Sunday Sampler: Standom Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Hey! Hey! Who wants to see a steaming pile of bullshit?

Writing this concentrated blast of stupidity & willful ignorance in the comments to a breakdown of a horror game about social media & toxic fandom leading expressly to the psychological torture & eventual deaths of several Kpop idols is just the icing on the cake, really.

I hate fandom. I truly, truly do. And sorry, Wednes3day, there is ZERO difference between fandom and the odious origins/behavior of standom at this point.

Are there things I’m a fan of and vocally enjoy? Yes. I’d argue everyone has at least one athlete or music act or TV show or author that they’ll always take joy in engaging with and want to share why they find value in that thing. But modern fandom isn’t about “community” or “connection” or whatever flimsy excuse they’re using. Modern fandom is a damn CULT.

I really wish actual trained psychologists or anthropologists would look at the modern fandom scene. I say this as someone who has grown up watching a branch of my family being ultra-fundamentalist, they are frequently indistinguishable from them except in the object of their devotion. Notably:

• Criticism of the subject is treated as criticism of both the individual & of the world at large.

• Creators/performers are seen as flawless leader figures to be obeyed & defended absolutely, not unlike a spiritual leader. Also not unlike some spiritual leaders, there are plenty of creators/performers who will exploit this, to better forge that connection, for their own benefits.

• There’s a push towards constant evangelism of the subject/faith and converting new followers, and any attempts to rebuff these efforts are met with hostility.

• If someone doesn’t belong to your particular fandom/church, it absolutely MUST be a sign of moral failure on their part.

Basically, it’s taking the absolutist mindset of a religious zealot towards their faith as the sole defining thing in their life, as opposed to just part of a wider personality tapestry, and applying it to things that are FAR less substantial. And I’d love for people more knowledgeable than me to get into the weeds of this. Is correlation equaling causation, and is there truly an Exvangelical-to-standom pipeline? How much does social media eroding the proverbial wall between creator & audience factor into this shift? Does the general slide into what I can only describe as “entitled rudeness” post-lockdown play a role as well? And the trend towards self-diagnosis of mental illness and/or neurodivergent conditions, is that a factor? There’s a lot I wanna ask and have someone with the actual smarts & professional distance from any kind of fandom experience answer.

Problem is, people still see “fandom” as a concept as a frivolous thing, which is what it SHOULD be. It should be no different than any other hobby, something you do that you enjoy, that you might opt to share with others, and something that isn’t as prioritized as, say, work or family or things that you actually have a stake in affecting in life. And in some spheres, that’s still the case; people who would rather spring for Disney season passes or season tickets for their favorite NFL team than pay their utilities or mortgages or keep their jobs (real examples, btw) still get viewed by people in everyday offline life as they should be, having a deeply broken sense of priorities. But for more online-based fandoms, that’s considered normal for some reason. Hell, that’s just the tip of the unhealthy behavior.

Maybe it’s cuz I grew up in the era of several high profile “fans gone too far” stories, from the guy who wanted to disfigure Bjork to the woman who killed Selena, that I tend to be extremely wary of what fandom has become. We get people routinely doxxing music reporters for giving their favorite’s latest album a mediocre review or harassing authors until they’re forced to out themselves. We get people in charge of the fandom subject weaponizing this mania to bolster themselves while portraying anyone who even mildly questions them as akin to terrorists or hate groups. We’ve seen examples of fans souring on the object of their obsession and turning on it violently, and the internet, as a collective, shrugged. They made excuses. They tried to portray it as solely stuff done by people that they already hated, be it for good reason or otherwise, only to turn around & do the exact same awful things with the flimsiest justifications.

So yeah, if anything, “fandom” should be the term that falls out of usage. It’s not strong enough anymore. The norm has become the stan, the guy driven to madness & murder because he’s too far gone and has nothing in his life except for the content he has slavishly consumed like a mindless hog. The term hasn’t been softened, no matter what Zoomers might try to claim. The “fringe” it described had simply molded & spread to become the norm, and they’re incapable of reflecting on that. It would mean questioning their world more than they’d be able to handle.

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Lightning-squared round! Cuz this is the best option compared to returning to social media aside from actual withdrawal symptoms..

• PCL updated again! Labor laws! Overexpansion beyond your business’s original area of expertise! Toxic mascot yuri! Puzzles I’m too dim to decode! Lovely art! And the worst "pollinator mix” of garden seeds I’ve seen since the one I bought this past spring! Also, while they archived the short stories hidden in the Halloween update, I’m not sure that they did the same for the trick-or-treaters around the site (or I just couldn’t find them), and I hope they did.

• Apparently there was a legit complaint about that British knitting reality competition show regarding them not paying the designers for their patterns being used in tie-in kits promoting the show. So that’s a real reason to be pissed with the show. And since they’ve stated that all rights & profits to the patterns will revert to the shows’ contestant designers once airing is done, it sounds like it’s been remedied.

• I don’t know what’s funnier, this story of a sticker store (using stolen art) trying to get publicity using the Msscribe "political opponent sockpuppet" tactic, or the people in the comments who fell for it even though it’s like 10 minutes into the video that it’s made clear the whole thing is massively fake. But that’s assuming that people have matured mentally beyond “16 year old who wants that sweet dopamine hit from confirmation bias”, and that’s been socially discouraged for at least 2 decades now.

• It sucks that the thing I have the biggest urge to write isn’t the next in-continuity part of the Phantom Violet story but rather a side story that would also mean breaking my “writing around copyright” rules, and that’s stuff that I don’t want to share publicly, even though I’m not sure why. Original work or no, it’s not like anyone reads my stuff…

• There are certain characters (and you can probably guess which ones by now) that, whenever I see someone marginalized “seeing themselves” in them, it gives me the same reaction of “Really? I thought I hated myself, but if THAT’S what makes you ‘feel seen’, you’re definitely worse off mentally” as whenever some ace person says they “feel seen” by an emotionless, inhuman, and/or amoral character. I wanna believe that they’re not possibly THAT dense & desperate, that they’ll see a character built entirely on insulting their existence & see it as a positive, but that’s giving the modern world too much credit.

• Gotta love when I see another reminder that a well-loved YouTuber who was directly an asshole to me (for the curious, see my Ace Week piece & find the link to the old essay I did) has absolute garbage taste in a very specific way, so I can continue ignoring him.

• Super Sentai being stopped feels like Toei & TV Asahi have just broken one of the remaining seals that’s holding off the apocalypse. It also makes me wonder if Precure is safe…

• What level of depression is it when you find yourself wanting to revisit some old concepts for fan senshi cuz you’re stumped on your original work?

• Horse-girl game update: I finally beat the URA Finale! And with the Uma named after my favorite liquor, no less!

• Y’know, it shouldn’t bother me that my stats show that absolutely no one followed me here from Bluesky once I gave up on it after the one-two punch of “wanton slides into the worst kind of gooner brain” and “extremely hypocritical & inhumane politics courtesy of Twitch grifters” with a side of "insulting you specifically once you’re barely out of earshot”, but MAN, is it making me extra disgusted with my social situation that such a place was my main socialization outlet for a couple of years. Once I’m not there to cheerlead for others, I’m forgotten. Even when I was actively sharing my stuff there, it was almost entirely ignored. And people wonder why I’m so jaded about everything…

• Another fun sockpuppet story has crossed my radar, this one about a Something Awful forum goon & early LetsPlay blogger who had so many alts & told so many tall tales (and they are TALL) that goons couldn't even be sure if he had actually died. As someone who can barely handle 2 email addresses, these kinds of stories are always bizarrely fascinating.

• The way that the internet manages to have 90% of its original celebrities turn out to be walking horrorshows of one stripe or another makes the sight of Christmas ornaments based on them darkly hilarious. And that includes ones who haven’t had any issues yet, cuz… c’mon, the odds aren’t really in their favor. Best they’ll get is “who the hell is this” five Christmases down the line.

• Honestly, I don’t feel like anything good is gonna come from the Netflix/WB deal, even with the current state of the latter. Netflix is so cagey about how well it’s actually doing beyond “this show/movie is popular” that they come off as… untrustworthy from a business perspective. And given what gets popular with their service, at least online, I fear they’ll monofocus WB’s animation library even more on Adult Swim, which by now you should know I find odious. Also, I wonder if they’ll start to yank rights back from FAST outlets and/or MeTV Toons just to cut out potential “competition” but then let everything they yank back gather dust instead of offering it to stream. I just can’t see any upsides to this deal. As Jeff Harris points out, Netflix is the best option out of three bad ones, especially compared to Skydance. But the best of three bad options is still a bad option.

• I’ll see your hatred of factory knots in yarn skeins and raise you “when thread gets caught in the glued part of the label, thus resulting in glue & paper being stuck to a section of yarn that can only be removed upon washing” for sheer frustration.

• “GenX was born to suffer. I think they like it.” - some random YT commenter. You’re not wrong, friend…

• There's a small account that I really want to support because of their great extremely niche creative work, but they’ve become one of those “AEW are blameless holy creatures and never do anything even slightly wrong” people, and damn does that make it hard. Sorry, I can’t support a company whose boss is a shining example of the standom-cult-leader problems above and whose staff AND fanbase behave in such a manner that I got to experience flashbacks to my shithole college for the first time. And constantly pushing them as the moral & always-original alternative is kinda souring me on their work.

• I originally had a video recommendation piece, but I decided that it’s just worth the potential trouble. All I'll say is that others have noticed that the horseshoe theory is correct in regards to one subject in particular, and it’s fucking disgusting.

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Gonna give a quick salute to Larry Talbot Mendez-Brooks. My mom knew almost nothing about wrestling, but she knew about “that cute funny-looking dog”. 

Here, we’re getting Larry’s hockey picks.

Rest in peace, you scrappy little house werewolf. Say hi to my dogs for me, especially Herbert.

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Instead of a cat pic this week, I'm using an ad from the Victorian era that I liked. It probably qualifies as a cat pic on a technicality.

I'd happily buy a print of this for my kitchen, if it was available.

I

See you all next time!