#once again angry about the don’t maintag negativity rule

[lilyminer]

I honestly hate to bring a more negative topic into fandom discussion again but there’s been something that’s been a constant in the dsmp fandom for as long as I’ve been in it and I just feel like having a little rant. Don’t mind me if you’re not here for that.

If you’ve been in the fandom for any amount of time (or at least since I joined late 2020) fun fandom catchphrases such as “the fandom is dying” “the smp is going downhill” and “the fandoms got so much worse” have surely been a common occurrence. How very fun and quirky :|

This kinda talk has always aggravated me so much and I think I know how to verbalize why now. The dsmp was a very strange internet phenomenon for a short while. Hell, all three of my very non-nerdy siblings got very into it. At a point it was practically everyone’s thing. My question is where the fuck do ppl think it’s going past that? Certainly not up, and very unlikely everyone from that wave would love it forever. The fandom isn’t dying it’s losing weight. At no point would any experienced fandom nerd ever call what we have a dead or dying fandom.

And sure it’s upsetting when a fandom begins to split and form separate bubbles, but what do you expect of such an enormous group of people? If a person thinks the fandom is worse now honestly I’d just say they aren’t curating their experience thoroughly enough, I guess that’s harder on Twitter and Tiktok but don’t blame the whole fandom for that shit. And especially don’t host “I’m not in this fandom anymore but I’m still mad at it” discussions in our fandom tags. (Looking at a select few tiktok videos I’ve seen recently)

I guess my main point is that if you looked at fandom popularity as a graph people are so obsessed with the popularity being a perfect straight line forever or even getting more popular as it goes but that is just not how everything works. Especially an independent creative project based on individual peoples motivation. I’m gonna get a bit existential here but oh “The fandom has just been slowly dying as it goes on :’(” . . . Yeah and so are you. Slow decay of things over time is quite literally the most natural progression for anything. There’s erosion and decay until only the most resilient pieces are left. And I say that with all the love of two years of the most passion and inspiration I’ve ever experienced for a fandom in my heart. We live, we experience, we change, that’s just how our silly brains work. Oh god, this is getting way too deep for a rant about minecraft men but god damn it decay is not something to fear. Let the fandom go through its life cycle, why would you want to focus on the erosion when you could focus on how beautifully polished what is left is becoming? Its ok to have a bad experience with a fandom and be angry about it but projecting that back at the fandom in such a general and aggressive way especially from outside of it always does more harm then good. Please stop telling me my community and greatest comfort is dying, we’re right here.