Also, "You need to know when you're an NPC."
A couple months ago, FFXIV fan Pat Boivin, of Two Best Friends Play and Castle Super Beast, tried to get his cohost Woolie Madden into the game. They announced they'd be streaming his experience, which was probably a bad idea, as the starting area was flooded with "welcoming" committees, would-be mentors - people who wanted to take over his experience for him. There were also dozens of folks gathered around to unleash flashy emotes, to jump up and around Woolie so their character & guild name would be visible on the stream, etc. The crowd derailed the experience and was the primary point of discussion immediately following the video.
This brings to mind a few things I've noticed about humor in fandom circles recently that I'd like to discuss.
The first is the wisdom contained in a post on that great mass of humanity known as Reddit, about a wedding guest who wanted to wear to the ceremony a theatrical, attention-getting dress festooned with messages that were meant to be supportive of the couple but could have been construed as offensive. The wisdom of the crowd advised against wearing the dress, with the best answer, I feel, below:
"People need to understand they're basically NPCs at a wedding unless they're immediately close with the bride and groom and even then they're just background characters."
In other words: you need to understand when an event is not about you. Here, the event was supposed to be about Woolie, as he (theoretically) reacted to a well-known game beloved by the podcast fanbase. Some attention-hungry people instead made it about themselves, to the point where they stopped the actual event from proceeding. (At least initially; there have been subsequent installments, unseen by me.)
I don't think they thought they were being rude, though. I think they thought they were being genuinely funny, even when they were stopping things from happening and preventing someone they ostensibly loved from enjoying the game. Which brings us to my second point.
A lot of fandom people believe they can't be bullies because they themselves were bullied or ostracized in their youth and have internalized that they are permanently on the "victim" side of that dynamic. If anything, like the hordes besieging Woolie, they think they're cute. Cuteness typically is associated with innocuousness - non-threateningness, a lack of power. These folks genuinely believe that their behavior could never hurt anyone - they're not capable of hurting anyone! They're victims, after all!
So: Even if you think you're cute, even if you've been the victim of jerks in the past, you yourself can still be a jerk. If someone tells you to stop, stop.
My third and final point has to do with the problem of humor. Running jokes are perhaps (next to puns) fandom's favorite form of humor, with "commit to the bit" the guiding rule. (To continue the Giant Bomb theme from last time, think of all the people who respond to any mention of Jeff Gerstmann with "STILL A THREAT! STILL A THREAT! BRAWK BRAWK BRAWK".) I think the appeal here can be explained: humor usually takes a good deal of social skill - you have to hit with the right timing, consider how your audience will receive your joke, deliver your joke well, read the room and vibes before and after, etc. etc. (And you have to think of a joke besides!) Social skills can be a challenge for some fandom folks.
Running jokes, however, seem to bypass all this. All you have to do is repeat what someone else did before. It appears to be the most rock-solid, Skinneresque 1-for-1 correlation between effort and reward: Someone else said this, and people thought it was funny. If I say it, people will think I'm funny, too! You don't even have to think up an original joke! You just have to parrot. Commit to the bit, and a reliable payoff of social acceptance and positive attention is seemingly assured.
That's not correct, of course. A joke that was funny the first, second, or third time is rarely as funny the 423rd. (If it is funny that 423rd time, it's usually because the teller has given it a twist with content, timing, etc. - which requires skill.) Sometimes a joke is funny for a bit, but the humor eventually runs out, or the group or your host wants to turn their attention to something else now - like playing the headliner game on the stream. A bit of #1 still applies here: Even running jokes require a degree of social awareness for success, and you need to know when you need to put aside what you want to do, or being the center of attention, to allow the group activity to proceed.
So: Committing to the bit does not automatically make you the funniest person ever. It can be unfunny, rude, and kill a group activity dead. Unfortunately, you still have to read the room in humor, even if reading the room is difficult with all the gamertags in the way.
Also, "You're not always doing your kid a favor by sharing adult-oriented media with them."
Note: This discussion has a couple mentions of pedophilia & child sexual assault below the cut.
Recently, the Nextlander podcast had as a guest Patrick Klepek, who is the only former member of the Giant Bombcast besides Voidburger to know anything about horror. (Alex knows about Hellraiser, but not for horror-related reasons.) He spent a good deal of his appearance talking about taking his nine-year-old daughter to The Backrooms. The account caused some controversy, as while Klepek was extremely eager for his kid to see her first R-rated horror movie, his daughter, from his account, did not seem to share his enthusiasm, taking a blanket and stuffed animal with her to the showing. (Klepek gave her some nominal outs but seems to have put a lot of indirect pressure on her, presenting it as a test of courage and emphasizing that he thought she wanted to do this.)
The existence of the controversy is notable in itself, as the Giant Bomb community (by which I mean the followers of the founding members' various current projects) is hyper-protective of its personalities. Part of this is plain parasociality; part of this is genuine gratitude to people who have entertained them for many years; part of this is due to certain dynamics present in Giant Bomb's dying days, where the hosts were caught in a bunch of now-detailed struggles with management and took out those frustrations on their audience, and the diehard fans would rail at everyone else for making their dads fight until only the diehards remained, or at least dominated the conversation. In any event, Vinny opened the most recent podcast with an account of how he took his own daughter to The Backrooms with no problems, in what seemed to be a show of support for Klepek.
This situations aren't equivalent, though: Vinny mentioned that his daughter is older—twelve years old as opposed to nine—and that she actively wanted to see The Backrooms. Nevertheless, the move has mobilized the diehards in force with the party line that everyone needs to shut up and if you're not taking your kid to The Backrooms, whether they want to go or not, you're committing child abuse!
Now, before I delve into this, let's take a couple common defenses I've already seen in this discussion off the table:
Read more: Unpopular Opinion 1: It's OK if your kid isn't into the things you like.
In brief: my server upgraded its FTP, and my version of my blogging platform wasn't compatible with it. The long-term solution is to make a switch, but with assistance from a helpful person at my ISP (thank you, George), a short-term solution has been implemented, minus a couple features (comments, for one). The long-term solution will take a bit, though, as it involves a bit of prep work, and there's a lot going on in my life currently.
In the interim, though: I've got a small backlog of posts on recent - well, semi-recent - controversies in gaming. A three-part series! Call it a mini-Blaugust!
There's someone combing through this site and my social media in a desperate bid to prove that I leaked material from one of my professional projects. That's a fool's errand, because, uh, I didn't leak anything. I'm not exactly new at this. You don't get hired if you breach confidentiality. I can weather life without ever knowing the fleeting approval posting NDA material would get me from 4chan. Despite this, someone is as of this writing going "look! look! look what they're doing!" really hard on Microsoft Teams.
To assist in the "look! look!"s, I've compiled a list of the worst behavior recently evidenced on this blog.
- I posted that I played Final Fantasy II relatively recently. I may not have been on an original Famicom while playing.
- For the purposes of discussing some odd Game of the Year choices, I scanned and posted some pages from a 1995 issue of a puzzle magazine without the publisher's express permission.
- I referred to the music in Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters as "dorky."
- I also referred to that GamesRadar reporter who was caping for the misogyny in that Bloober interview as a "dumbass," but let's be honest: they were being a complete dumbass.
- Not currently on the blog, but upcoming: I bought a PS5 recently. The first game I bought on it was The Casting of Frank Stone. I have previously mentioned that I bought a DS for Lunar: Dragon Song and a gaming PC for NightCry.
- I have a note back on the "best games I played in 2025" post stating that the post was incomplete and that I'd remove said note when the post was finished. I, uh, may never have gotten around to removing that warning. It was originally there because there were a couple images locked up on my Switch that I had to post. I kept it around because I was planning on adding a big aside on Lumines Arise that ended up being too long a haul just to say, "eh, the game's okay". I think the post has now slouched toward completion. The note remains scandalously up as of this writing, though.
- I once had a yellow Labrador (now passed, sadly) who got into a bark fight with Stephen King's Corgi. A family member wanted to see Stephen King's house, the Corgi (Marlowe) was on the front steps when we drove by, and my yellow Lab poked her head out the window to give him a piece of her mind. He ran to the sidewalk and eagerly engaged her in debate. Tabitha King (very nice) had to come out and pull Marlowe away from the (solely verbal) argument. I don't think I've mentioned this incident on the blog, but I think it should be noted in any accounting of my suspect activity.
- I have a number of posts on otome games. This isn't nefarious, but based on this person's activity on my social media, it really, really freaks them out.
Please make note of any other activity that should be reported in the comments.
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