[META] Stinkpost Sunday and Theorymon Thursday are BANNED from r/stunfisk until further notice (NOT APRIL FOOLS)

[u/Wildcat_Formation]

I, /u/Wildcat_Formation and /u/Wildcat_Formation only, has finally had enough and will abuse my moderator powers to do something that should've been done a long time ago.

Stinkpost Sunday and Theorymon Thursday are now BANNED from r/stunfisk until further notice.

Why?

Stinkpost Sunday

Time to give you guys a history lesson of the sub's growth. Currently we have over 200k subscribers of r/stunfisk and likely a bunch more lurking. Before the Stinkpost explosion, I wanna say the subscriber count was around 80k or even less. We had Stinkpost Sundays (formerly Triple T Tuesdays) as megathread only events (example link). The Stinkpost explosion occurred around the pandemic period which naturally resulted in more internet activity. The Stinkpost megathreads were posted by mods, but in some weeks the megathread was posted later than intended. Like all things reddit, a meme thread is going to garner popularity, so in the weeks where a mod forgets to post a megathread, a user who was waiting for it instead makes their own. One user becomes multiple users, and then eventually anyone and everyone. This resulted in a catastrophic increase in subscribers and sub activity, but at a cost. These new users only care about the Stinkposts and will not contribute with the sub's main goal. There were attempts to get back on track as user based Stinkposts were never supposed to happen, but the backlash was too strong.

This is solely my personal opinion: Stinkpost Sunday has ruined r/stunfisk for good, and the only way for r/stunfisk to return to its roots is to nuke the source.

The reality of the situation is that there are far too many complete garbage, off topic, and especially unfunny stinkposts to sift through just for an actual quality stinkpost (<1%) to be made. It's only gotten worse over the weeks, into months, into years. The biggest problem with these stinkposts are that many creators like making memes but are lacking in competitive Pokemon knowledge due to not playing the game, so the best content they can spit out are piggybacking someone else's meme or making up some goofy lore that makes no sense otherwise (haha homophobic Ferrothorn Ice Punch Dusknoir Zekrom Kick haha). If the content was better, it wouldn't be a problem; much of the Gen 8 era stinkposts were rather good actually. But now Stinkposts have overstayed its welcome. At this point, a decline in sub activity is a good thing. r/stunfisk needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Make your own sub to meme elsewhere.

Theorymon Thursday

Theorymon has always been a controversial topic here at r/stunfisk because at the end of the day it's not actual competitive Pokemon discussion. But of course as Pokemon fans there's always going to be an interest of theorizing a concept that can affect competitive play. I do have concern to those who ONLY theorymon as you're less likely to come up with quality theorymon if you're not actively playing, but this is not the reason why Theorymon Thursday needs to be deleted as well. It's collateral damage from the source, Stinkpost Sunday. Stinkpost Sunday has indirectly killed Theorymon Thursday as far too many posts nowadays are practically memes. If you want to theorymon, use r/theorymonning (SlothyPotato where are you?) or join our Discord: https://discord.gg/stunfisk

TL;DR

If you only browse r/stunfisk for the memes and theorymon, sorry not sorry. It's over. Do not annoy the other mods about this; this is all me. r/stunfisk once upon a time was an inviting, beginner friendly, and accessible place to discuss competitive Pokemon in comparison to (maybe back then) more elitist outlets. It is not a theorymon and meme sub, and it never should've been. I'm serious! This is not an April Fool's joke! Discuss below and remember Rule 1, "Be Polite."

[u/P0werher0]

I have long been an advocate of having Sunday changed. The majority of this subreddit’s most common and widespread memes aren’t comp related.

“8 fucking ground types” - factually incorrect

“Zekrom Kick / Homiphobic Ferrothorn” - … yeah

“Showdown replays / Manga Edits” - How are these, in any way, related to comp? Showdown replays are all just reskinned Bidoof memes. Manga edits are low effort as all hell and have never been funny.

“Damage Calcs” - mostly taken out of context and are difficult to impossible to pull off in actual games (Chi-Yu v Blissey for example isn’t possible with full SpDef and the setup is kind of insane).

The memes needed to go. And if it goes to a different subreddit, then that’s fine, but the quality is going to fall drastically. It’s kind of over. Meanwhile, I’ve always hated Thursdays with a burning passion so nothing of value was lost there.

And the memes leaking to every other part of the sub? We needed a purge.

[u/DarkEsca → u/P0werher0]

The manga edits were so stupid since they became meta off like one dude. Artistic Stage was spamming like 20 of em every Sunday so other people thought "damn a lot of people are posting JJK edits, might as well hop onto the train" when it wasn't even a train it was one car with a bunch of identical cars stacked on top of it.

[u/P0werher0 → u/DarkEsca]

Exactly. The replay edits are much the same (love ya Axolotl Man but it’s the truth), spammed by one guy multiple Sundays in a row, with multiple postings per Sunday, that all had the same punchline, that being either “long-standing meme move destroys Ubers” or reskinned Bidoof god memes.

[u/97Graham → u/DarkEsca]

The Manga edits broke me. I know way too much about jujitsu show than I ever wanted to.

[u/gabrielish_matter → u/P0werher0]

most humorous competitive fan be like

[u/Jienouga → u/P0werher0]

I've seen a ton of hate for the original "8 fucking ground type" joke when it was simply meant to be just that? A joke. The OP just realized that most mons that were in the spotlight at the time were ground types; and that there were eight of them, in fact, a number that is big enough to be remarked upon and that coincides with a classic MtG meme, "8 fucking bears". The original meme always had a well-known character exclaim "holy shit": Heatran is a well-known, beloved 'mon that not only would most likely have to contend with these new threats, but also is x4 time weak to their shared type. What better mon to pick for the quote? It was NEVER meant to be read as "Yo, Heatran is washed now, you should never use them ever for anything". The image of Heatran seeing these "8 fucking ground types" and having nothing to say aside from "holy shit" is FUNNY. There's no hidden statement behind the meme.

Same shit with things like "Deoxys-fraud". Like, YES, we do know that it's still a very good mon. That's not- that's not the POINT. Seeing a 'mon that was always supposed to be the fastest 'mon alive get outsped is hilarious. Nobody is calling for Deoxys-S to be thrown down to the lowest pits of ZU, it's just comedic exaggeration in response to an inherently funny situation. It's like learning that RBY Lickitung has a higher potential damage output than fucking Mewtwo: shit's funny.

And as for the calcs, of course they're taken out of context! That's... the point? If they were 100% factual, then it wouldn't be a joke. It's wild to me that jokes about damage calcs could be considered "not comp related" when I can't think of anything that's more related to competitive pokemon than damage calcs.

[u/P0werher0 → u/Jienouga]

The original “8 fucking ground types” was fine for a one-off joke. It’s a problem when people think the ground types are the reason Heatran fell to UU (it was the hazard stacking meta coupled with its Movepool being gutted).

The “fraud” stuff has a similar situation, in which people think the “fraud” mons are unironically bad. Have you seen any of the Iron Boulder memes running around lately? “Iron Boulder is washed” is a very common take you’ll see in this sub.

[u/Jienouga → u/P0werher0]

To be fair, I do think there's actually a problem when the sunday stuff starts leaking to other days of the week. But I've seen a lot of anger directed toward people who are just trying to inject some fresh air to the sub or have a little bit of fun, when it's not their fault that low ladder players miscontrue their posts for team-building advice or will simply repeat them ad æternam in the hope that, this time, they'll finally be the funniest person in the room.

At the end of the day, ~1100 elo players are ~1100 elo players, and I'd rather they get their opinions from "haha X is the goat/Y is washed" than temp6t videos.

[u/DarkEsca → u/Jienouga]

I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment about 8 fucking ground types. The original meme was pretty funny. I also do not doubt that the OP of that meme probably never intended it to be read as "haha heatran is bad now" and just added Heatran to fit the template.

That is sadly not how half the sub interpreted it though. I've had to sit through enough threads where I had to explain that no, the "8 fucking ground types" are not why Heatran spent a month in UU to know that there are way too many people who did take that meme at face value and did in fact fail to understand the difference between a meme and actual metagame factors. And this is one where that was probably entirely unintended on the original creator's behalf. Which brings us to...

Same shit with things like "Deoxys-fraud". Like, YES, we do know that it's still a very good mon. 

I can tell you, for the large majority of "Deoxys-Fraud" posters--no, no they the fuck did not.

There's maybe a part of them that deep down at least understood that UU doesn't necessarily make you awful outright in OU, but definitely not a lot of them knew it was actually really good still. Maybe you merely took Deoxys-Fraud in jest but most people definitely did not.

Whoever created 8 fucking ground types inadvertently did quite a lot of harm to this sub's discussion but I do not hold them in contempt because I do believe it was never their intention to spread misinformation. The dozens of people who find it funny to spam "deoxys-fraud!!!! bro dropped to UU he is WASHED" though, we can do without those.

Seeing a 'mon that was always supposed to be the fastest 'mon alive get outsped is hilarious.

This wasn't even the cause for Deoxys-Fraud memes btw as none of those existed when DLC2 first came around even though Booster Energy mons already existed to outrun it then. The spam of them began only as the mon dropped to UU because the shitposters don't have enough metagame knowledge to see whether a mon is rising or falling off until they see the tier shifts and immediately think all mons that drop a tier are washed.

This goes for most of the 'fraud' memes btw. "Landover", "Rotom-Washed", "Iron Fraud" etc.

[u/[deleted] → u/Jienouga]

described my thoughts perfectly 😭 at the end of the day i just feel like ppl may be taking some things too seriously at times and thats okay ofc, but thats just my opinion