The Tumblr Files - Official Thread - An exposé on the media and people that destroyed the Internet

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Newcomer 42 said:
Really? How does it feel to be the exception to the rule? Are you a fan of Shadow? He likes firearms, bikes and I presume hot chicks too (but he couldn't be seen with those around for obvious reasons).
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I'm a weird contradiction. I'm into a bunch of series that are notorious redflags and I'm not really affected by them. Shadow is one of my all time favorite fictional characters, but I hate almost everything about him that's been written after SA2. His character has been so warped beyond recognition by bad writing and memes that I'd written him off as a lost cause until Sonic movie 3 and Shadow Generations reversed the damage a bit.
 
Kari Kamiya said:
There's less crying in their so-called qweer utopia Revolutionary Girl Utena. It's almost like if you take away character personalities and motivations, you leave behind a void, and voids are just gaping holes that will weep whatever substance you keep pouring into it.

If you want characters to cry, you gotta earn that shit, otherwise they're just crybabies.
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Haven't watched that one yet, not sure if I'll do so, but there's no way the characters here are as whiny...
I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis said:
It's almost like they were inspired by a certain cartoon about sentient rocks or something.
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Because fucking Steven Universe is cancer, although I'm sure that if SU wasn't here, the wokes would have found something else, as these are to blame.

Channel Catfish said:
Maybe if I ever have time and more importantly the willpower I'd do a writeup about the rise of the counterculture that emerged as SJWism ramped up and mutated into the globohomo of today.
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I would say REEsetera contaminated indie gaming forever, as they're connected to nearly every fucking indie game and many AAA games since the mid-2010s.

I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis said:
I know about GamerGate (obviously), all the "Triggered SJW" compilations that went viral, how /pol/ rose to power and overtook 4Chan's zeitgeist, and I think that's about it.
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I thought that 4chan got infected with wokeism since the Gamergate inanity and never recovered. There's 8chan and the likes, but all of those have the same issue.
It bears repeating, but Mother 3 is a good litmus test on how society is going. Initially, players recognized that the game makes fun of crossdressers (trannies weren't that many back then) and how a particular scene implies that one of those abused Lucas, the teenager MC, all played for laughs. Today, the main view is that the game is tranny-friendly (except for that particular scene that's considered transphobia).

Since that terrible event of 2018, mental insanity seemingly multiplied in the 'net.

A Pale Shadow said:
Shadow is one of my all time favorite fictional characters, but I hate almost everything about him that's been written after SA2.
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He should have died in SA2, or in the Shadow game perhaps. Afterwards, it's clear SEGA doesn't know what to do with him, as he's like Sonic but better, plus he can actually drive (and is old enough to drive!). Hell, Shadow technically has a stable job, working for the government, while Sonic is a homeless hobo who crashes at Tails' home.

A Pale Shadow said:
His character has been so warped beyond recognition by bad writing and memes that I'd written him off as a lost cause until Sonic movie 3 and Shadow Generations reversed the damage a bit.
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He's been made edgier and more hostile because otherwise there wouldn't be any friction with Sonic to cause drama. Funny how Knuckles used to have these traits. As for fixing him, these two made him go back to how he used to be. While in Archie Sonic comics Shadow eventually got over his grouchiness and became a kind man (with nasty streak sometimes), videogame Sonic is a Vegeta clone. IDW Shadow is even worse, as he's constantly shat on for some reason.
 
Newcomer 42 said:
I would say REEsetera contaminated indie gaming forever, as they're connected to nearly every fucking indie game and many AAA games since the mid-2010s.
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Even then, Resetera is only a continuation of what NeoGAF started. GAF at its peak was sort-of a gaming industry "secret club" with how so many industry figures and journos used it, and how you needed a verified eMail address to even make an account.
I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis said:
Minecraft's history pre-2011 is something I feel I need to look into at some point, as Notch was both a Something Awful goon, and advertised the game on /v/. As for ResetEra, it ultimately just continued what NeoGAF started after that site imploded. Things like the internet's obsession with the industry, industry politics, sales numbers, business decisions, etc. all started on there. I would recommend watching MagicMush's video where he briefly talks about GAF to get yourself up to speed.
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Eventually, ERA got bad enough with their totalitarianism that some people decided to break away from the site and start their own like Famiboards. Off the top of my head, I really can't think of anyone who uses ERA these days, let alone anyone who would want to so much as associate with it, given it's so mired in controversy. It may be only a matter of time before another incident like the one that happened to GAF happens again.
 
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I would say that one thing to keep in mind is that in its infancy, the 'net was mostly populated by nerds. With the democratization of the Internet, power-hungry maniacs eventually stepped in, which is why doxxing and increasing censorship began increasing as time passed. During the cough of the 2020s, the net got even worse as more arbitrary regulations were implemented as the hysteria was artificially extended, over, over and over. As for the commie stuff being a thing since the late 60s, I concur. If you know where to look, you can find the same clichés even in the strangest places, but the difference is that they held back long ago. One random example: The campy Batman of 1966, of all things. Some saved interviews had Adam West lament that the scripts got worse and lead to the cancellation of the show, but what they don't tell is that by Season 3, Batgirl is introduced, and she has all of the clichés of an insufferable girl power Mary Sue of today: Ranging from super-competence, to her inability to commit mistakes, to the heroes and villains randomly failing to make her stand out, and so on. The loss of quality is noticeable.

Another case you wouldn't think of suffering this: Duck Avenger, or Paperinik for the Italians, a somewhat obscure take on Batman, long before Darkwing Duck was a thing, and way more fun and vicious than the former (he was so famous, that in the 90s he got a serious reboot that is on par with the best of superhero comics!). Long story short, at some point Daisy got in the superhero business, but she does so by somehow having Donald being clumsier and dumber than ever, while he's supposed to be hilariously competent as Paperinik. Fans didn't like that so her character was shoved aside.

Fast-forward to 2016 to Current Year, and now the commies no longer restrain themselves anymore, throwing you in your face how much they hate you, and how special their snowflakes are. 2017 Ducktales is a good example, where the super-special Webby Duck is completely different from the original character by being a super-competent le-quirkly insufferable girl and whose presence makes the boys randomly become stupid and clumsy to make her stand out more. Oh, and the fucking Marvel movie quips everywhere, but of course. Even the newest Disney product, Zootopia 2, has the formerly nimble fox act clumsy for the same damn reason.

Videogames also suffer from the above but I would say it's even worse due to how they work compared to movies and comics, plus the exaggerated costs of production. See the massive failure that was Kill the Justice League, Concord, Forespoken, and many more.
 
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Blarmed&Dangerous said:
And I'll say, virtually none of you realize how bad the situation really is. People point out shit like the NEJM saying "birthing persons" like they don't know what a woman is as some kind of recent scientific cataclysm, but we're forty years passed papers appearing in mainstream journals declaring that capitalism prevents us from knowing 'real math' that will let us realize the revolution. Josh mentioned that the Wikimedia Foundation is a money laundering NGO, but most people don't realize that your donations go to pay for black women to run YouTube channels with 13 views talking about how power defines reality and scarcity only exists because capitalism has convinced us that entropy exists, and only if people could achieve true Class Consciousness they'd realize that literally nothing is impossible: not infinite resources, not a world without any work by anyone ever, not men turning into women on a whim - a true infinite utopia at the end of history, only kept from us because not enough people "believe."
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Foucault is one of the greatest creations of the central banking class. Because there is nowhere to go but down for anyone already at the top, change is negative. Stagnation is preferable to any disruptive innovation. The "miracle" of Foucault is the ability of critical theory garbage to perpetually freeze academia so that it does nothing meaningful. Certain sections can even be unfrozen, put to some narrow technocratic task, and frozen again. This is the ideal state of academia for evil freaks.

2025 is eighty years removed from postwar ideology. This is important because no ideology lasts longer than eighty years. It was easy to forsee that 2010 onwards would be a time of increasing upheaval year by year. The lack of a frontier meant that the burden on young men could only ever increase, and disaffected young men drive fascism. Multicultural neolib utopia could go on forever only in an environment of women and faggots. This is why economies began moving faster in anti-family directions from the 1970s onward and also why the Enfaggening of media began by the late aughts. The purpose was to shrink the coming population of young men and, failing that, to make them act like women.

Instrumental to all of this was the transition from the "greatest generation" to boomers in senior leadership roles. The reason you could still have racist caricatures in major movies as late as 2008 is because older people still appreciated humor like that. But boomers were programmed for cultural revolution, and most truly degenerate policies could not be implemented until boomers occupied important technocratic positions.
 
Newcomer 42 said:
He's been made edgier and more hostile because otherwise there wouldn't be any friction with Sonic to cause drama. Funny how Knuckles used to have these traits. As for fixing him, these two made him go back to how he used to be. While in Archie Sonic comics Shadow eventually got over his grouchiness and became a kind man (with nasty streak sometimes), videogame Sonic is a Vegeta clone. IDW Shadow is even worse, as he's constantly shat on for some reason.
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Sonic Team in general seems totally unconcerned with character writing or any type of internally consistent lore. They just lean into memes and flanderize everybody. Every character has been hit by this, Shadow has just been hit the hardest. And maybe it stands out to me because he's my favorite.
 
SHITTAHS CLOGGED! said:
2025 is eighty years removed from postwar ideology. This is important because no ideology lasts longer than eighty years. It was easy to forsee that 2010 onwards would be a time of increasing upheaval year by year. The lack of a frontier meant that the burden on young men could only ever increase, and disaffected young men drive fascism. Multicultural neolib utopia could go on forever only in an environment of women and faggots. This is why economies began moving faster in anti-family directions from the 1970s onward and also why the Enfaggening of media began by the late aughts. The purpose was to shrink the coming population of young men and, failing that, to make them act like women.
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That's probably why Yurop is pushing a war against Russia so much, as to distract everyone from the elephant in the room... But you can't start a war with gays and women and expect anything but a total defeat, so I dunno if we'll see a sudden pivot towards the other direction.

The_Bladder_Splatter said:
Technically all this gender nonesense started being discussed in colleges around the 80s, it just became mainstream in the mid 2010s
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True, but the gril power inanity started in the late 60s.

A Pale Shadow said:
Sonic Team in general seems totally unconcerned with character writing or any type of internally consistent lore. They just lean into memes and flanderize everybody. Every character has been hit by this, Shadow has just been hit the hardest. And maybe it stands out to me because he's my favorite.
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To be fair, they don't have to care as each new game resets the status quo and doesn't matter what happens: In Forces, Eggman took over the world and then the occupation forces simply dissolved into thin air once the game is over (no matter how much IDW Sonic tries to think otherwise). If they had RPG games or something, they could show a little more care towards worldbuilding, but they don't (characters don't even have proper ages anymore, kek). For not to mention the state of the Sonic fandom makes it a necessary evil the exaggerated mandates from SEGA. Maybe with a bit of hope Sonic 2025 game will start changing this? Sonic Frontiers tried hard to imply characters will start changing instead of stagnating... But I'm not so sure about that. Team Sonic has stopped caring about any character who's not Sonic (except for Shadow in Sonic Gen remake).
 
Newcomer 42 said:
For not to mention the state of the Sonic fandom makes it a necessary evil the exaggerated mandates from SEGA.
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I don't really have the time with my life to go into this level of depth, but I would love to make a deep dive of my own like this topic about the Sonic fandom, what the internet did to it, and why Sonic fans are so goddamned weird even among the normal degeneracy of terminally online fandom. I have a pet theory that a big part of it is how innately fragmented Sonic as a franchise is due to Sega's scattershot approach to the IP.

Is Sonic a lightly edgy 90's cool Mickey Mouse? Is he a resistance fighter in a post-apocalyptic dystopia? Hot blooded shonen hero? Looney Toones comedy protagonist? Frontman for a band? Does he live with a group of live action humans on our earth? The answer is yes, because Sega basically totally reboots the series somehow every five years or so. The exact same thing goes for the gameplay, it's like they spin a roulette wheel at the start of every new main series game. As a result, Sonic the Hedgehog could be seen as at least half a dozen distinct and totally independent series, all with the same label. When you move online with this, it can cause multiple groups of completely different people to smash together in one space.

Obviously this doesn't account for all of it, there's also the bright colors, simple characters, easy to replicate visual design, deeper lore for those willing to dig and sperg out, and (usually) simple gameplay loop, But somehow I feel like none of this fully accounts for it. There's some X factor that even I after decades with this series can't put my finger on. What makes Sonic this way?

This is going to sound completely insane, but a decade ago I think a weird little fan project called Sonic Dreams Collection touched on it. It used bizarre game design choices rather than words, but I think that game began to point the light at this invisible sickness in the core of Sonic.
 
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A Pale Shadow said:
I don't really have the time with my life to go into this level of depth, but I would love to make a deep dive of my own like this topic about the Sonic fandom, what the internet did to it, and why Sonic fans are so goddamned weird even among the normal degeneracy of terminally online fandom. I have a pet theory that a big part of it is how innately fragmented Sonic as a franchise is due to Sega's scattershot approach to the IP.
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There's an article talking about the then-absolute state of the Sonic fandom, and that was a big cause of it. It's a good place to start with 20/20 hindsight.
 
A Pale Shadow said:
I don't really have the time with my life to go into this level of depth, but I would love to make a deep dive of my own like this topic about the Sonic fandom, what the internet did to it, and why Sonic fans are so goddamned weird even among the normal degeneracy of terminally online fandom. I have a pet theory that a big part of it is how innately fragmented Sonic as a franchise is due to Sega's scattershot approach to the IP.
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One idea I've had for a post Tumblr-files thread is a full retrospective/history on the Sonic franchise, but told from a Lolcow/Internet history perspective. I'd go through the entire history of the franchise, talking about the people who built it, and also talk about the fans that had a major effect on both the fandom and later the IP as a whole.
 
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Kari Kamiya said:
There's an article talking about the then-absolute state of the Sonic fandom, and that was a big cause of it. It's a good place to start with 20/20 hindsight.
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Wow, if people back then knew how bad things would get... Trying too hard and being too safe at the same time explains the state of the fanbase and man of Sonic's latest games. Ian Flynn loves trying waaay too hard and still tries to downplay it at times by making jokes, which was bad at times in the Archie comic and it's downright terrible in IDW due to how jarring and inconsistent the writing feels (you can quickly notice which characters can be hurt by third parties and those who exist in a limbo), which makes me think of a MCU movie sometimes. Then there are other issues like the troonism, games taking too long to release these days, everything about Ken Penders and Chris-chan and so on.
No wonder why Sega took the easy way out and focused on the blue hedgehog and ignored everything else.
 
I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis said:
One idea I've had for a post Tumblr-files thread is a full retrospective/history on the Sonic franchise, but told from a Lolcow/Internet history perspective. I'd go through the entire history of the franchise, talking about the people who built it, and also talk about the fans that had a major effect on both the fandom and later the IP as a whole.
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The two big ones I think you'd have to tackle is the Deviant Art and the OC/fanart side of the fandom and Arin Hanson. I think the art side did things is...pretty self explanatory. Arin Hanson on the other hand I think has shaped the discourse around the series for a decade whether he intended to or not. He's bad at games and a shit commentator, but clueless kids who aren't old enough to remember the game's he plays take his word as authoritative gospel.
 
Even though all 4 files are done, I would definitely like to keep this thread alive somehow. Remember, the 4 cases are meant to double as a foundation for the rest of the site to build upon. Fill free to do your own research. The stuff we uncovered about Undertale/Toby and co. is a good example of that. There are also a few smaller things I'm open to writing about in the future that I wasn't able to cover in the cases, or further elaborate upon that I didn't previously.

While discussions about how this stuff stems back to post WWII ideology/colleges/etc. is neat and all, I feel it would be a better fit for its own thread. This is mainly about dissecting the cultural aspects of the Internet and the media that influences it.
 
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