Here's another philosophical ramble from me. Something clicked in my brain this morning and I wrote about it a lot.

It’s not really true that “the darker a piece of media is, the better fandom it has, and the more family friendly a piece of media is, the worse the fandom is”. No, the reality is that the more popular something is, the worse fandom it will have, and darker media tend to just turn off more people from liking them.

I’ll prove it to you by poking some holes in the so-called “rule”. Everybody who believed in that old saying (myself included at the time) got very confused when Mouthwashing - a very dark game - ended up with so much fandom drama and pettiness. The answer is actually quite simple: it got popular. More popularity leads to more people with no media literacy or empathy entering fandom spaces. Similarly, after Fear & Hunger received more attention on YouTube, there was an increase in chuds with no media literacy claiming to be fans of the game. And now, as my beloved The Outlast Trials becomes more accessible via PlayStation Plus, this comes with the effect of new breeds of Outlast “fans” and self-proclaimed “critics” all over Twitter and TikTok, who pass judgment on each other to desperately feel something, rather like what happened with Mouthwashing on those platforms.

Do not misconstrue this as me saying that popular things are inherently bad. There is nothing inherently wrong with a piece of media just because it gets popular, because there is very little that these media inherently have in common, and the chances of something getting popular are often very unpredictable. A lot of indie projects get popular with no intention or foresight on the part of the creator (see for example how Friday Night Funkin' blew up.) This is purely about the types of fans that get attracted.

A lot of people tend to use this adage the same way that many people use "boys will be boys" whenever something bad happens. We ignore the conversation about the fact that fandom incidents shouldn't happen, and instead it becomes "eh what can you do, that fandom is full of crazies so it's bound to keep happening".

Now, why is it the case that popularity is the cause?

Obviously, the larger a fandom is, the larger the lowest common denominator group will be, and those people tend to be louder, because they’re generally quite miserable and will find more things to complain about. Some people aren’t even as genuinely invested as they think they are, and might be hanging around due to popularity alone or due to their friends liking it. They’ll move on elsewhere when the next episode of The Amazing Digital Circus (or whatever animated cartoon is super popular when you are reading this) comes out.

Why do people like that old adage?

Well, on a surface level, it seems to be true, but there’s also a lot of bias in it that goes unquestioned. The Internet looks down on interests that are “too childish” - they will call those people “cringe” or tell them to grow up if they can’t find a reason to believe there is some kind of mental illness or immorality at play. And fans of certain things have been generalized as being immoral and mentally ill plenty of times. Take a look at the “Hello Kitty Girl” stereotype, which originates from straight men's dating culture. The reason for this labeling of female Sanrio fans as dangerous is two-fold: the bar is higher for what constitutes an acceptable interest for women, and right-wing, male-centered, cis- and heteronormative rhetoric also spreads faster online due to the fact that cisgender heterosexual men are less likely to feel too threatened to speak online than their female and LGBT counterparts. This is the reason why so many “memes” - jokes that often come with a hidden truth about what people believe - are about categorizing women, where some are considered sex objects, some are demeaned, and some are both at the same time (again the Hello Kitty Girl is an example.)

The male-dominated internet has an inherent dislike of femininity. Fandoms and interests that have a younger target audience tend to be less gendered, and any group that welcomes everyone with open arms, where women and others are not the exception to the rule, is not hypermasculine enough for 4chan. At best they’re written off as meaningless and vapid; at worst they’re considered a threat to the status quo of online frat boy culture (as if that had ever been threatened and isn't thriving thanks to the online activities of a certain Jeffery.) So when you have a chip on your shoulder about anything that isn’t made for frat boys, of course you’re going to want to claim that it’s “always the cute ones” who are broken inside, and that therefore, groups of people who like family-friendly or feminine media are not to be trusted simply because they’re members of that group. (This is not to say that all darker media is catering to said frat bros; in fact, they got very angry when the feminist horror game Silent Hill f outwardly refused to cater to them by preventing them from looking up the skirt of its underaged protagonist. Once again, Epstein’s influence is visible, present in the fact that these online circles consider it normal to do this with child characters.)

From those circles, the rhetoric spreads from 4chan to Reddit (Diet 4chan, if you will), to Twitter and TikTok, and even further from there. It spreads to the gamers who consider themselves “not political” but frequent the same places, to the horndogs of every alignment who indulge in porn trends stated by the frat bros, and to the pseudo-intellectuals of all genders who believe they’re so much more erudite than other women just based on outward appearances alone (that’s me holding a mirror to myself on the last one). I must clarify that being an active gamer or sexually open is not intently bad, but one must always exercise discretion with the things that one hears others say in those circles before accepting them. Tumblr regulars, jaded of all the drama happening in their favorite fandoms, accept these simple answers without examining their implications, and incidents perpetuated by a loud minority become stereotypes of the whole group. Things get diffused and changed from one person to another, so not every instance of the old lie about fandoms means a person has right-wing beliefs, but the bias against media that are less masculine (again, family friendly media is usually less masculine) is still present in every corner and shadow.

Let’s take a step back now to my original assertion. So if it’s popularity that leads to worse fandoms, and not family-friendliness, what can you do about this if you’re a creator? Not very much. Trying to use content and language to put up a barrier never really works (i.e. Hazbin Hotel). You don’t need to artificially make your creation less accessible, because realistically, there is nothing you can do to make your creation more or less popular. Nor is there anything you can do once your creation becomes popular - trying to control a large fandom is basically impossible (ask Goosworx and she will confirm it). So if that happens, just start praying that it’ll be over soon.

Edit 2/9/26: People asked me to be more clear, so here's the TLDR of what I was trying to say:

• "Family friendly stuff has worse fandoms" isn't true. It's popularity that causes worse fandoms because then you get a larger percentage of bad people just because more people are into it.
• Generalizing every member of a fandom based on "rules" like that makes you a condescending asshole. It doesn't help whenever something bad does happen (because then you ignore the discussion of the fact that it shouldn't happen), and it feeds into the larger internet culture of hating "childish" and feminine interests, that originated from 2010s cringe culture and from straight men looking down on the interests of women they try to date.
• If you're a creator and your stuff gets popular, just hold on for dear life.
• If you're a fan looking to get into one of those fandoms, don't be afraid to engage based on rumors, but do set boundaries and curate your internet experience. Fandoms should be enjoyable, you aren't obligated to put extra stress on yourself.

-Theta

Thank you for reading.

I plan to make a BBS post on the subject soon. Feel free to pitch in when that happens.