The Wrong Stuff, Incorrectly

Once again I, an idiot, have entered a tumblr tag after consuming a piece of media to join in the revelries and instead find a lot of bizarrely bitter, cynical people bandwagoning onto a reason to be upset about it that they most assuredly were not honestly this passionate about before being passionate about it gave them a community of online trolls to feel a part of. It’s become so unpleasant here, toxic actually, and I don’t mean just tumblr. I mean fandom in general. Everyone is just so angry and they only want to find reasons to be angrier. It’s made me so sad to get a taste of how things used to be with the beginning of the Heated Rivalry fandom, and now all I see is people referencing these petty in-fights and conspiracy theories that are all completely blown out of proportion, if not entirely made up. But everyone just lives in these miserable fantasies together, seemingly unaware that there is a corner of fandom that has no fucking idea what Paris Fashion Week incident you’re talking about, that there’s a way to appreciate things that is, first and foremost, about having a good time. It’s so hard to find those corners anymore. No one seems to even want to enjoy themselves. Anywhere. You all think you’re so much more woke or whatever than the morons on 4chan but you have a variation of the same illness. I’m not saying shut up and don’t be critical when you have an honest thought, but this is absurd. Did you guys know adaptations can take liberties and still have something worthy and artful to say? Did you know you can be a fan of someone and still give them and yourselves enough mental and emotional distance to let them be flawed or even just nuanced in private? You don’t have to reduce everything to a meme or a fandom fight you and your invisible buddies can snicker about together to get a few weeks of blissful acceptance and insular popularity before you’re alone and miserable again with nothing to love. I’m so tired of being disappointed by all this. It’s so pervasive, it gaslights me into thinking we never had a good time at all. But we did, and we ruined it, and that - and not a single line in the cyclops scene - was the point of the fucking odyssey.