I'm here for Pokemon and memes

And he kept doing it. Scene after scene.

He spent the film expecting someone to make a joke about how unserious things were or to break the fourth wall or do some other self referential type thing.

Now, maybe I'm just at that point in my cycle or maybe I'm too delicate in general, but I literally teared up hearing that. Straight up cried a bit. It is so fucking sad that sincerity and genuineness is being bred out of people.

People say all the time 'this generation can't take anything seriously!' and really, is it any wonder? Younger people have been trained out of it. You are no longer encouraged to be genuine or show emotion or be honest. You are actively punished for it. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to suffer for it.

That is so fucked up. I'm sorry to go on a bit of a random ramble rant but it's so fucking gut wrenching to see younger people lose that element of themselves. You can't express your passion without being told you're 'crashing out' or 'cringe'. You have to live in this neutral state of fear of perception, and god forbid anybody step outside of it!

You're told you should only consume and succumb and be ironic and emotionless and cool.

Listen, if you're following me and you're like.... 25 or under, let's say. Please. I beg of you. Do not fall for this rhetoric. Please, for the love of all things, feel. Feel and create and be honest with yourself. Indulge in things that make you happy. Be sincere. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Do not let this hyper-capitalistic, hyper-consumerist, self-centred, individualist culture take that from you.

So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.

So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.

This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.

Me in 2016: I’m still salty about that

There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.

The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.

(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)