In My Dragon Age Era

Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.

The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.

Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.

Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.

Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.

By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.

There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.

1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.

2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.

3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.

anyways. i noticed how much of this is applicable to darkling/darklina stans.  because those who view the darkling’s lines as romantic are falling prey to the point: the darkling as a whole is engineered to seem romantic, but only at first. we’re supposed to go wary of him -> in awe of him -> idolizing him -> realizing something’s fishy abt him -> wary of him again -> denouncing him, but so many people got stuck on idolizing.

& it scares me the way that some of you defend him because it sounds so much like the way people discredit abuse survivors. pulling out unrelated strawmen like “he’s immortal” or “he’s literally not human”, as if that’s not part of this abusive power dynamic in the first place. “oh but it’s just fiction” is even worse, because if you can’t even recognize this textbook definition of abuse & exploitation, then how are you going to support and uplift abuse survivors in real life?

like, the darkling is a litmus test just like midsommar is. if you find his lines to be romantic—as they’re specifically engineered to seem romantic while creating an unhealthy power imbalance—then maybe you’re so easily susceptible to that rhetoric. or maybe you won’t fall for it yourself, but you still lack the critical thinking skills to recognize when it happens to someone else. 

and then every single other channel out there thought “hm. why are we using a third party site to do what WE could do ourselves?” except not a single one of them had enough material in their libraries to do what netflix was doing. but they still pulled all their content out of netflix anyway and tried to do what netflix was doing. and then disney decided to do it as well, which… essentially just killed netflix.

but not only did they kill netflix, they just restarted cable! the whole point of a streaming service was being able to watch one show in one go, over a weekend or something. but bc these services don’t have enough material to keep people invested on paying every month, they have… to…. release shows one episode at a time, so that by the time one show ends they can roll out a new one and keep the subscriptions. which just? defeats the point?