#its the second hottest thing to exist in the mcu

[thediktatortot]

RE: Your "fandom wasn't always like this" post Fandoms ending when their source did used to be a VERY BAD SIGN that the series had utterly belly flopped. It really didn't start being standard until.... at least after dashcon, but probably closer to the end of the second phase of the MCU. I think Avengers Endgame was the real final death knell of "extended fandom", but even before that, the MCU dragging us along by the hair on the back of our necks seemed to be what killed having a long-term fandom.

You aren't wrong with assuming that specific fandoms were some of the major downfalls of what we had going for us, but the answer is definitely more nuanced than that unfortuntely.

I've had a lot of time to sit and think about the subject of the post I made, and I genuinely think that the true answer to the downfall of Fandom as a whole, is social media.

I hate to sound like That Old Person at a ripe age of 31, but that is my honest answer.

I myself did not get a phone until I was 18 years old and was able to buy one for myself, a little sidekick that let me text my friends when I wanted to hang out, but that wasou f about it. I didn't even get a home computer in my house until I was about 13 years old because we were fairly poor and didn't really need it for anything other than emails and bills.

The first thing I discovered on the computer was Neopets and Gaiaonline, two 'gaming' websites (I'm not assuming your age, but I'm going to talk as if you don't know about anything I'm speaking of just in case other people read this who do not know about it.) that focused heavily on dressing up your avatars, mini flash games and forum role play. The hottest social media at the time was Myspace and it wasn't until I got into Highschool that I even ended up making one.

There were no real algorithms that fed you 'content' on a front page outside of the things the people you followed posted, no way to get fed news ads unless it was in the sidebar where ads were usually placed, and there was no instant updates to every person's lives both small or famous unless you went looking for those updates yourself on google.

Now we have social media that is both forcefully placed in front of you in the form of genuine 'content' in both long and short form on absolutely every platform you can imagine. This isn't even going with the discussion that talks about ads on the TV and how for decades, America has been putting more and more emphases on pharmacy ads on TV and extending commercials to the point where people would rather pay 10-40 a month on streaming services to access movies and TV that might not exist at the whim of the streaming services, than watch cable tv with ads lol

Anyway, when Fandom first began its slow descent into madness, it was about the time that the new style of social media began to get big (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine, Tiktok, etc) all places that were designed and created to make you want to See More.

I'm not one of those people who are like "We have no more focus because of social media arg!" but there is a grain of truth to the fact that, if you are fed bite sized pieces of bee information at a faster rate, it's harder to get yourself to slow down and actually delve into a topic further without incentive.

We have catchy news headlines that people read and never take the time to look into the matter further, we have facebook posts where people make crazy claims and no one verifies to check if it's true because that takes time and effort and understanding of how to perform basic search tasks and reading comprehension to ask the right questions, we have instagram breaking the concept of art and life experiences into bite sized, perfect square windows of moments to make your instagram feed look pretty enough to have thousands of followers, we have Twitter that has always been somewhat of a fast websites, but is easy to spread misinformation around on at light speed, Snapchat makes photos disappear, never allowing anything you do to be permanent unless someone manages to save it, Vine and TikTok made attention sinks were it's so easy to just get lost for hours of time into maybe not useless, but an exhaustive stream of information that encourages doing the same finger action for hours on end.

Marvel/MCU/Disney whatever we want to call it, including all the other major production companies, are just one symptom of a bigger problem. They've ridden the waves of instant gratification and people's inability to think outside the boxes for years, but unfortunately our primary source of entertainment in a world that wants to kill us all the time and keeps us inside the house more often, just happens to finally align with the companies and programs that are designed to squeeze more and more out of us until we die.

Unfortunately, Capitalism is killing Fandom as a whole, we are just seeing it more because our primary sources of communication and our major routes of entertainment for ourselves are finally working together to bleed us dry.

#ask tator #fandom wank #It's Capitalisms fault