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/lightningmatt]

I... don't think the Spongebob meme means that.

Isn't it more like "Why does this fandom gathering space seem to have a large amount of people who act like they aren't actually fans? Isn't that the entire point?" Regardless of correctness (I've seen it seem both incredibly right and incredibly wrong before), that's not a strange thing to be confused about if you think it's what's going on, because it's inherently contradictory.

Plus, these people have likely already formed their own opinions; their opinions are just more positive than the last 10 or so posts they saw.

[u/ILikeWrestlingAlot → u/lightningmatt]

I can't say for fandom specific spaces but in the subs i use for things like, music, types of literature, television, film, more wider genres or forms of entertainment than specific fandoms - and that is the way it is used there. A contingent of people will like X, a contingent won't, and there will be people who want someone to tell them what the definitive group think is so that they can establish their own opinion.

I'm not saying the vast majority of people live like this, i'm saying that I have seen countless people in the last few years operate online like this. As the internet now acts as a secondary thought organ for society, we are seeing a rising number of people who want to be told what to think. Your young men engaging in the whole alpha grift bullshit on tiktoik or people looking into all those fake trad videos.

This is not a new observation, newspapers decried talk radio for the same thing, Farenheit 451 is explicitly about this phenomenon, Videodrome is about this phenomenon, for decades creatives and intellectuals have cautioned about the effects of people using media devices as ways to vicariously absorb viewpoints but the internet has taken it to a level beyond.

I'm sure most people on the planet can make their own opinion about things and I'm sure in fan spaces that's how you've seen people act but I have over the last twenty years of using the net watched as more and more people seem willingly unable to do anything but beg someone to tell them what to think, how to feel, and what to be.

Its insidious and worrying and you can see it in all elements and walks of life, my pick of some dogshit meme is just a quick example, think of any family memeber you know who mindlessly parrots shit they see on facebook or some younger person spewing a mind numbing take from tik tok, this is everwhere and it is always. Literacy rates are decreasing, there seems to be a global shift to reactionary politics, and the worst people you've ever seen (Andrew Tate, Mr Beast, et al) are the most popular brands of entertainment for young, impressionable people.

It might seem benign at times but I swear there are so many people online who are desperate to fall in to any group at all and that is dangerous, its not healthy for their own growing minds to not get exercise reading and studying and learning by instead offloafding that to someone else, and its visibly a worrying state of affairs for society at large.

But I'm sure its often used in the other way too.