Fandom Sucks Sometimes

I made this blog because I want to reblog more critical posts but I don't want to bring down the vibes of my main blog ||| I am a little hater about fandom

[life-critical]

With the Scott tag once more being flooded with random hate, I would like to say:

I've seen a certain beloved fandom creator who is well respected within the fandom (and by the Lifers too) tell their audience that they think Scott is a bad person and that he has a bad attitude.

I'm not saying who because it would be my head on a spike, but when the controversy with Skizz happened, they blocked the people asking if they would keep Skizz in their AU despite saying previously that they would no longer keep any controversial or problematic creators and won't bring back any creators even if they apologise. They said this as a way of shutting down questions about why Scott wasn't in their AU

Guess who showed up in the first post they made after he apologised?

[001x456]

unpopular opinion but I think, while in fandom space, people should learn to ignore things they do not agree with instead of resorting to name calling and rudely telling op how they are “wrong” about a fictional character.

chances are you’re not gonna change their mind by reblogging or replying to their post with insults and how “wrong” they are.

personally I think fandom in general is mostly about how each person interprets the media and their favorite characters. so yes, you are going to see things about your favorite characters that you don’t agree with. you can either mute, block or ignore things you don’t agree with instead of “trying to correct” op, especially when you’re going to attack or be rude to them.

get off your high horse, stop saying you are “dealing with bullshit when you see it” by attacking people whose opinions you don’t agree with. you’re not above anybody in your community, you’re a fan just like the rest of us all. you have the right to express your own interpretations and opinions about a fictional character, but so do other people in the fandom. you don’t get to attack them for having opinions you don’t agree with.

mind your own damn business, ignore, scroll past, mute or block what upsets you. willingly being a bully for the sake of being popular in a fandom is just sad.

[life-critical]

Hi its the anon who was complaining about hermits giving bad medical advice. I would like to clarify that Gem was not a nurse. She was a lab tech. Her job and education centered around testing fluid and biopsy samples. This is a very important job in the medical system, don't get me wrong, but it is years away from the job and education nurses receive. It's generally a two-year degree and focuses on the use of different diagnostic machines to test patient samples. Those test results are then handed off to the doctors to help them make diagnoses. The education focuses heavily on how to safely handle biohazards and how to ensure you are getting accurate test results. Very important job! But it's not nursing!

So the problem is that you are not the only person who incorrectly believes that Gem has a higher level of medical expertise than she actually does. This imo makes it *worse* that she gets on stream and gives out potentially dangerous health advice. People are far more likely to take her advice because they think she is more trustworthy due to her background. And ironically enough, if she had actually gone through nursing school, she very likely wouldn't be telling people what medications and supplements to take because this exact issue is explained in nursing and medical school.

So when Impulse recommends some medication, it's much easier to be skeptical because he doesn't have a medical background. But, when gem recommends taking a dangerously high level of Tylenol because she doesn't know the term paracetamol, people are far more likely to trust her because """she was a nurse."""

I'm not sure of how to add to this but I think it's still very important for people to know

[sensiblynecrotictoad-deactivate]

Something I've noticed among Life Series Fans is that Grian fans are the least likely to watch other POVs. Most other people watch at least a couple POVS. If a Cleo fan says they only watch Cleo, other fans treat them like they're crazy, but if a Grian fan says they only watch Grian, no one bats an eye. Grian literally uploads late to encourage his viewers to watch other people and still no one does and every week during the Life Series there are Grian fans freaking out that he hasn't uploaded yet and everyone else is already posting about the session.

[life-critical]

This is such a minor gripe that literally doesn't matter, but I get so annoyed when I tune into one of the hermits streams and they are just talking out of their ass regarding medicine. (I'm looking at you Arizona dads and occasionally grian and gem)

No, vitamin D won't "boost your immune system" unless you currently have a deficiency, same with vitamin C. Also no, Mucinex is not great for colds! Same with phenylephrine! Both medications are widely criticized for being basically useless. Phenylephrine is very likely to be pulled from US shelves because it can't prove any effectiveness! That's how bad it is! And Mucinex contains guaifenesin and dextromethorphan which basically cancel eachother out, and if you have a wet cough, using dextromethorphan could slightly increase your risk of developing a more severe infection.

But it's not like I actually expect any of the hermits to know these things. My gripe is that just because you can buy something otc doesn't mean that it is safe. If you're a youtuber/streamer stop making medication recommendations! Otc medications ARE medications, supplements ARE medications, and they 100% are equally capable of being dangerous so SHUT UP ABOUT IT.

Anyway here's your psa from your friendly pharmacology student who is annoyed with the misinfo youtubers are spreading.

If you are sick, pain relievers like ibuprofen or acetaminophen (aka paracetamol) are good for reducing fever. Don't use asprin for fever control. Also do not take "PainQuil" of similar products that contain alcohol and acetaminophen/paracetamol because you are risking liver damage. Same thing goes for hangovers, never use acetaminophen if you've been drinking with the past 24 hours.

If you have a wet cough, you want to cough it out. Try not to take cough suppressants. If you have a dry cough, treat the symptoms not the cough itself. Cough suppressants can be dangerous and even addictive, drink tea with honey, gargle with salt water, and use throat lozenges. Cough suppressants should be your last choice only if you are in pain from the coughing (like your throat is too sore or it's giving you a headache from coughing so much.) Also those sudden uncontrollable coughing fits you get when you're sick are often caused by your sinuses not your throat. Blow your nose occasionally to get mucus off the back of your soft palate. It helps prevent coughing fits.

Also don't use anti-histamines as sleep aids. I know it's generally considered safe, but the risk of addiction is extremely high. It may help you get to sleep, but they actually reduce the quality of the sleep you get, so you'll likely be just as tired as you would have been without it.

Clear ANY supplements you take with your GP (even if it's just melatonin) because it's basically impossible to make any broad safety or benefit assessments about them.

In conclusion, don't listen to mcyts for medical advice despite the fact that they routinely give it out. And also, don't listen to me! I'm a stranger on the internet! If you take anything away from this, it's that you should clear things with your GP first. (At the very least, call your office's nursing line OR talk to your pharmacist next time you pick up your medications.)

TLDR: mcyts need to shut up and stop giving horrible medical advice on stream...

I can understand Gem giving occasional medical advice, as she was a nurse before becoming a YouTuber, but it's still a terrible idea to get any type of medical advice from some guy on the internet because they don't know your specific situation

Anything someone from the internet recommends might work for them but hurt someone else

Edit: Geminitay was not a nurse, she was a lab technician

Source: her Instagram

[life-critical]

This is your friendly reminder that there are separate tags for positive and negative talk regarding a character or piece of media!

This is because people scrolling through a tag are doing so the enjoy the thing they like, and don't want to see people bashing it!

Similarly, people scrolling through a negative tag don't like the thing and don't want to see people gushing about it!

Using the right tags makes it so others can block whichever tag they don't want to see, making everyone's lives easier

These work for negative posts:

#[thing] neg

#[thing] hate

#[thing] critical

Otherwise just tag as #[thing] like you normally would

[life-critical]

i totally get what you’re saying about scott haters often being homophobic.

first i want to establish: i think his character DOES have a weird manipulative streak, but honestly so does the rest of the cast. it’s part of the death game, figuring out how to survive. it’s not a scott thing in particular, he just has a very recognizable STYLE of manipulation that i think a lot of people are drawn to because it’s so interesting.

scott does say some WEIRD things. his whole “you have to whittle jimmy down” thing was WILD. and i LOVED IT!! it created such an interesting dynamic to explore.

imo, i think part of it is a matter of how deeply people read into things. i personally like reading into the bits as something more serious. it’s a fun way to engage with the media and i think leads to some really interesting analysis! i like seeing the life series as a sort of tragedy. it’s fun for me!

so i LIKE reading all of the characters as toxic. they’ve all had really deranged moments and have said wild things about each other within the context of the game.

i think people do not discuss the toxicity of the other members enough, and that is entirely an internalized homophobia thing (which you can have !! and still be queer yourself !! that’s why it’s internalized!!!!).

so tldr; there is a lot of homophobia, absolutely, but i think also there are some really different interpretations of the source material out there because of the nature of minecraft youtube roleplay.

Oh, yeah I get that. I personally am not big on the "reading into things" side of fandom since I don't see it as a roleplay server but I have no issue with people reading into everyone's actions

I don't even think reading into everyone's actions and being an apologist for one or two characters is a big deal either

It's when Scott haters try to pose him as the Only Toxic One that it's very obviously homophobia

The social game is a huge part of the life series, and a lot of different players play all sides (Impulse, Martyn, Etho, Tango, etc) but Scott is the only one who regularly gets hate for it.

When Big B always has a secret alliance with Grian or lies for no reason it's funny and how he is. When Bdubs complains about his team behind their backs and acts like he would leave if he could, it's funny and everyone knows he's not being serious. When Scar offers help to opposite factions kill each other or stirs the pot, it's funny and Scar's so silly.

When Scott dares to help a team other than his allies because he likes chaos, suddenly he's evil and manipulative and toxic and it's not funny anymore.

I'm not saying that the "it's funny when people are toxic" idea is wrong, just that it should be applied equally

There's always some excuse/fondness for the straight guys being toxic, and that's why I think it's mostly homophobia

Personally, I come at it from a "everyone's having fun and this isn't serious" view so I forget that other people think the toxicity is what makes it fun, but I totally get that view too

It's when there's that double standard in which the straight men actions are toxic in a fun way but the girls and the gays' actions are toxic in a bad way that bothers me

Or worse, when people with a very serious interpretation start thinking of the creator Scott as equally bad as his character while everyone else retains their "silly little guy" status

[ceratedfish24]

WARNING: This is a fandom critical post. If you do not like fandom critical posts, then you should filter the tag in your settings. This will remove ALL of MY fandom critical posts from your immediate feed. I will not remove the two main tags from this post, because I have also tagged it with “fandom critical” with an upfront warning and believe that it is an important discussion for the fandom to be having. If people can main tag Smajor posts that call him manipulative without anyone disputing whether or not you should be calling someone manipulative in their own tags, I can main tag a post that claims he’s not.

“Scott is manipulative in Flower Husbands” can you even name one time he got his way in a life series argument. I don’t think it’s manipulative to want to hang out in a nice little house and not go to war and not make enemies that clearly out-number you. I don’t think it’s manipulative to not want the people you care about to go to war even if they want to go to war, especially if you eventually give up and go to war with them. Having a different desire and being upfront about it is entirely and completely different from being manipulative.

And if you’re about to give me that “Scott punched Jimmy in minecraft and is therefore abusive” bs, you HAVE to see how that’s blatant hypocrisy and looks so much like internalized homophobia. There’s a viral clip of Martyn, a generally straight-passing man, encouraging his young daughter to beat Jimmy to death with a shovel in minecraft, and you’re saying that Scott is abusive for punching a character in minecraft, a gesture often used to get a person’s attention or lightly, and often playfully, chastise them. Joel and Grian mock and torture and berate Jimmy all day long for the love of it, and nobody calls them abusive or manipulative. Of course all these things are done in play, because they’re all friends, but why would Joel, Grian, Martyn, and many others get seen as funny or normal for doing practically objectively worse things to Jimmy while Scott gets seen as manipulative for lightly chastising his friend or joking around with him.

[life-critical]

I do fully, 100% believe that most of the hate towards Smajor is homophobia

I think the arguments about him being manipulative/abusive/mean/evil/whatever are hypocritical because you can see straight or straight-passing lifers/empires folk doing the exact same thing (or worse) but people will bend over backwards to say it's fine because "it's just a bit" and "that's just Jimmy's dynamic with his friends

I've noticed a lot of the people hating on Scott hide behind the excuse "oh but it's in-character analysis I don't hate the real Scott" as if Scott is playing a character in the life series. Scott has done roleplay once (1 time) in the life series, after Jimmy died in 3rd life, that's it

To anyone who doesn't like Scott: genuinely, you can just say that, I promise. You don't have to make something up or microanalyse his actions to justify it, you can just acknowledge it and move on without spamming Scott's main tag with hate.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

“how dare people write fanfics about these things I find disgusting” “how dare they make fanfics about this ship, it’s so gross”

so there are these things called

the fics are properly tagged with content warnings

you don’t have to read what will upset you

no one forces you to read what you don’t want to read

people will continue creating things you don’t like, and there is nothing you can do to stop that

you can, however, choose not to see these things by muting, blocking, filtering out tags

censorship has no place in fanfics or any other form of art

darkfics are not harmful

censorship is harmful

harassing real people over fiction is harmful

the fictional characters you try to protect are not real

artists who you harass for making art that’s not to your approval and personal liking are real

harassing real people over fiction will never make you morally superior, it just makes you a bully

[lilbittymonster]

People seem to be really resonating with this so I'm putting it over here too.

Original thread

[life-critical]

Just wondering if you or anyone following you happen to have the 2021 (iirc) screenshots of Skizz's subscriptions to Ben Shapiro and Prager U

I've been looking for them as well since he made his subscriptions private, and thankfully someone has found them using the Wayback machine

[life-critical]

Btw here’s a compiling of everything Skizz ignored in his “apology” https://x.com/skizzlearchive/status/1960550283479822437?s=46

I knew that the apology wasn't great, I'll be honest, but I didn't want to undermine that the mods were gone by focusing on criticism

I understood why it sucked and thought we weren't gonna get much better. Skizz is an old, stubborn man who only apologised because he felt like he had to. He doesn't understand why people are upset at his friends because 1) they deleted the tweets and I doubt he went through the effort to find them and 2) they're nice to him so he assumes they're nice in general

I never expected Skizz to actually address the contents of their tweets. I wanted him to, but I acknowledge that he would think addressing serious topics (even to condemn them) would "bring down the vibe", which as he's said many times, he doesn't want to do

But yeah, now that the first hurdle is jumped, that makes it obvious that there are more down the track

There are a lot of concerning folks he's subscribed to, far too many to be a coincidence (and someone got not only a screenshot but a way to view all the subscriptions! Yay, I've been looking for that)

BunnyBond completely ignoring her own racism is expected of a bigot, and there's no response I'd like from her unless it's to leave the internet, go to therapy, and become an empathetic person. Her parting response in Skizz's chat is so disingenuous. "I'm sorry if you found what I said offensive" is the textbook "apology" for bigotry.

Hey, BunnyBond, your actions and words are your own and any hurt they cause is your responsibility. Don't push blame onto the people you ostracised

And god I would pay money to have a psychologist examine what the hell SokaSop thought he was doing with that parting tweet. It's foul. He says the words "I don't agree with LGBT choices", says he's entitled to his opinions about queer people, and calls anyone who criticised him idiots. All in the same tweet he said "let kindness prevail". The man is not winning any Oscars with that mess. "I believe in LGBT rights" yeah no shit, they're not a ghost. Everyone believes in them because they exist, but whether or not you support them is an entirely different question

And to address the third mod: I made a post about Skizz's other mods and noted that he was republican but didn't seem too problematic. Clearly I did not scroll nearly far down enough on Bengineer's twitter because holy shit

My bad for not checking thoroughly enough, that guy's views on women's healthcare scare me

I still feel like Skizz's apology, while it sucked and didn't address anything directly, is the best we're gonna get from a guy so clueless to other's perspectives. I've said it before and I'll say it a thousand times, Skizz's claim that he "just gets people" is 1000% cishet white man hubris

His mods behaviour is their own and while I'm not impressed by how much he praises them or how he's still following them, they are no longer in a position of power in his community, which I feel was his only major responsibility in this situation

His continued friendship with them is reason to be cautious and more firm with conversations his (past and inevitable future) blunders, but it's not something we can demand he change. At the end of the day, he chooses his crowd and we can only make our disapproval clear, not force him to drop them entirely

Like I've said a thousand times over, he's a grown ass man with the ability to educate himself. We can hold him accountable when he fucks up, but understanding and learning are on him

[life-critical]

Hey, Anon, who was complaining about the whole "Ugh, are you people happy now" stuff. I just want to say that your reply is so eloquent, and you made such an important observation that I wish more trans people would understand. Like I 100% understand the fear that if you correct someone on their transphobia that they are going to become on of those "mean liberals made me a fascist" types, but thats not how it works at all.

Honestly, I think the best thing you can do to prevent that kind of reaction from someone is to correct them early. If you say "hey implying that trans-rights are too political kinda feels like you're telling us that our right to exist is debatable" you are much more likely to stop them before they go further down the anti-trans rabbit hole. And once they've done that, people will be (understandably) less kind to them when they are more explicitly transphobic. That's what usually causes them to spiral into reactionary thinking.

You have to get to them and explain the pro-trans side of things before reactionary thinking gets to them. Because preventing them from falling down that rabbit hole is wayyyy easier than pulling them out after they've already gone in.

Anyway, I mostly just want to say thank you for this blog, and thank you for your incredibly intelligent observations!

Very well said; bigoted beliefs aren't inherent, they're taught and the more someone's given the same narrative without opposition, the more they'll fall into that belief (it's called a pipeline for a reason). The best time to teach someone tolerance and open-mindedness is when they were a pre-teen, the second best time is now

Also, thank you for the compliments! I don't think I'm saying anything revolutionary here, but it's nice to hear that others enjoy hearing my perspective

[crossroadsghoul]

Friendly reminder for anyone who needs to hear it that the life series are DEATH GAMES. "Enough of these niceties this is a death match for a reason" as Martyn has said before. They are going to lie and betray each other and use any edge that they can to get ahead and that's how the game is supposed to be. Revenge and bloodlust and enmity are a huge part of why the storylines are so compelling. And at the end of the day its a STORY. The series is to entertain us but also the players are in it to win which means that sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes things just aren't fair. The name of the game is survival.

[averymelody]

// life series spoilers

saw someone saying "at least grian avenged pearl" oh my GOD this fandom cannot let women have anything istg

[life-critical]

// Spoilers

Everyone congratulate GEM for avenging Pearl, her kill on Jimmy was very clean

[shanrambles]

Past Life end spoilers

While I didn't know who would win, I knew that Gem wouldn't. Would I love a Gem win? Yes, yes I would. But I have been reaffirmed in the fact that Gem doesn't want to win. Even when Grian directly said, "you know you have to go for the win" this ep, Gem side stepped it instead of agreeing. She's not aiming to lose, but not aiming to lose is different then going for the win. She could have clutched if she wanted, she had the bucket in her hand for a while (realitively) when she fell.

And while I think maybe percieving other people as wanting it more could play into it, I 100% believe that the real reason is that we as the viewers have made it something she doesn't want. She's said that the community isn't ready for a Gem win, and based on a lot of the posts I've seen, I agree. She's always doing something wrong, moreso then any of the other players based on the posts that come across my dash.

[life-critical]

Hi, it's the Anon again. I did not know you could fire people for political affiliation in other states, I was taught in school that was one of the protections people automatically had. I didn't know that was misinformation

It's alright, like I said there are many states that do protect political affiliation (and Arizona has a few limited protections) so it's an easy mistake to make