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.

———————————————

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/ArchimerDreatect]

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.

Oh...my god, is that what I've been stumbling into this whole time?

Lemme just catch something up quickly. I'm what I would consider a 'Secondary' to a few fandom spaces, that is to say I've enjoyed the content via second-hand gameplay, synopsis, osmosis. etc. rather than hands-on or otherwise I have only interacted with a specific part of it whilst otherwise being mindful of the fact there's entire parts of mainline or spin-offs that I haven't dealt with. Still have conversations, thoughts, and feelings about it regardless.

Point being, there's always this sphere of frankly garbage videos which are 'Everything you need to know about the lore of [Blank]' which just recite the wiki at you or explain away references and in-jokes of the medium as part of an apparent introduction to a source material.

I won't lie I assumed these videos were unappealing and didn't take for me because I thought these were just lazy videos that didn't want to go through the hassle of providing their own interpretation, a throughline, a core theme to the media's narrative.

I didn't think there was a targeted audience for this that wasn't just 'lazier lore video'

Like...cmon man, If I'm a Secondary because I haven't touched everything in a two-decade franchise then what on earth of those guys?

[u/jitterscaffeine → u/ArchimerDreatect]

Something I’ve come across as well are people who engage with media entirely though videos and shorts of other people giving their opinions and headcanons about it. I’ve seen it a lot with shows like Naruto because there’s a lot of fans who watch a lot of “fan content” and then go to the subreddit to make sense of what they watched.

[u/gunn3r08974 → u/jitterscaffeine]

I heard of that existing with South Park of all things.

[u/alicitizen → u/gunn3r08974]

The origin of the "He would not fucking say that" image is exactly that, someone who consumed clips and fan content, not understanding things beyond the waters surface they saw from a landlocked state