Plenty Of Highly Intelligent People End Up Getting Sucked In To Cults Because They Just Wanted People

Plenty of highly intelligent people end up getting sucked in to cults because they just wanted people to hang out with. There are antivaxxer nurses. Your ability to act on empirical reason breaks down fast if your social and emotional needs aren't being met.

the concept of fatphobia isn't "skinny people have never ever been shamed or insecure about their bodies ever" but rather "society literally doesn't want fat people to exist at any cost to the point healthcare systems are willing to let fat people die rather than address any other possible medical issue, in addition to facing insults and disgust at every turn socially". online the fact u can't make a body positive or even neutral post without somebody going "but what about us naturally skinny and petite people" is so fucked man

The split physical/mental model of disability is a lot like the gender binary, if you think about it.

For one, the categories are believed to be discrete boxes when in fact they have a LOT of overlap (consider autism/adhd-related dyspraxia - even relatively mild cases can make someone injury-prone enough to justify owning mobility aids just in case and severe cases can be functionally indistinguishable from any other mobility disability - chronic pain and other sensory issues, the fact that sensory processing disorders can sometimes be functionally indistinguishable from not having an affected sense at all, the mental impacts of traumatic brain injuries, and so much more) - depending on how you graph factors around them (comorbidity, noncommittal nonbinary identities based on social alienation, etc.) they might not even be a "full" inverse bell curve but a pretty well flattened one.

For two, the divide is given power by people's belief in it, NOT by any material reality of its existence - which means it's difficult but also critical to criticize people's behavior about it WITHOUT implying or claiming it has inherent merit; you can't just go around pretending that people DON'T act differently depending on what side of the binary they perceive someone as being on, but you also can't just decide that the the fact that people do that as a general thing means all individual people on any given side of that perceptual divide necessarily have the same specific internal experience, and it's totally alien to anyone on the opposite side of it.

I don't give a shit as long as those in need benefit

Not people saying “Fandom has always been like this” in that vent post I made. No. It hasn’t always been like this. Fandom has NEVER been like this until recently and if you were in fandom pre-tumblr purge, pre-twitter, pre-netflix boom, pre-tiktok….then you would fucking know it was nothing like this.

We still had the drive to create. We still sold prints and charms and made zines…but it was never like this.

The introduction of streaming, binge shows that drop all at once, tiktok and vine RIP i still love u vine but you were the beginning of a particularly ugly era) creating this bite sized, quick paced ‘content’ era of creation and it bled out into fucking everything else.

Fandoms didn’t die down when the show ended or the season was over. You didn’t mass unfollow artist, writers or moots just because they changed fandoms. There wasn’t this need to please the algorithm in order for your posts to get seen by people and enjoyed.

Fandoms used to last YEARS. Star Trek is literally the oldest running fandom out there and you got people in there that could care less about the new stuff and still have been happily prancing through their fucking fifty year old fandom today. Hell, even SPN after all it’s fuckups and shitshows has a dedicated fanbase STILL creating tons of art and fic.

There is no patience anymore. No calm feeling of taking in fandom and friends at a pace that which doesn’t make you stressed and is still fun.

Do I blame fandom for this? Of course not, but people are complacent with it and start changing their vocab to accommodate and end up making the situation so deep it cant be fixed.

We call Art & Fic Content now, completely stripping the value of what it is to a level of consumerism instead of personal entertainment & community bonding.