Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - Thoughts on Ponyhype · 1:12am Aug 1st, 2018
I was recently introduced to a web comic that I thoroughly enjoyed. I’m not going to plug it here because it’s not pony related, but I had a bit of a revelation about fandom, and consumption of creative material in general - stuff that’s extremely relevant to the brony world - so if you’ll bear with me, I’m going to talk about what this web comic made me realize.
You see, I got sucked into it gradually. I went from indifference, to liking the comic, to loving the comic, to being blown away by a particular story line that I read only just recently.
Then real life suddenly exploded. Construction guys who were supposed to do minor work on my roof ended up tearing the whole thing off and putting a new one down, leaving everything in my attic blanketed with rubble. It was destructive and disruptive - an overall nightmare. At the end of the day, my nerves were frayed. I turned to the comic for stress relief. I thought that since its last storyline had moved me so deeply, maybe reading the follow up would give me some of that same feeling, and help me settle down a bit.
It didn’t. The fact that it didn’t made me feel worse than when I'd started.
This is the problem with all fandom.
You start at loving something because of how it makes you feel. However, that feeling is fleeting. When you reach for it, and when you expect it, when you need it, it creates an emotional roller coaster out of something that is supposed to be fun.
I’m pushing 40. Emotionally, I’m in a pretty stable orbit, and I’ve got too many real world responsibilities to let something like this really drag me down for too long.
However, in this cycle, I see the origin of where a lot of fandom toxicity comes from.
In the most extreme of cases, people go from expecting and needing a certain emotional high from the creative material they consume, to actually believing that that high is owed to them. I’ve seen this mentality in our community. I’ve seen it in the Steven Universe fandom. I’ve seen it in Star Wars fans’ online harassment of those involved in making of the new films.
While most people wouldn't dream of going there, the source of that sourness is still the same. It all comes from expectation. Hype.
The very thing that makes it all so exciting is inevitably what makes us burn out so hard.
The web comic had frustrated me because I was already upset when I had turned to it in for conciliation. Like an addiction.
A lot of us feel this kind of negativity from time to time. I'm not here to lecture about it or call everyone with a criticism haters. That doesn't help either. Personally, I think the best way to avoid this sort of thing is to be conscious of what’s actually happening – to be aware of where these feelings are coming from.
The midseason hiatus is almost over. So my advice to people suffering from fandom burn out, or just plain wrestling with negativity in general, is to look at this new pony season, (or web comic, or hyped up movie) not from a place of anticipation, but rather, curiosity.
-Sprocket
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That's my usual stance on this sort of thing. "Let's see what happens." "This is going to be awesome" can so quickly sour into "This had better be awesome."
I lean towards liking things. Left to my own devices, I'll like more things than I dislike. I see articles and videos with headlines like "Why All Anime Sucks Now (Especially Your Favourite)" or "Why This Film You Enjoyed Is Literally Hitler", and I wonder, why would you spend so much effort on hating something? What good does it do you or anybody else to increase the amount of dissatisfaction by persuading people that's the things they enjoyed are, in fact, bad - generally with the undertone of "and you're a bad person for enjoying them".
It matters not if their arguments are correct, if the artistic it technical flaws they're pointing out are real. In so many cases, the goal of the criticism is in fact negativity for its own sake.
It makes sense that people who put so much effort into tearing down the things other love are experiencing the same disillusionment you're talking about here. They had a phase of being enthusiastic about everything in a given area, of overriding the obvious flaws in it; and the backlash from that cognitive dissonance is that they can now only see flaws.
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There have been a few episodes I actively hated, including very popular ones, but didn't feel the need to use my blog or Facebook pages to spread my negative feelings about them.