Beating the trope to death, in our party of 6, we have 5 PCs who are either legit orphans or have lost their parents to various causes. Only one person, the wizard, currently has parents and while the party was discussing our plans to head to a different country to look for information, the wizard had just mentioned that he would like to stop by his parents’ house and let them know that he was going pretty far away when following sass transpired.
Rouge: “Okay, so we’ll go back and let mommy and daddy know that you’re going to be leaving the country.”
Wizard: “Not like you would know what that is like.”
After I tweeted this, Coldstone contacted me and agreed to donate $10,000 to Inner City Arts. I just received word from Inner City Arts that the payment has gone through. I’m glad Coldstone did the right thing!
Everyone agrees! Your intestines squirming around like eels in your belly is horrifying!
IM SORRY THEY FUCKING WHAT NOW?
The racks even have hooks to keep them from squirming right off and onto the floor apparently. They desperately want to escape our bodies
Intestines are muscles, and function involuntarily. If your muscles did not squirm around, then they wouldn’t be able to move food through them, thus you wouldn’t gain any nutrients from anything you eat, and the food would spoil and make you sick. I agree the squirmy wormies are a bit unsettling, but hey it’s actually really good for you! Your intestines work so hard for it! Please give them a little love.
(My DM had set up a situation where he would attack us all with a spell that deafened us and made us drop our weapons. The plan was, when we were retrieving them, he would attack us with multiple surprise attacks. Before he could put this into action…)
I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.
Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.
The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.
Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.
Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.
Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.
By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.
There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.
1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.
2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.
3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.
So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.
this is great!
It also complies with the “killer theory”. I don’t remember exact names, but people in online games are generally divided into four groups:
- explorers research game opportunities, they don’t mind playing alone, usually don’t hurt others, but sometimes they can exploit game weaknesses
- achievers play to win, to gain points, popularity. They need both explorers who know all perks, and socializers - as their followers and support
- socializers - they play because their friends are all here, they like to be together, they are usually most of the players, they can be easily led astray
- killers - for some reasons they come to hurt others, be it hurtful remarks in the chats or disturbing behavior
A tiny amount of killers is manageable and even profitable. (All four types are important). Killers raise stakes for the achievers, give socializers something to talk about in their groups and give explorers incentives to invent something new.
Angered explorers are the top predators here - but they must be seriously offended, and since they play on the outskirts of the game, killers rarely fight them. Killers usually go for the weakest (socializers) or most noticeable (achievers).
But if the game, by its design, somehow attracts to much killers, who scare socializers, leave achievers without their rewards and - by choking the environment - make it boring for the explorers (what I gonna explore here? ten kinds of dick-related-nicknames? Pff!) - they effectively kill the game.
This is awesome. In fandom terms, I think whether a fandom tends to be, in general, a pretty decent place to be with a small tire fire here or there, or one big flaming dumpster fire, probably has a lot to do with who the 1% in that fandom are. If you’re unlucky enough to be in a fandom where a couple of the tire-fire people are the ones who run the exchanges, or the most influential shippers of your particular small pairing, or the big BNF, you are screwed. Even though the vast majority of the fandom undoubtedly still consists of sane and decent people, it’s going to be really hard to avoid the 1%, and they’ll actively drive people out.
On the other hand, some of my best times in fandom have been in calm, sane corners of fandoms that I knew had raging dumpster fires going elsewhere, but I never had to deal with them because my part of the fandom was quite nice.
Large fandoms are a mixed blessing that way … more and bigger tire fires (and more visible to outsiders), but also, with more people and more ships, it’s easier to find cozy little pockets of sanity in which to nest.
