Quote Originally Posted by Lord Golbez View Post
Reading the comments in this thread, apparently disliking a game is considered "toxic." If that's the attitude, I would submit the problem is less with the fandom and more with those who define opinions they don't like as "toxic." I get how trying to rain on the parade of people who do like a game could be considered "toxic," but just applying it to the fandom typically disliking the most recent entries? I would argue that for many of the entries, that response is warranted. Now if it's the same people complaining about every entry I have to wonder if they should be considered the "fandom" at all, but it's probably different people having the same sort of response to different entries in the series.
It's really more of hating a game to the point where you both drive away the fans of said games and thus drive fans away from the community at large, or basically leave such a warped view of the series that even if someone was interested, the very fact they don't fall in line with this warped view can prevent people from wanting to check it out. It was far more rampant among the FF fanbase back in the PSX era with the old school 16-bit fans and all the new 3D FF fans arguing over which electronic entertainment was the best, and I feel it finally started to die down around the time of XII and XIII's releases.

Granted, mods kept it fairly cool here so I don't really feel like this forum got hit as bad as some others, but even jumping into other fanbases, you can see some really smurfed up trout people did. I was originally a member of a Xenogears/Xenosaga forum, and the head of the forum would ban you if you so much as uttered anything remotely positive about Xenosaga Episode 2 in the forums and the mods would regularly humiliate members who didn't condone to their views of the games. Another example is the Rick and Morty fanbase that has several members that somehow feel like the show makes them superior because it somehow combines a few touching deep moments with songs about literal trout. And they brow beat other fans of other cartoon shows for not being smart enough to appreciate it. I don't even think I need to bring up Star Trek and Star Wars fans.

*Note this is not directed at anyone in particular*

There 's a difference between me saying to someone,

"I disagree that Game Y is a bad game and here is why"

vs.

"Oh my god, I can't believe you're so stupid that you can't see how obvious that Game Y is the greatest smurfing game of all time. Maybe it's just too deep for you because you love all those baby games with that animu trout. So you should just shut the smurf up, cause obviously nothing of interest if going to come from your opinion, and the adults in the thread will continue to have a real conversation."

That's the kind of mentality I'm thinking when I say toxic. When parts of the fanbase try to shape or coerce the entire thinking and makeup of the fanbase, and it gets so abrasive that it not only has fans jumping ship or sometime just hiding in smaller and more insular social groups that ironically often breed more of these types of people, or gives the fandom such a bad rep that new fans don't really want to engage with the fanbase in general. I mean I love SMT and Persona, but I've lurked in enough of their communities to know I want nothing to do with the fanbase, cause holy hell the amount of elitism or general stupidity that runs in those places are maddening, but at the same time, it's not like every fan community is like the negative view they've given themselves.