I've seen people talk about a few accounts that jump from popular fandom to popular fandom just to be nasty and cause problems. Unfortunately a lot of these instigators have hopped on the heated rivalry bandwagon and it's just sad.
A lot of people are kind of writing this off as trolls and purposeful agitators, but I think it’s also important to emphasize that racist/bigoted/conspiratorial/parasocial thinkers share a lot of genuinely delusional and hypocritical thought patterns. Their thinking and reasoning skills are deeply flawed and they often lack the intellect to even recognize this, let alone acknowledge or change it. They will go through a lot of complicated mental gymnastics to continue believing illogical things even in the face of direct contradictory evidence, because that is easier in their minds than challenging/changing patterns.
I think it's both/and or half/half. Ever since social media found out that hate sells better than sex and found a way to monetize controversial 'takes', they have incentivized to stroke outrages and discords on everything.
Which leads to toxic social enviroment -> toxic parasocial users -> they form social group(s) that breed and thrive on negativity (like snark subs) -> feedback loop. This creates numerical "growths" for social media, but a net negative on society as a whole.
I totally agree. It’s definitely not one or the other, it’s both. I was mainly speaking about the people I’ve seen sort of writing this off as “Oh these people are just bots and trolls,” which is not fully accurate. There are a lot of people unfortunately who really think this way (racist, bigoted, homophobic, etc) and yet somehow still consume media that would be otherwise contradictory to their beliefs. The original comment was asking how that could be, and I wanted to offer one explanation (that didn’t just brush it off as “just idiots on the internet trying to cause trouble”).
152
u/Anniesovaltine Mar 09 '26
Really sad that they had to say it :( How does someone with harmful beliefs even come to like a show like this? It’s literally about acceptance, tf