#I just finished a discord conversation with a guy who punctuated nearly every statement with I WIN

[momtaku]

Wouldn't the world be more beautiful if all people who didn't like the ending simply left? If someone didn't like the finale and it destroyed the whole series for them, then they should sell their volumes, DVD, remove MP3 with Sawano's music and close the doors of SnK forever. Leave it behind and keep moving foward. I don't know why so many people staying in the fandom and complaing like crazy. The new leaks = the new reason to complain and hating SnK and Isayama.

What I wish is that people who hated the ending would follow the only rule that has ever existed in fandom - Stay in your lane. Hate it all you want, but don’t hassle those who feel differently. 

I’m going to rant below the cut.  I’m going to take this opportunity to mourn what I believe has become lost in our fandom. 

Our fandom was never perfect but I feel like it was always a place where you could find your community and have fun. Acknowledging “stay in your lane” was what made that happen. Sure there were people who ignored that and would deliberately cause trouble in other communities, but at least everyone agreed that the behavior was deplorable. It was acknowledged to be bad.

I see two things that happened to change that. The first was that stay in your lane happened to also be platform related. Reddit and Tumblr were the two places fandom congregated and those two platforms were (and still are) divided ideologically. When fandom migrated to Twitter, those communities converged and all hell broke loose.

The second change was the influx of new fans during the Marley Arc. Two groups grew significantly during that time - the Warriorstans and the Jaegerists.  The Warriorstans fit the existing fandom mold. They enjoyed their characters and their ships. They made their art, wrote their headcanons and formed their communities. Any issues the Warriorstans brought to fandom were ones that every fandom community is guilty of -- namely a few rogue members fomenting ship wars and crossing lines to bash characters.

The Jaegerists, on the other hand, felt like a new type of fan, not just ideologically but because their enjoyment of fandom was based more on “winning” it. They wrote their theories with complete confidence that it would become canon and celebrated their ship by insisting it wasn’t a ship at all, but rather “thematically essential” to the story.  If the Jaegerists had stayed in their echo chamber things might have been fine, but “stay in your lane” runs contrary to the concept of winners and losers. As with fans of a sporting event, openly jeering and taunting the rival team is part of the fun.

The attitude I see most from that community now is “if I can’t win, no one can” . Since they so severely “lost the manga” they now take every other communities disappointment as their own personal victory and openly celebrate that.

I guess I can put it this way. Ship wars I understand. Gloating over other people’s pain I do not.  When I go to twitter, all I see is people throwing rocks at each other. 

Maybe that’s fun for some, but its not for me. These days I find myself relieved that Attack on Titan is over mostly because I am excited to fade into obscurity and go sit in my discord trenches with the 8 or 9 people I actually trust until a better fandom platform appears.