously the two caveats to all this are when the media itself has a role in the actions of its fandoms, and also people who have experienced real world hurt due to the actions of people identifying with a certain fandom.

Those are outside of the decisions of the individuals in the fandom.

To the point that I kind of even shudder at 'positive' fandoms, because I just see it as waiting for the other shoe to drop. It implies a high perceived moral investment in the group identity. Then something bad happens and people feel their expectations aren't met.

I think that extends to the fact that bad fandom experiences can poison your enjoyment of the source media. Its just a further negative response to the group that you associated with that material. People attribute their interpretation or bad associations of the group on the media itself.

about every single thing everyone else is doing, or afford to always give the nuance these individuals deserve.

It's just easier to say 'Xfandom sucks, I don't go there anymore' than to say, 'I had a bad experience interacting with A' or 'watching A and B interact that I shared an identity with.'

That's the definition of parasocial behavior, its just not pointed at a single person, its towards whole groups of people being identified as a monolith.

Like the way we interact and discuss fandoms on the whole is extremely reductive, and it kind of has to be. We can't know or care

Your relationship with a fandom as a whole is lopsided, where you identify as and invest energy and care into it, and since its not a person (or rather, its a faceless sea of many people) when the group fails to respond the way we like, we associate it with wasted effort and bad memories.

tMRA sounds like something that RFKJr. would complain about being in vaccines.

You should be.

You forgot that Old Spice leaked the Super Mario Galaxy movie.

I feel like they've at least re-rigged their models? Wendy's mouth and Ludwig's hair feel like they've been animated with attention to their shape to the camera, but they do straight up look like the NSMB models.

Also, I gotta rep my kids... They're back... They're using the same models as NSMBU, but I'll always be happy to see them :)