what the fuck is wrong with people complaining about the undertale and the pope thing. turn your cringeometer off for like two seconds and realize he was invited to a summit with the pope and you traditionally bring a topical gift, and he brought a video game that fit the pope’s theme earlier in the year. its literally a summit about how the internet brings communities together and it was a topical gift demonstrating how a video game can challenge expectations of being, you know, a fucking shit show shooting up brown people or whatever like g*merg*te desperately all wants all games to be. to be beyond not just criticism but being considered a relevant media form subject to scrutiny by any public figure whatsoever by being just totally not important as anything but private self-gratifying wank material behind closed doors, never reported-on
like all day on this blue hernia I will read posts proclaiming that cartoons, kids shows, and tv serials are worthwhile as media and have deeper significance than a purely capitalist syndicated one meant to extract your time for ratings. but the second that any form of new media or media community is even tangentially appearing in an ‘important’ context you all shriek that fandom is the worst it’s ever been, homestuck is dethroned, etc. well, which is it? Labor in comfortable insignificance or have someone assert a piece of new media as worthwhile?
like i get it, you all are tired of pissing-in-the-ball-pit style antics but fucking turn down your lust for more ugly things to justify why you hate certain fandoms. you can find other reasons, there are infinities of them, you’ll never be disappointed, daddy dom sans is just a click away. but the more you emphasize that video games, cultures on the internet, can be nothing but goony and illegitimate and selfish, the more that the entire world will not take them seriously. the more they will be seen as worth only for capitalizing on. predictably to the same old audience, with the same old tired material. the quality of them will go down. industry fuckery will accelerate. They’ll be seen as unworthy of archiving and preserving for the future. And they won’t be used as tools to tell compelling stories or educate people.
And I totally understand, many of us need to decry something a selfish and cringey and goony because if we don’t, what if we’re one of the bad ugly fans. I know, we all want to distance ourselves from mishapocalypse and dashcon and superwholock but sincerely fuck you all. things are going to escape the online secret clubhouse eventually and I understand if you cringe when you see a pepe shirt on the street but. you can’t take a fairly famous youtuber or whatever being invited specifically to an internet themed summit, giving an indie game that was voted like, the best game of the year despite massive backlash by online terrorist campaigns and anger from AAA publishers, to an important figure that gets thousands of meaningless gifts a year because that’s his job to get tons of offerings because he’s the final boss of the catholic church???
it’s the most meaningless tier of ‘significant’ world events. people present much more cringeworthy stuff to the pope all the time. I promise. the pope isn’t going to get this, search ‘undertale’ and find undertail or whatever the fuck
at the core of it, its like a mass behavior as if a parent suddenly is going to enter the room and catch you browsing some humiliating webpage you don’t want to be associated with. grow up.
[context summary: a person was invited to a conference about the internet with the pope; he brought a gift for the pope, as is expected: that gift was a copy of undertale; he made a video explaining this choice with fairly hyperbolic praise for undertale; there’s a post with many notes somewhere saying undertale fandom has surpassed homestuck in obnoxiousness]
I mean, the Pope invited him…