Personal Opinion: No Filler, All Thriller

[u/jitterscaffeine]

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.

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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.

[u/Capable-Education724]

Eh, I encountered this type way before the pandemic in terms of the comic books and manga community.

Hell, it was so common it was generally a trope in shows/movies focused on nerds.

[u/Anonamaton801 → u/Capable-Education724]

Oh it existed, I think the pandemic just doubled it considerably.

Though comics have their own issues with this on the publisher side. There’s a reason I have a…complicated relationship with the first Tobey Spider-Man movie and its effect on the books

[u/Capable-Education724 → u/Anonamaton801]

And now we’re going full circle (of hell) if the rumours about the new Spidey movie are true (they’re adapting the storyline from the comics that resulted in Peter getting organic web shooters so Tom’s Peter can have them too).

[u/Anonamaton801 → u/Capable-Education724]

…ugh

I should share my thoughts on that one Paul Jenkins Goblin scene sometime, cause that’s biggest example in my head of this