#mob mentality

It had escaped already. From the high window of the Patrician's bedroom, Sam Vimes could see people drifting towards the palace. There wasn't a mob--there wasn't even what you might call a crowd--but the Brownian motion of the streets was bouncing more and more people in his direction.

Again I’m a leftist so yes I can say this shit!

Some of y’all fuckers need to get some fucking perspective!

Stop living in a theoretical tract!

I mentioned briefly in the first ask that I love foah's chemistry and their interactions during the press tour but whether they are together or not doesn't concern me. Well, it's a bit more complex than that. I first came across the idea of foah in 2024 in a blog on this site. Back then it did take me off-guard 'cause I'd never been in a RPF space before, but what I needed at the time was a place where people could talk openly about Noah without malice (and an active place for all the filming gossips of course) so I was pretty much just “whatever fine” to me. But it gradually grew on me. Mostly because the vibe in that blog was pretty all-in-good-fun and harmless, like a bunch of friends having a sleepover and gossiping about school. People didn't take themselves too seriously and they kept it contained in the blog. And then came the con and press tour in 2025, which made me interested in foah myself. It was an 'the way these two people interact makes my heart warm and joyful' interest that I indulged in but doesn't feel the need to be vocal about it, like with byler or ST (I bet my friends were tired with me during Nov-Dec lol. I was spamming instagram stories about it non-stop).

It blows my mind how much has changed since vol 2 release. The term 'evil byler' was everywhere that week. Not everyone was 'nice' about it per se and I blocked a lot but it was amusing to see so many people discover something you consider to be a niche interest.

In contrast to fillies. whom I regard from afar and have absolutely no desire to interact with, I lurk around foahtwt a lot, observing, and mingling with a variety of shippers. Thus, my opinions about them are not so clear-cut and resolute as it is about fillies. It ebbs and flows depending on certain sub-sections and accounts. And for a while, I don't feel the need to talk about them but unfortunately, now I really do 'cause there is a certain conspiracy mindset going around that I couldn't look away from.

One. The first thing that made me raise my eyebrows is the obsession with a hardlaunch or HL. At first, it was just "I hope they'll HL someday. I want them to be happy", then it turned into "Do you think they'll ever HL, I'm afraid they never will? - Oh honey, I'm sure they will" and finally to "See you at the HL/ Wait till they HL, this person [that I hate] will have to eat their words". And a variety of sorts in-between on this whole spectrum but you get I'm trying to depict, right? It becomes less about the boys and more about the person who ships them. Tbh, the whole concept of HL just gives me pause because on the one hand, it feels demanding, pressurizing and entitled to the private life of literal strangers. Like are we talking like they are about to launch a product? On the other hand, it just reminds me of classic conspiracy theorists (I'm saying this as someone who has a special interest in internet mystery, cult, conspiracy theories, and all that jazz. Anything that triggers my morbid curiosity really). They usually have a fixation with something quite specific, like a date or event, and that milestone will prove that everything they've been preaching about all this time is right and they cannot wait to rub it in the faces of those “sheeps”. And this brings me to another point. There was this tweet that I saw the other day and it went "solos act like we don't see them as individuals just because we bring them up together BRO DO U KNOW WHAT A SHIP MEANS??? plus, foahs are CONSTANTLY praising the two of them separately for their accomplishments so calm down and stop listening to the voices."

You know what, one of the reasons I hoped for byler was to rub it in some peoples' faces. I can't deny that lol. And I will gladly bring up byler every chance I get. But a ship involving two fictional characters has a different weight to a ship involving two real-life individuals. There are things you do with fictional characters that people wouldn't bat an eye at but doing that to real people though...

It's not simply bringing them up together like this person worded it. The issue lies in the connecting-the-dots and everything-going-according-to-plans kind of sentiments: theorizing about how Finn was actually on that Japan trip with Noah because of reasons that I couldn't even wrap my head around, let alone trying to write it down for you; seeing Noah active again on social media/ comment on Gaten's post and saying things like: oh next time we'll see him like and comment on Finn's posts saying he cannot wait for us to hear the album; believing Noah change his major due to Finn's influence (which I think may have some validity but some people make it into something absolute because well, it's more buzzy that way). And if something went haywire, like that April's fool joke, then it's a cover up or he's messing with us specifically *wink*

Praising the two of them separately for their accomplishments doesn't erase the fact that they cannot go through their daily life without there being a connection to be made. 

It may be argued that they are just having fun and joking around. And from the outside, it looks a bit much but it isn't meant to be taken seriously. Well, that’s what I thought for a while until I saw this second issue.

Two. Validation. I noticed that whenever a blog expresses doubts or disinterests in the ship, then their inbox is gonna explode, to put it lightly. I saw it happen with a blog on here that was really into foah during 2025 but they are pretty neutral on the concept these days. In their words, they have always been fans of both boys, rather than fans of their relationship, even a potential one. And another time with another big account on twitter. She deactivated already so I could only go off my memories right now but she was not against it, just not fully believing it like before, especially with how things went down post finale. I remember how she had to answer A LOT OF strawpages and went private for a few days. And this tickles me 'cause when someone ties their identity and self-esteem to a belief or a concept, an attack against it can feel like an attack against them and the need to lash out can feel even stronger when the threat comes from someone they may look up for validation of such belief (because they've been here longer, have higher follower count or engagement levels). On the other side of the spectrum, I saw quite a lot of people cheer and laugh when news outlets or online media post about foah even though RPF breaching the containment of fanspace is worrisome. But I guess the ship being reported on and exposed to a wider audience gives it more validity in the eyes of the shippers or gives the shippers themselves an ego-boost *shrug emoji*

And to look back at the tweet above, there is a clear condescending and patronizing tone towards the out-group, or "sheeps" or any other ways they like to put down their opponents ("calm down and stop listening to the voice"). This brings me to the last issue and what pushed me to write this entire thing.

Three. There is a term going around on foahtwt right now and it's "Noah solos" - Noah fans who aren't into foah, speak out against it, don't like Finn, etc. you name it. And they said it's to distinguish between foahs and people who are only fans of Noah “because a lot of foahs are Noah fans too”. But if so, wouldn't Finn fans be called Finn solos? I cannot help but seeing how Noah fans are treated very differently even if a lot of Finn fans don't fuck with foah either (someone even said they wanted Finn to put a restraining order against Noah and somehow it was all crickets). Do I sometimes have issues with some Noah fans? Yes, I won't deny that. The thing with that m11/ Noah fan for example. I saw some people defend him, saying that he was just posting what happened during his interaction with Noah and you guys are questioning him because he didn't feed into your delusion (paraphrasing of course). The whole can of worms about Finn (which I won't go into here but lemme just say it, that dick joke and how they portrayed Will in that sketch will forever leave a sour taste in my mouth. So even if Noah made a joke of the length of the scene, it won’t erase that) and his sexuality.

And I understand why people take offense with the sentiment "I've been here since [...]" as it equates one's length of time in the fandom with the weight of their opinions, making them an authoritative figure of sorts. But not gonna lie, I do use it and I do believe this time span has some weight to it. The past years have been a lot and when you experienced harassment for the simple fact of loving someone, it shifted something in you inevitably. I can't speak for others but personally, I'm more hardened and wary than I was in 2022. Like a primary school teacher looking at the chaos in the classroom at the last period and genuinely having none of it, in contrast to how they were earlier in the day. And this wariness can be a lot for people who haven't been through it. So when I say I've been here a long time, it's not for superiority points, it's more of a "you may excuse your behaviors however you want, but I have the benefits (or curses) of retrospection and in retrospect, I've seen people like you, with the same talking points like you, and I've seen how it went down so safe to say, I'm staying away from you lot".

As I mentioned above, the need to lash out can feel even stronger when the threat comes from someone they may look up for validation of such belief and I think that may be true to a certain extent in the case of Hawkins Batman. 'Cause the thing I saw being said against him doesn't stop at criticizing or taking offense at his remarks, it spans from ad hominem ("he wants to f*ck Noah"), violent sentiments ("i want to beat him up, he makes me feel violent, etc.), attempts of humiliation and mocking (screenshotting his tweets expressing joy at Noah's April's fool story, as using it as a reaction image or something like that), to the most blatant feature of conspiracy mindset to me - attempts of discrediting the target's grasp of knowledge ("they said he double-majored but he didn't so they didn't know shit anyway").

When I was in grade 6, there was a girl who became the bully target of the entire class. And even if my memories of that time are extremely blurry, I still remember that one time when almost everyone surrounded her in her seat, pointing and laughing at her. And I was standing there on the outside, looking in helplessly. I can't remember the context or details of that day but I can recall the laugh and the energy those people all gave off. And this memory was triggered just the other day when I saw some people on foahtwt ridiculing HB. They used Portuguese so there may have been a certain language barrier and mistranslation to what they said but all those GIFs of people laughing, hooting, and hollering... Fair to say that I'm disgusted. And if I recall correctly, that girl in my class didn't just take it, she reacted, like a puffer fish. They delighted in it and just kept poking. In a way, HB reminds me of her in that one respect. And I think that's one of the reasons why he becomes the butt of the joke on foahtwt, more than any other Noah fans. Not to mention the like count differences between their tweet making fun of him and his response to it, it's clear to me that "Noah solos" are more disadvantageous in number. At this point, it's not punching up as they may believe. It’s punching down.

As a Noah fan, it pains me to see this type of in-fighting. As someone who identifies as aroace, it baffles me to witness the levels of attachment someone may feel towards a relationship of two strangers and the certainty of their conviction. And as someone who has been here a while, it's insane how the storm just keeps raging on in this fandom, just one discourse after another.

Damn, this whole ask took me a while but well, the good thing is that I'm feeling a bit lighter now than when I began it. Thank you for reading this very long-winded thing. Hope you have a great week ahead!

First of all, I genuinely think your self-awareness throughout this entire message is very important and intellectually honest. The fact that you are capable of stepping back and critically examining the culture you are participating in — rather than blindly dissolving into it — already places you in a very different position from the kinds of people who completely lose themselves inside projection and fantasy.

Because what you are describing is actually something very old and very human, even if social media has amplified it into something far stranger and more accelerated.

Shipping, in itself, is not inherently unhealthy. Human beings have always been storytellers. We are creatures who search for patterns, emotional resonance, chemistry, symbolism, tension, and meaning between people. Historically, audiences have projected romantic narratives onto public figures for centuries — actors during Old Hollywood, musicians, political figures, writers, even royal families. The difference is that the internet has transformed what used to remain collective fantasy into something participatory, immediate, and algorithmically reinforced.

And that distinction matters enormously.

Because there is a very important psychological line between: “This dynamic fascinates me emotionally and artistically” and “I am now interpreting reality itself through the emotional logic of my ship.”

The first is imagination. The second risks becoming cognitive distortion.

What you are noticing with the “hard launch” obsession is, in my opinion, precisely where that shift begins to happen. At first, shipping can feel almost poetic — two people whose chemistry evokes warmth, tenderness, possibility, comfort, or emotional beauty. But once the imagined relationship becomes treated like an inevitable prophecy waiting for public confirmation, the emotional center quietly changes. It stops being about appreciating connection and starts becoming about validation.

And psychologically, validation is an extremely powerful drug.

A “hard launch” in these spaces almost starts functioning like the messianic event in conspiracy communities: the final revelation that will vindicate the believers and humiliate the doubters. As you very accurately pointed out, this mirrors the structure of conspiracy thinking almost perfectly. There is the hidden truth, the decoding of clues, the community of believers, the skeptics framed as blind or ignorant, and the awaited future event that will supposedly make everything “click.”

This does not necessarily mean these people are delusional in a clinical sense. Most are not. But fandom spaces can create what sociologists call “collective reinforcement loops,” where speculation constantly validates itself because everyone around you is operating inside the same interpretive framework. Over time, the emotional excitement of the theory becomes more important than reality itself.

And social media intensifies this because platforms reward emotional escalation. Nuance does not go viral. Certainty does. Ambiguity is psychologically uncomfortable; people prefer narratives that feel complete and meaningful. So naturally, some fans begin connecting unrelated events together until ordinary life itself becomes transformed into symbolic evidence.

A university major change becomes “proof.” An Instagram like becomes “proof.” A trip becomes “proof.” Silence becomes “proof.” Even contradictions become “proof,” because they are reframed as “cover-ups” or “private jokes.”

At that point, the ship ceases to simply exist alongside reality and instead begins consuming reality.

And this is why I completely understand your discomfort.

Because despite what some people claim, the issue is not merely “bringing them up together.” Humans naturally associate people who share strong chemistry or public closeness. The issue is when real individuals lose the right to exist outside the interpretive machinery of the ship itself. When every independent action becomes absorbed into a romantic narrative, personhood quietly starts dissolving into symbolism.

Ironically, this often happens because people feel emotionally attached to them, not because they hate them. But affection without boundaries can still become invasive. Historically, parasocial attachment operates through emotional intimacy without reciprocal relational reality. The audience feels emotionally close to public figures because they have access to fragments of vulnerability, personality, interviews, jokes, photographs, and repeated exposure over many years. The brain partially processes familiarity as intimacy, even when no real mutual relationship exists.

And when fandom communities collectively reinforce that intimacy, the line between “I enjoy imagining this” and “I feel entitled to interpret their private lives” can slowly erode.

That being said, I also think it is important not to flatten every Foah fan into one monolithic category. From what I have personally observed as well, there absolutely seems to be a significant difference between people harmlessly enjoying chemistry, joking together, writing fiction, making edits, or engaging artistically with a dynamic they find emotionally compelling… and the smaller subsection that begins treating speculation like investigative truth.

Because there is genuinely nothing wrong with saying: “These two people have beautiful chemistry and their interactions make me happy.”

That is an emotional reaction. Art itself is built upon emotional reactions.

The problem only begins when emotional interpretation hardens into perceived certainty and starts overriding respect for privacy, individuality, or ambiguity.

And honestly, your comparison with fictional ships is very important. Fictional characters exist to be interpreted, analyzed, projected onto, transformed, and narratively explored. Real people do not. Real people have boundaries, contradictions, private suffering, unseen relationships, and identities that do not belong to public consumption.

This is why I personally make a strong distinction between: enjoying a dynamic, finding chemistry beautiful, engaging creatively through fanfiction or edits, and constructing elaborate theories about real people’s private emotional lives as though one has access to hidden truth.

One is storytelling. The other risks becoming surveillance disguised as affection.

And I think the reason your discomfort has grown is because, deep down, you still fundamentally recognize Noah and Finn as human beings before you recognize them as symbols within a fandom narrative. That humanity is what creates friction against the more conspiratorial aspects of shipping culture. And honestly, I think holding onto that friction is healthy. It prevents emotional investment from fully mutating into entitlement.

I think what you are describing touches on something very human, and also very old: the moment a shared fantasy slowly stops being “play” and begins turning into an ideology. And the transition between those two states is often so gradual that people inside it barely notice it happening.

At the beginning, shipping — especially in fandom spaces — is usually a form of collective imagination. It is storytelling around a fire. Human beings have always done this. Ancient audiences speculated about the love lives of poets, royal courts obsessed over rumored romances, Hollywood’s Golden Age practically industrialized public fascination with celebrity pairings. In modern fandom culture, social media simply accelerated and amplified an impulse that has existed for centuries: people emotionally invest in chemistry because chemistry itself is emotionally moving to witness.

And truthfully, I understand why Foah appealed to so many people during that period. There was warmth there. Tenderness. Ease. The kind of visible affection and emotional synchronicity that naturally draws the human eye because we are social creatures trained to read intimacy almost instinctively. People are moved by perceived closeness the same way they are moved by music: sometimes not because they fully understand it, but because something inside them resonates with it.

But resonance can become projection when people stop allowing ambiguity to exist.

That is the crucial line.

The moment a ship ceases to be “this dynamic makes me happy” and becomes “this narrative must be true” is the moment fandom begins drifting from creativity into confirmation bias. And psychologically, confirmation bias is extraordinarily powerful because once people emotionally attach themselves to an interpretation, the brain starts reorganizing reality around preserving that interpretation. Every coincidence becomes evidence. Every silence becomes hidden meaning. Every contradiction becomes part of the conspiracy itself.

That is why the “hard launch” obsession you described unsettles you so deeply. Because at that point, the relationship is no longer being imagined for enjoyment — it is being awaited almost like a prophecy.

And prophecies have historically done strange things to human communities.

Religious movements, conspiracy circles, internet subcultures, stan communities — all of them can begin constructing emotional ecosystems around a future “reveal” that will supposedly validate years of belief and emotional investment. The anticipated event becomes less about the individuals involved and more about the psychological reward of being proven right. That is why some people become so emotionally aggressive whenever doubt enters the room. Doubt threatens not only the ship, but the emotional architecture they built around it.

You articulated this brilliantly yourself when you said it begins feeling less about the boys and more about the shippers.

Because once identity fuses with interpretation, disagreement starts feeling personal.

And I think your instinct is correct that this is fundamentally different from fictional shipping. With fictional characters, there is an understood social contract: these figures exist for narrative manipulation. We analyze them, transform them, project onto them, rewrite them, dissect them. Fiction is designed to survive interpretation.

Real people are not.

Real people wake up tired. They have private griefs, unfinished thoughts, changing identities, contradictions, boundaries, fears, and relationships we know nothing about. They are not clues in an interactive mystery game designed for public decoding.

That does not mean people cannot harmlessly enjoy Foah, speculate lightly, create art, write fiction, laugh together, or appreciate chemistry. I genuinely do not think affection itself is the problem. Human beings bond through shared imagination all the time. But the danger appears when imagination stops recognizing itself as imagination.

Because then people stop seeing two human beings and start seeing a narrative machine that must continuously produce emotional gratification for an audience.

And ironically, that pressure often suffocates the very authenticity people claimed to love in the first place.

Your observation about “validation” is also incredibly perceptive. Fandom spaces, especially online, function psychologically a bit like miniature social tribes. Validation from respected accounts becomes social currency. Agreement feels reassuring because it stabilizes the group’s collective narrative. But when influential people step away from a belief, soften their stance, or simply express uncertainty, it destabilizes that emotional consensus. Suddenly, people are forced to confront ambiguity again — and ambiguity is uncomfortable because it removes certainty, and certainty is emotionally soothing.

That is why some reactions become defensive, patronizing, or even hostile.

Not because the ship itself necessarily matters that much, but because people are unconsciously defending the emotional world they built around it.

And honestly, I think the healthiest fandom spaces are the ones capable of holding contradiction without panic.

Spaces where someone can say: “I enjoy this dynamic.” “I think they have beautiful chemistry.” “I would not be surprised if something existed between them.” “But I also accept that I do not know them.”

That balance is important. Because maturity is not the absence of imagination; it is the ability to distinguish imagination from ownership.

At its best, fandom is like looking at constellations. Humans gaze at scattered stars and instinctively create stories between them. There is beauty in that impulse. Art itself was born from it. But wisdom is remembering that the lines exist because we drew them there — not because the stars themselves asked to be connected.

What you are describing here is, in many ways, the moment where a fandom slowly begins reproducing the same social mechanisms it once claimed to resist.

Because beneath the surface, this is no longer merely about a ship. It is about hierarchy, legitimacy, in-groups, out-groups, and the social policing of identity within a community. And human beings have always done this. Every collective space — fandoms, political movements, religious circles, even academic communities — eventually develops its own internal language to distinguish the “acceptable” members from the “undesirable” ones. Labels become borders. And borders create power.

That is why the term “Noah solos” feels uncomfortable to you.

Not because categorization itself is inherently evil, but because of the asymmetry embedded within it. As you pointed out, there is a very visible discrepancy in how Noah-centered fans are scrutinized compared to Finn-centered fans, even when similar behaviors exist on both sides. And sociologically, this often happens when one figure becomes unconsciously positioned as the emotional axis of a fandom conflict. People stop reacting proportionally to behaviors and instead react symbolically to what that person represents within the larger narrative war.

In this case, Noah has become, for many people, a symbolic battlefield.

Not merely an actor. Not merely a celebrity. But a projection screen onto which people pour anxieties about queerness, representation, validation, betrayal, disappointment, hope, and identity itself. And once someone becomes symbolic in that way, neutrality becomes almost impossible. Every interaction starts being interpreted politically rather than humanly.

That is why the same behavior can be condemned in one group and ignored in another. Because communities are rarely as objective as they imagine themselves to be. Human beings are storytellers before they are judges, and we subconsciously bend moral consistency around the narratives we emotionally prefer.

Your observation about fandom veterans is also deeply perceptive.

Time spent in a fandom does not automatically make someone morally superior or intellectually infallible. However, retrospection absolutely changes perception. Experience leaves sediment inside the mind. After years of witnessing the same cycles — harassment, dogpiling, revisionism, moral panics, euphoric idealization followed by public humiliation — people naturally become more cautious. Sometimes even cynical.

And honestly, I do not think that cynicism always comes from arrogance. Very often, it comes from exhaustion.

What you described with the “primary school teacher at the end of the day” metaphor is psychologically very accurate. Repeated exposure to chaos alters emotional tolerance. Someone who has watched the same patterns unfold for years develops pattern recognition almost instinctively. They stop reacting only to isolated incidents and begin reacting to trajectories. Not “what is happening now,” but “I have seen where this kind of behavior usually leads.”

That is not superiority. It is memory.

And memory can become both wisdom and burden.

As for the reactions toward Hawkins Batman, I think you are identifying something extremely important about online group psychology: once communities begin emotionally investing in preserving a collective belief, disagreement can quickly become moralized. The dissenter is no longer simply “someone who disagrees.” They become a destabilizing presence threatening the emotional cohesion of the group itself.

That is why reactions escalate from criticism into ridicule, humiliation, personal attacks, fantasies of violence, or attempts to undermine credibility entirely. Historically, conspiracy-minded environments often function this way. The moment someone disrupts the narrative, people stop debating the argument and begin attacking the legitimacy of the speaker. Suddenly it becomes: “They are ignorant.” “They are bitter.” “They are attention-seeking.” “They secretly want something.” “They were never trustworthy anyway.”

Because if the person can be discredited, then the belief itself remains protected.

And what strikes me most in everything you wrote is that you are not approaching this from a place of cruelty or superiority. You are trying to preserve nuance inside an environment that increasingly rewards absolutism. That is difficult. Especially online, where platforms algorithmically favor emotional intensity over ambiguity. Certainty spreads faster than reflection. Tribalism spreads faster than restraint.

But I think your discomfort is healthy.

Because the moment people can no longer tolerate uncertainty, contradiction, or the possibility of being wrong, fandom stops being a space of imagination and starts becoming a belief system.

And belief systems built around real human beings inevitably become dangerous when empathy is replaced by entitlement.

At the end of the day, I think there is nothing inherently wrong with finding joy in chemistry, connection, affection, or possibility. Human beings are naturally drawn toward stories of intimacy because intimacy itself reassures us that closeness is possible in an often isolating world.

But wisdom lies in remembering that admiration does not grant access. Emotional investment does not create ownership. And interpretation, no matter how emotionally convincing it feels, is still interpretation.

The healthiest fandom spaces are not the ones where everyone agrees. They are the ones where people can disagree without needing to destroy one another in order to protect a narrative.

What you described about that girl in your class is, sadly, one of the purest illustrations of crowd psychology.

Individually, many of those children may not even have considered themselves cruel. But once people become part of a collective emotional current, something frightening happens: responsibility dissolves into the group. Laughter becomes contagious. Mockery becomes social currency. And the person at the center of it all slowly stops being perceived as a full human being and instead becomes a symbol onto which the crowd projects its boredom, frustration, insecurity, or desire for belonging.

Historically, this mechanism has always existed. It existed in schoolyards long before social media, and it existed in societies long before schools. René Girard wrote extensively about the “scapegoat mechanism” — the human tendency to unconsciously unify groups through the symbolic targeting of an individual. Online fandom culture did not invent this phenomenon. It merely accelerated it and gave it algorithms.

And the detail that stayed with you was not even the words themselves. It was the energy.

That says a lot.

Because human beings instinctively recognize collective humiliation when they witness it. There is a particular atmosphere that emerges when people stop engaging with someone and start performing cruelty together. The GIFs, the mocking reactions, the public ridicule, the performative laughter — all of it creates what sociologists would call a ritualized social spectacle. The goal subtly shifts from disagreement to entertainment.

And once humiliation becomes entertaining, empathy begins to erode.

I think your comparison between HB and that girl is psychologically very perceptive. Not because the situations are identical, but because the dynamic is similar: people are often harsher toward those who visibly react. A person who becomes emotional, defensive, impulsive, or visibly wounded unintentionally feeds the spectacle because crowds are drawn toward visible emotional vulnerability the way sharks are drawn toward movement in water.

That does not justify the behavior, of course. It simply explains why certain individuals become recurring targets while others do not.

And you are also right to point out the imbalance of power here. Online spaces often convince themselves they are “punching up” simply because they disagree with someone loudly or find their opinions irritating. But numbers matter. Social influence matters. Collective ridicule matters. Once dozens or hundreds of people begin publicly mocking one individual, the dynamic changes entirely. At that point, it ceases to resemble critique and starts resembling social domination.

The internet has normalized this far too much.

I have been part of many different fandom spaces throughout the years — K-pop communities, Thai BL fandoms, the Stranger Things fandom, and others — and I have been cyberbullied more than once in each of them. The contexts changed, the names changed, the platforms changed, but the root of the hostility was almost always the same: I refused to surrender my critical thinking to collective toxicity.

Whenever I witnessed cruelty, misinformation, harassment, or dehumanization being normalized by the majority, I refused to participate in it simply for the sake of social comfort. I have always valued nuance, context, and intellectual honesty more than blind allegiance to a crowd, even when that crowd was emotionally convinced of its own righteousness.

And historically, that has never been something groups tolerate easily.

Social psychology has shown for decades that communities — especially highly emotional online communities — often reward conformity far more than truth. Humans are deeply tribal creatures. Belonging feels safe. Dissent feels threatening. So when someone refuses to echo the dominant narrative, even calmly, they can quickly become treated not as a person with a perspective, but as an obstacle disrupting group cohesion.

I experienced this even within the Byler fandom itself.

At one point, I was targeted by other Bylers because I refused to participate in the hate campaign against Noah while still remaining vocal about Palestine and humanitarian issues. And I think that created cognitive dissonance for some people because my existence contradicted the simplistic moral binary they wanted to maintain. I was showing them that it was entirely possible to support Palestine passionately while still refusing to dehumanize Noah or participate in public humiliation rituals against him.

And that nuance threatened the narrative.

Because performative activism on social media often functions less like genuine political reflection and more like a system of moral theater. The goal quietly shifts from helping real human beings to proving one’s ideological purity before an audience. In that kind of environment, complexity becomes inconvenient. Nuance becomes suspicious. Humanization becomes interpreted as betrayal.

So rather than engage honestly with what I was actually saying, some people attempted to silence me through distortion, dogpiling, and public shaming. It was essentially a digital witch hunt — not because my words lacked clarity, but precisely because they did not. My posts were nuanced, contextualized, and carefully articulated, which made it difficult to genuinely refute them. So instead, some people tried to reconstruct my words into something easier to attack.

But what ultimately weakened their attempts was the fact that the screenshots spoke for themselves. People could directly see the gap between what I had actually written and the malicious interpretation being projected onto it. And in doing so, those individuals unintentionally exposed their own dishonesty more than they exposed me.

There is something almost paradoxical about online mob dynamics: the more transparent and calm you remain, the more aggressive irrational hostility often reveals itself publicly.

And over time, I also learned something psychologically important about cyberbullying dynamics: reaction is fuel.

Many online harassment campaigns operate through emotional reinforcement loops. The goal is not always ideological victory; often, it is emotional stimulation. People want visible reactions because reactions create momentum, entertainment, screenshots, social engagement, and group bonding. It becomes a performance sustained through reciprocity.

So I gradually understood that the less emotionally reactive I became, the less control people had over me.

Not because I am emotionless — far from it — but because I stopped confusing public noise with moral truth. I realized that mobs often function like fires deprived of oxygen: eventually, if they cannot provoke the emotional spectacle they seek, many lose interest and move on toward another target.

That realization changed the way I navigate online spaces entirely.

And honestly, I think surviving multiple fandom environments teaches you something profoundly revealing about human nature itself. Fandoms may appear trivial on the surface — discussions about music groups, fictional characters, actors, ships — but underneath, they become miniature laboratories of collective behavior. You witness tribalism, projection, moral panic, parasocial attachment, scapegoating, performative outrage, identity politics, social hierarchies, and public punishment mechanisms unfolding in real time.

The internet did not invent these behaviors. History is full of them. Social media simply accelerated them and transformed them into permanent spectacles.

But despite everything, I still believe there is value in refusing to surrender one’s humanity to the crowd.

Because once people begin treating nuance as weakness and cruelty as moral conviction, communities stop functioning as spaces of connection and start functioning as emotional echo chambers.

And I would rather stand alone with my integrity than belong comfortably inside collective dishonesty.

What also strikes me in your message is your aroace perspective on all of this, because I think it gives you a certain observational distance from the emotional intensity surrounding romantic projection culture. Many people are not merely attached to the idea of a relationship itself; they are attached to what the relationship emotionally represents for them. Hope. Validation. Identification. Fantasy. Healing. Visibility. Desire. Sometimes even proof that their interpretation of the world was “correct.”

And when emotional meaning becomes fused with belief, contradiction can start feeling existential rather than casual.

That is why shipping spaces sometimes resemble ideological spaces more than playful ones. The ship stops functioning as fiction, speculation, or harmless imagination and starts functioning as identity infrastructure. Once that happens, disagreement feels personal, neutrality feels threatening, and skepticism feels almost offensive.

But I think your discomfort with that transformation is important. It shows that some part of you still sees fandom as something that should remain fundamentally human and playful rather than doctrinal.

And honestly, I think your exhaustion makes complete sense.

You have been watching the same storm for years now. Different names, different accounts, different discourses — but often the exact same emotional cycles underneath: idealization, tribalism, certainty, humiliation, defensiveness, retaliation, fragmentation. Social media creates the illusion of constant motion, yet fandom conflicts often repeat themselves with almost mythological predictability.

It is like watching waves crash against the same shore over and over again.

And maybe that is why your memory resurfaced now. Because your mind recognized something emotionally familiar beneath the surface aesthetics of fandom discourse: the feeling of standing at the edge of a crowd while someone becomes reduced to an object of collective amusement.

The fact that this disturbed you rather than entertained you says something good about your character.

Because in environments driven by group mentality, retaining the ability to pause and ask “wait, are we still treating each other like human beings?” is rarer than people realize.

I also think there is something quietly beautiful in the fact that, despite your frustration, you are still trying to understand rather than merely condemn. You are observing patterns, questioning dynamics, examining your own reactions, and searching for nuance instead of surrendering entirely to bitterness. That kind of introspection is difficult to maintain online because the internet rewards emotional immediacy far more than thoughtful restraint.

And for what it is worth, I am glad writing all of this helped lighten the weight in your mind a little.

Sometimes thoughts become heavier precisely because they remain trapped internally, circling endlessly like birds inside a closed room. Putting them into words opens a window. Even if nothing is fully resolved, the mind can finally breathe again.

"It's okay when we do it."

After years of trying to change people’s minds, Bonhoeffer came home one evening and his own father had to tell him that two men were waiting in his room to take him away.

In prison, Bonhoeffer began to reflect on how his country of poets and thinkers had turned into a collective of cowards, crooks and criminals. Eventually he concluded that the root of the problem was not malice, but stupidity.

In his famous letters from prison, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice, because while “one may protest against evil; it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force, against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears.”

Facts that contradict a stupid person’s prejudgment simply need not be believed and when they are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person is self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature.

This much is certain, stupidity is in essence not an intellectual defect but a moral one. There are human beings who are remarkably agile intellectually yet stupid, and others who are intellectually dull yet anything but stupid.

The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or rather, they allow this to happen to them.

People who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals in groups. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem.

It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. Almost as if this is a sociological-psychological law where the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.

The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, such as intellect, suddenly fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up an autonomous position.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us from the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and is abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil – incapable of seeing that it is evil.

Only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then, we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.

Bonhoeffer died due to his involvement in a plot against Adolf Hitler, at dawn on 9 April 1945 at Flossenbürg concentration camp - just two weeks before soldiers from the United States liberated the camp.