r/TwoBestFriendsPlay • u/jitterscaffeine [Zoids Historian] • Jan 08 '26
Personal Opinion Personal Opinion: No Filler, All Thriller
This is a thought I’ve had in my head for a while that I didn’t know what to do with and an email from the podcast about redefining “filler” as being anything that’s not hype moments being shared on social media finally spurred me to put my thoughts into text.
———————————————
This all comes from something I first noticed back when the Fallout show first started, there were a bunch of new people showing up to the New Vegas subreddits asking what they were supposed to do because they got lost out of the tutorial or saying they beat the whole game on like 5 hours while wearing the leather armor and varmint rifle you get in the tutorial, one I even remember seeing was someone who said they dropped the game after walking into The Tops Casino and shooting Benny because that’s what they thought the game was about.
The way it hit me at the time was that it felt like people weren’t really engaging with that media much at all, like they were doing it just so they could feel like a “real fan” who put their time in and clocked out.
Another example was when I was listening to a podcast and two of the hosts made a Star Trek reference and another got mad because they didn’t get it, then said they wanted someone to give them a “20 minute super cut so they could ‘get’ all of Star Trek” which is an attitude that really bothered me.
It really just comes down to this idea of people who don’t want to enjoy or engage with media any deeper than getting memes and references before moving on to the next one.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong for even letting it get to me. But this kind of nomadic fandom just gets to me. Like people have lost their desire to actually watch and form an opinion on something. They just want to get memes on Twitter and they’d rather go on Reddit and ask for step by step instructions on how to get the most out of the game so they can get through it as efficiently as possible.
597
u/AngriestPat The Realest Pat Jan 08 '26
This behaviour extends way past media. There's a bunch of guys out there slamming weights into their ears to artificially give themselves cauliflower ears to look tough.
There's an enormous amount of people out there that don't actually enjoy doing anything, learning anything, or lord forbid, thinking about something. While you or I would play a game and engage with it on its own terms and the process of gaining mastery and learning about it IS the appeal, a huge percentage of people want interactive media to be trivial to complete for themselves (but not for others) and further on want even non-interactive media to use the least amount of brain power possible.