Not to be 2015 on main but undertale deserved so much better and I’m still pissed. The soundtrack was incredible and the storyline was captivating and all the art was charming as hell, it had ACTUALLY GOOD humor and top notch character design and the message of the whole game was !!!!! So great!!!! Not to mention it had not one, not two, but SEVEN LGBT CHARACTERS that weren’t taken as jokes and were like explicitly that way!!! Why did undertale get the fate it got!!!!!! I’m so mad!!!!!!!
“it was the fandom! the fandom ruined it” cried the masses, such empty claims, if not outright stupid.
I’ve been on the internet for a long time, seen many fandoms come and go, and believe me when I say the undertale fandom hardly scratches the surface of “bad fandoms”. I say from experience that the fandoms percieved to be the “worst” are dominated by young audiences, especially young girls. bullies need an easy target to make fun of, it’s nothing new. And I’m not saying they are idle targets, because children will happily eat each other to appear “cool”. Many former undertale fans are now part of the naysayers group, as being mean is a domino effect. That’s how bullies are made.
I realize people always bring up a certain, isolated incident of fan entitlement/harassment in the undertale fandom, and that’s a fair argument. But, if we are using harassment as a metric, any other mainstream online game is a ripe contender, so singling out undertale would be ignorant at best and hypocritical at worst.
You need to realize indie games are affected by bullying/cringe culture in particular, because they don’t have the mainstream marketing imprint effect that would have shielded them, giving them a more positive perception. (shoutout for @girakacheezer for making this analysis) so like uh, maybe do not do that.