recently saw a post on curated tumblr with this image:
i have known some people into all or most of these things, and it made me really consider this image, and my perception of these interests
they aren't slop. the things themselves aren't slop, they range from perfectly fine to really good, depending on what you like
but if you imagine the type of person who considers themselves to be a fan of all of these? who doesn't actually engage with them all as their own, unique thing? think about how they express that, how they talk about these things.
from the perspective of someone seeing the way these fans engage in and talk about the media, it all seems at best bland and uninteresting! These specific kinds of people have such a bad critical understanding of the media they consume, that from any outside perspective it appears like slop
i think an amazing example of this would be TADC. Think of how this person would talk about TADC. If i had to view TADC like this, i genuinely wouldn't be able to enjoy anything about the show
fans that watch every episode by pausing it every five seconds on their first watch, who start yelling about themes and references not as actual storytelling devices, but as 'cool trivia' or 'theorycrafting hints from the creators', who genuinely can't just enjoy the show for itself but only see it through this over-expansive, reductive lens
we have seen this with undertale, with helluva boss, with hazbin hotel, with mascot horror. i know you can conceive of the person who engages with all of those in the same way. You know this person. You have seen atleast one, maybe even been them once or twice.
there's nothing intrinsically wrong with enjoying all of your media through this same, blurry lens that makes you like all of the things in the above image in the same interrelated 'vibe-based' abstract fandom-y way, i just wanted to point out that there is a very real phenomenon of consuming media in this fake-deep, reductive, homogenising way, since the original image was clowned on for there "not being any connection" between the interests in the image, even when reposted on reddit
this is a thing! stop pretending it's not! this is a huge thing underlying a lot of content about media! this makes up a significant portion of the discussion around these types of media!
