Why does fandom get so much hate?

[Akira Diamond]

First of all, I'm not trying to start a war or anything, I'm genuinely curious about what you guys' opinion are on this
You're probably wondering why I suddenly decided to start this topic, and this will (hopefully) answer that question;
So it all started this morning when I decided to listen to Eiki's PoFV theme and I found this one YT comment talking about how fandom destroyed Eiki's character and then went into this thread where people were talking about how the Fandom likes to ruin characters, regardless of how they act in the original works/game.
Another example of this being Kaguya where she's portrayed as a NEET in Fandom or Flandre where she is portrayed as a Lunatic killing machine, which in canon, she really isn't.
My question being, why does people hate the fandom interpretations so much? I get that it changes the characters and whatnot but to go as far as saying "HURR DURR THIS RUINS MY CHARACTER", I think it goes a bit over the line. What do you guys think? Should the fandom interpretations get this much hate?

Edited April 19, 2022 by Akira Diamond

[Isaac]

I think it depends on how the characters are being portrayed. I completely understand the people who don't like the fandom if their favourites are being dumbed down to bad memes. I feel the same way too which is why I don't interact with them much apart from this site and with some people on discord.

I think the main issue is that if characters are portrayed as something by the fandom for too long, they will be portrayed like that forever in other games. I could name a lot of my favourites that haven't actually been appreciated at all.

Edited April 19, 2022 by Isaac

[Akira Diamond]

I personally don't mind them really. For example, I think it's hilarious that Meiling is portrayed as a Narcoleptic guard keeper because Reimu and Marisa aside, no one is stupid enough to enter the SDM while Sakuya is around. It really comes down to personal opinion which is why I decided to start this forum.

[Isaac]

Those types of portrayals like you mentioned with Meiling and Kaguya aren't too bad.

The ones that I absolutely can't stand are the people who use insensitive or nsfw content to make bad jokes. Apart from songs or games, I don't type in anything touhou related on YouTube cause I get awful recommendations after of characters with inappropriate thumbnails. These people give the fandom a bad reputation.

Edited April 19, 2022 by Isaac

[Akira Diamond]

7 minutes ago, Isaac said:

The ones that I absolutely can't stand are the people who use insensitive or nsfw content to make bad jokes. Apart from songs or games, I don't type in anything touhou related on YouTube cause I get awful recommendations after of characters with inappropriate thumbnails. These people give the fandom a bad reputation.

Oh, I haven't seen those before. I was mainly talking about the level of the Kaguya and Meiling fanon perspectives which people seem to really dislike. Compared to that, the ones I mentioned doesn't seem bad after all

[Isaac]

23 minutes ago, Akira Diamond said:

Oh, I haven't seen those before. I was mainly talking about the level of the Kaguya and Meiling fanon perspectives which people seem to really dislike. Compared to that, the ones I mentioned doesn't seem bad after all

Yeah those perspectives aren't bad enough for me to dislike them that much, but I totally get that some people would. Maybe I should use more characters as examples to show what portrayals I'm not a fan of.

I think it's great that you haven't encountered that stuff I mentioned. I'd still be careful around youtube and twitter to avoid those awful people.

Edited April 19, 2022 by Isaac

[Gou the frog]

Allow me to go of,

Unfunny jokes and Gatekeeping

First of all, people might go a bit overboard with the characters in this case, Meiling and Kaguya. I don't really mind if you make the jokes with your friend or with the people on the internet albeit unfunny and annoying. Things start to go downhill once they shoved the joke down through you throat. There's a certain individual in the Touhou fandom that likes to gatekeep content; ruining the fun and characters. His sole purpose is to annoy people and be a obnoxious troll. I'm not really fond of the  (          )guy. He just want reactions, there seems to be a few species that like this kind of content.   

Fan works that brings out the youkai aspect too much

There's a fan work that brings out the maximum overdrive level; "Koshi Koshi Heart Throbbing Adventure" mainly know as KKHTA. I don't recommended you reading that if you don't want to get your favorite character to be brutally K.O. (It's even more brutal than Mortal Kombat) A selective amount of people try to milk the trend and makes the people from outside of Touhou to be uncomfortable. Heck, there're people on the youtube section, going off with a "joke" to watch this, giving off uncomfortable vibe for the newcomers and for the curious people. Regarding KKHTA, there's also a japanese fan work similar to this. (I don't really remember, thank god) The more tamer version "Osana Reimu" also hated, since the people assume that the story was emotional. Thus, making fan cry. But as we all know, anything popular gets milk to death and overused. So, the people start to hate the fan work. There's another one that's called "SuikaKasen" which I don't know about.

NSFW Dojinshi and Mommy memes and Fumos 

12 hours ago, Isaac said:

The ones that I absolutely can't stand are the people who use insensitive or nsfw content to make bad jokes. Apart from songs or games, I don't type in anything touhou related on YouTube cause I get awful recommendations after of characters with inappropriate thumbnails. These people give the fandom a bad reputation.

Exactly like Isaac said, they bring bad reputation to the fandom. There is a channel called "XE3G weeb" who milk every single trend that comes to the fandom. "TouHouWiafu1" is also one of them but dedicated to "Mommy memes". I can't stand these fellas, they are the bad apples of the community. (Pun intended). 

About the fumos, they are overpriced and sometime come us bootlegs. Not to mention most of them are only exclusive in Japan. It's just dolls with Touhou character on it. The circles once again begin to rotate: those who have the fumo will make fun of those who don't have it and those who make it theirselves spreading wild fire.

Elitists?

I'm not sure about this one but there's seems to be some people affected by it: the trigger word being "EEEH? Easy Mode?, How Lame! Only Kids Play In Easy Mode" a popular one to set flames to the people outside and inside. This catchphrase is from IOSYS "Overdrive".

 

In summary, there're good things and bad things as well in the fandom like Yin & Yang. People tend to focus more on the bad things resulting the fandom to riddled with hate once in a while.  Don't forget that there're people who likes to focus on the good things translating to new fans of Touhou.

[CountVonNumenor]

3 hours ago, Gou the frog said:

There's a certain individual in the Touhou fandom that likes to gatekeep content; ruining the fun and characters. His sole purpose is to annoy people and be a obnoxious troll. I'm not really fond of the  (          )guy. He just want reactions, there seems to be a few species that like this kind of content.

Yeah, very much seems to be a troll. I guess nobody really cared enough to address this example until now, and I started shaking the water a bit recently about him. 

 

3 hours ago, Gou the frog said:

There's a fan work that brings out the maximum overdrive level; "Koshi Koshi Heart Throbbing Adventure" mainly know as KKHTA.

I have never watched KKHTA. I found out about the existence of that series through TVtropes. Not knowing what it is, I decided to read the synopsis and the tropes associated. What can I say is that I did not really like it at all. It seemed way too gruesome, way too graphic, and something I really wished I could forget I saw. Just reading what happened to Ran and Chen is enough to put off a lot of people. Randomly seeing a few short clips presenting various deaths from the show made it look even more graphic and gruesome, and so I decided to just stay far from it. However, it seems like there are people who unironically like this series. I don't know if they actually like it, or it it is "sunken cost fallacy". 

Bonus round for (potentially) graphic and controversial: Zounouse and his doujins. I will only say one thing: canned human meat (of the outsiders, not the villagers)

 

3 hours ago, Gou the frog said:

The more tamer version "Osana Reimu" also hated, since the people assume that the story was emotional. Thus, making fan cry.

I did not know there are people who hate Osana Reimu. I personally never watched it, but I heard lots of praise about it, since it is apparently very well written and emotional. To me, it is just shocking how quickly Joyful can change the tone of his work, going from an emotional trainwreck like Osana Reimu to creating  the extremely light-hearted Three Fairies SAY YA! music video from Shinra-Bansho. 

 

4 hours ago, Gou the frog said:

Exactly like Isaac said, they bring bad reputation to the fandom. There is a channel called "XE3G weeb" who milk every single trend that comes to the fandom.

Thing is XG3E is not just milking the trends. He actually is the creator of the "I want mommy" meme, as he is the one with the oldest video on that format (or at least he is the oldest ones I have seen), just in the first days of January this year. I had the feeling everyone copied him afterwards. And it is not just about shitposting. That would be easy to just brush off. His attitude is a little bit questionable - like today he says "I am feeling ashamed of myself for shitposting" to "I have come to accept my shitposting fate, and embraced the cringe" to [insert horny thought about Reisen]. First time when he apologized, people took the bait. I personally (almost) took it too, even if I kept a raiser eyebrow. In the end, it was unfortunate that I was right, just a few days later.

 

4 hours ago, Gou the frog said:

About the fumos, they are overpriced and sometime come us bootlegs. Not to mention most of them are only exclusive in Japan. It's just dolls with Touhou character on it. The circles once again begin to rotate: those who have the fumo will make fun of those who don't have it and those who make it theirselves spreading wild fire.

The Fumo situation is quite funny, especially since it came as a surprise. But here is the background as I understood it

• in late August 2020, AmAmi put an announcement for the sale of these plush companions - around 370 plushies of 16 variations 
• the sale was supposed to last 3 weeks, but the offer was exhausted in mere minutes (20 minutes as a whole, counting AmiAmi crashing from the amount of traffic)
• many people left unsatisfied, calling for mismanagement of the website, too few plushies put on sale and scalpers/bots that managed to buy multiple Fumo while others lost them from the shopping cart literally when they were about to pay for the product
• around the same time of this sale, there has been another event that was negatively received - the Roblox server "Become Fumo" was featured in a relatively big sized "normie" YouTube channel, which brought more attention towards the server and the plushies
• naturally, along with the reasons I have already mentioned, people have put the blame on "normies" and this new wave of people for what happened
• second Fumo sale on AmiAmi took place in October
• this time, a bit of a larger stock has been put on sale, but the problems repeated - the whole stock (around 400 plushies) was exhausted in literally 3 minutes

You may ask why so little Fumo are put on sale, knowing there is an ever increasing demand for them. Officially, the explanation is that they are partially hand-made, and so it takes a while for one to be done. Another explanation, more towards conspiracy theory, is that this low number is don on purpose, in order to create artificial scarcity. Or, another explanation that is even more of a tinfoil hat moment, is that the Japanese community simply hates us, those outside JP, which explains why they do not translate most of their stuff and seemingly want to keep it for themselves; that fact that the West got into the fandom and merch being completely accidental. 

[_.Mevs]

Tbh, i think that are only people that wanna be right about everything and think their opinion is the coolest while other people are cringe

Everyone want to be the "cool guy" about something and just disagree about everything to be the different ones

Those people ruin any fun

Edited December 2, 2022 by _.Mevs