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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I'm saying hardcores are the most turned off by lack of quality. And among non-hardcores there are a much higher % that don't care about quality.

Hardcore fans are defined by their slavish devotion to some IP, if any group especially lacks taste it is hardcore fans. The tasteful enjoyers move on from a product when quality declines, the cultlike fans are the ones still buying iteration 37 even though quality went down the drain

A poor definition of hardcore if I've ever seen it. Hardcore fans are pioneers who discern what is the value early on and then police the ip into quality. Hardcore fans kept super smash bros melee relevant long after all its successor games faded from memory because it is simply better.

That's the opposite of how it actually works. When Game of Thrones' quality was declining, it was the hardcore book fans that dipped out first (and even started pissing contests about which season was the one where things started going downhill). The "tasteful enjoyers" didn't realize there was anything wrong with the show until the very end.

You can see the same pattern with every franchise.

I'm saying hardcores are the most turned off by lack of quality.

Are they? Hardcore fans can be very persnickety, but they'll also grade their favorite IPs on a curve. This is the sort of thing where it's hard to generalize with confidence, but I've been involved in Star Wars fandom since I was like twelve, and looking back one of the things that stands out is the extent to which me and my fellow Star Wars devotees would heap praise on material that would struggle to get a passing grade if it didn't have "Star Wars" on the cover.

It used to be much harder to get any kind of decent nerd content. We had to love whatever shit they gave us, it was the only hope of getting any more.

We have the luxury these days of being able to say that it sucks and can just go consume different nerd content.

My personal experience also matches this take.

I can enjoy media related to my favorite IPs that are objectively mediocre or even bad in various ways, as long as the IP itself is treated well by the media.

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