This is something I find fascinating about modern media ~consumption~. I'm very used to watching a movie or playing some game and then moving on. Very rarely will I interact with a ~community~, even less if not counting the mere act of suscribing to a guy to see his new stuff.
I find it weird to see all these ultraniche communities that keep rattling about the same videogame for years and years on end. This probably has to do with many of these being franchises (it does make sense to have a resource that big for the many installments), but you see this with one-off games like Ultrakill and such things too.
I do not hate the concept of having niche communities, I even like that, but they seem less justified when there's only one thing to discuss. It seems to me the attention economy has created an incentive for artists to create communities for their one-off project, and since it's just one thing they end up veering into offtopic that opens the gate to things like this topic discusses. After all, if you open a discord for your "community" and it's just a channel with updates then it's not really worth it that much, is it? You can just check the changelogs regularly... So the admins, to avoid people forgetting, open offtopic channels and such.
And since they're so obligated to appear everywhere on every social media platform they end up not just opening a twitter for updates, byt a subreddit as a general discussion forum, and a discird for chatting about it, and a... No matter that maybe a subreddit is completely overkill for a small project, or that there's not that much to chat about.
Or maybe I'm just very used to having other things going on with my life, so I just consume the X and then keep on with my life. But some people build these communities as a replacement for IRL community. It feels surreal sometimes.
To be fair, a lot of these communities surround games that are the only one of that type made rather than being part of a series unlike many triple AAA titles, and many of the reasons why communities spring up around games like this is that many AAA developers do not want to take risks developing games that deviate too much from their established releases. Also, there are a lot of games that were popular series at one point in time but have largely been abanonded by their developers. The Quake series comes to mind.
In the late-90's and early-2000s, Quake was the sibling series to Doom. Now, it has largely been ignored with the exception of Quake Champions a few years ago which tried to make Quake into a boring hero shooter and abandoning all of Quake's core gameplay in the process. Rumors keep surfacing about another Quake single-player release but nothing has been confirmed.
Anyway, what a lot of these game communities like to do is make their own mods or engines for existing games to change or make various quality-of-life/graphical/performance improvements to existing games now that they have been largely abandoned by their developers. I commend these modders and hobbyists for that as they are one of the few ways that old but great games can be kept alive and compatible with newer PCs.
However, the dark side to this is that this opens the gate for troons, as a lot of people who troon out tend to spend large amounts of time online as they put these mods together and release them and they also encounter like-minded people who happen to be troons which reinforces the propensity to troon out and then it becomes a vicious cycle. Now, trooning-out has become just as much of a fixture in the IT/programming community as PC casemods, Linux, custom hardware builds, and scripting.
The bigger picture here, is other than the AGP fetishists, a lot of people in these online communities tend to be loners/introverts IRL with eccentric hobbies or interests. Because they do not quite fit the mold of what "normal" boys or men (For pooners, insert normal girls and women) like, they start thinking they must be inadequate or "failed" males. Many of them have also experienced severe bullying and harassment for being "weird" in school and other places. This is all quite sad and kids can be quite cruel to each other, especially teenagers.
In any case, these sorts of individuals start looking for places that would be accepting of their quirkyness. The trans community is all too willing to accept new converts and then they basically start being groomed to fall even further down the trans rabbithole.
So, this is where we ended up, today. I do not know what happened to the paradigm that we had in the '80s and '90s that it is okay not to have to follow gender stereotypes, as liking stereotypically "feminine" things as a male or stereotypically "masculine" things as a female does not make you less of a man or woman. Now being "gender nonconforming" has a high risk of getting you flagged as "trans" and if you are a kid, you had better hope that your parents do not give you the Jazz Jennings/Gruffin treatment in order to help you "transition".
