fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6078 ]

[ SECRET POST #6078 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6078 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 32 secrets from Secret Submission Post #869.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
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As you said, this is often the case in longer running fandoms. I guess it has two main reasons - one is the old fans who genuinely are grumpy and elitist about younger fans coming in and doing things differently but the other is younger fans coming in and demanding that this fandom has to cater to them now and what the older fans have been doing for decades is wrong, actually and people don't react kindly to that.

Newer fandoms though? It's primarily the younger fans who tend to get out their pitchforks the second any evil old person (20+) does something they don't like and then whine and cry when they get consquences and try to get out of any responsibility with the "but I'm a MINOR" card. And I can't be fucking bothered with that bullshit.

Both are annoying, but I think there's a fundamental difference in children acting like children (and teenagers who think 20+ is old definitely count as children) and adults acting like children, and what it says about the people acting that way.

Not when the children acting like children is more like children acting like fucking psychos who pretend they don't know bullying is bad and rape/death threats, suicide baiting and other borderline criminal behaviour is not the "teehee I'm just a kid I don't know better uwu" thing they think it is.

...not trying to be sarcastic here, but has that not been children forever? Bullying wasn't invented in the 00s. It just moved online. Kids were just as vicious in the 80s.

I mean... sure? But saying "oh kids where always like that so it's nbd" is kinda like excusing men and boys being sexist/gross towards women/girls by saying "oh boys will be boys". And the main difference betwen kids being bullies in the 80s and kids being bullies now is that the internet and anonymity has made things arguably worse. And I've seen more young fans being major bullies than older fans in most fandoms I've been in.

DA

Bullying is bed, regardless of who is doing it. But adults bullying is worse than kids bullying. Adults, at least, have fully developed brains. They have no excuse whatsoever. Kids doing it is still bad, but not as bad as adults doing it.

There's a level of immature and dumb behaviour I'll expect from teens. I find out some asshole online is 17 I'll roll my eyes and hope they grow up in a few years while blocking them, I find out an asshole online is my age or older? I boggle at how they haven't managed to grow up at all in that time and wonder how they behave and cope irl while also blocking them. Being a dumb kid is something you can grow out of, being an entitled and dumb adult is pathetic and sad.

nayrt

There's annoying, immature behavior, and then there's actively bullying others with vicious personal attacks, doxxing other fans for disagreeing with them about a fucking movie or TV show, and issuing endless death and rape threats at anyone they don't like, and cyberstalking and swatting other fans.

One of the ways kids learn not to be assholes is by having to deal with the consequences of their own asshole behavior, and a lot of the grown-up asshole bullies were asshole bully kids who never had to deal with any consequences for it or were even rewarded for such behavior.

But in order for that 17 year old to truly grow up, it has to be made clear to them that that kind of behavior isn't okay.

People respond to incentives and disincentives. If the incentives for young people encourage them to be assholes, and there's no disincentive for them because all of the adults are shrugging and saying, "eh, they're just kids, no big deal, they'll grow out of it," then those kids are very likely to keep being assholes well into adulthood.

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+billions

I've been involved in Internet fandom for nearly thirty years now. Back in the day, most fandoms had at least a few controlling assholes, but the behavior wasn't usually encouraged, nor was bullying seen as a good thing. Also, even they knew there were lines that they had better not cross or the community would come down on them hard. There was also a time when the dangerous kind of crazies (the stalkers, the doxxers, the death and rape threat makers) were generally stopped or at least given real reason to think about their behavior.

Now, bullying has become the norm, and there are a lot of people who think bullying is a good thing when it's directed at the "correct" person or people.

Yeah, that's a good point. The culture in a lot of fandoms now actively encourages that sort of behavior in younger fans, which increases the likelihood that they won't grow out of it when they become adults.

Can you point out where someone said "it's no big deal"? Kids being bullies is bad, kids were always bullies, and it has always been bad.

It seems however that the point was that adult bullies are different from child bullies, which has not much to do with whether the kids are worse or better than they used to be.

Then someone said "no (they aren't different, because) children are worse than children used to be" but why is that relevant? How did "adult bullies and child bullies are fundamentally different" become an argument about whether children are worse now? Are you saying that makes them the same as mature adults? Why would it?

DA

Personally, I disagree that there's THAT big a difference between teen and adult bullies. I suppose it's slightly more excusable when a kid does it (only slightly, mind you), but I don't think it's a fundamental one. The urge to bully comes from a dark and nasty place regardless of the age of the bully, and I don't think the impact on the victims is fundamentally all that different either.

As another anon said ITT - it doesn't matter at all if the bully is a child or an adult, not to the person getting bullied.

+1. I have nothing against decent people old or young. I find very few decent people in either age range.

I'm not going to interrogate every asshole on the internet to see if they're young enough that their behaviour can be excused by their age. I don't give a shit if you're 14 or 44, and I'm sure as hell not going to waste my time looking it up.

Asshole behaviour is asshole behaviour. You're either old enough to know better, or young enough you shouldn't be there without adult supervision in the first place. Either way, same result.

+1000

+ infinity

I don't give a fuck what your excuse for that behavior is. I only care that you stop.

I mean, neither am I. No one is insisting that you look them up and treat them differently if they act like an asshole to you, which is what you seem to have inferred on your own.

But if you disagree there's a difference at all between being a child and being a childish adult and what that says about someone, I dunno what to say. Especially as you even acknowledge in your reply that "being old enough to know better" (your own responsibility) and "shouldn't be there without adult supervision" (mixed responsibility with someone else) are different things. So we aren't disagreeing, even? A confusing reply.

The point is that whatever difference may exist, it is 100% irrelevant to the asshole behaviour and should not be taken into account.

Again, I do not care if you're being an asshole because Mommy and Daddy shouldn't have let you on the internet, or if you're being an asshole because you're a 45-year-old incel dudebro crying because he can't get laid -- neither of those things matter to the people you're being an asshole to, and it is not their responsibility to take it into account, acknowledge, or deal with it in any way. The only thing that matters to the people you are being an asshole to is the fact that you are being an asshole.

This. To the person getting bullied, it's completely irrelevant whether the person bullying them is an adult or a teen. (If you get down to the legal stuff though, getting bullied by a minor is actually potentially worse because it's even harder to get them to face any legal consequences than when the perpetrator is an adult.)

If it's severe enough - like some cases where it's led to suicide or hospitalization because of suicide attempts, or someone losing a job because of libel - it might be possible to go after the parents for some liability. The minor is committing a crime, so sometimes the parents can be accountable for negligence.

+100

People (who are more forgiving than me, probably) can care about the bullies' immaturity or motivations or sad backstory AFTER the bullying has stopped for good, but only after. Not while it's going on.

So much this! I've been in long-running fandoms and it can go either way. With new fandoms, it's often the younger fans who throw fits about anything they don't like, but I've also seen plenty of instances where manipulative older fans would use the younger fans to attack other fans who did things the older fans didn't like. (Pacific Rim fandom, I'm looking at you.)

SA Either way, it seems like there's always some tribe of assholes who think they own the fandom. Or worse, you get competing tribes of assholes.

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