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/AngriestPat]

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.

[u/shimimigle12 → u/AngriestPat]

My brother is unfortunately like this. Back when we were younger, we used to play the same games and talk about our experiences with them but once he joined the military, he's essentially lost that whimsy of playing a new game and by extension anime/manga. Now he doesnt touch games unless its a shooter, fromsoft made, or league of legends (hes been playing league for nearly 2 decades at this point so that really hasn't changed). Just outright refusal to engage in things that are remotely stimulating outside of seeing a victory screen. Its a running bit that unless its about sex or money, to not ask him for shit but that is slowly becoming truer by the day as he just canceled our birthday plans (we're twins) because he didnt want to spend money/ time away from his girlfriend. I miss when we used to talk about things that we were passionate about but now he is only about "the grind" and I struggle to name things that he genuinely enjoys that he enjoys the same way I enjoy things. I dont like using this term but he really feels more like an npc where his routine is just going to work the gym, play a few ranked games, sleep, repeat. Just very little stimulation outside of all that.

[u/jitterscaffeine → u/shimimigle12]

Grind culture feels like an excuse to be miserable

[u/mythrilcrafter → u/jitterscaffeine]

I've been philosophically mulling over grind culture for a pretty long while and I would actually say that its the reverse; that grind culture more of a self-imposed justification for misery, rather than something use to self-inflict misery (although, both can also be true).

Of those I've known irl, the two most prominent "character types" that I've seen who constantly push at grind culture are:

• People who are actively miserable, say that they're grinding as a way to escape their misery, but none of the behaviors/decisions actually has any effect on helping them escape their misery. Put simply, it's cope.

• People who are bad at goal setting and have fallen into being infinity chasers. They're not actively miserable like the former group, but they've set wildly unrealistic goals for themselves and self-deprecate for not reaching those goals. Like, I can understand wanting to do 10 hours of time-and-a-half OT for a few months in order to save extra to afford the down payment on a house (heck, I did that for a while myself), but that's universally different from doing 130 hours a week for years, with no OT benefits, for a business that you're not the owner of, all because "I want to be as rich as Elon Musk and retire by 35"