The Pokemon fanbase is probably ruined now and I probably shouldn't like it anymore

Is the Pokemon fanbase ruined now?

  • Maybe most of the fanbase is still OK. I mean at least it's not Fire Emblem.

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Please don't delete or lock this, mods. I'm not trying to break any rules here, I just want to discuss my concerns about the state of the Pokemon community because I'm very worried about it all.

Back in the day, Pokemon was considered pretty cool. All the kids seemed to like it, and the games were better, too. However, despite being super popular in its prime, it fanbase wasn't considered cringy or insane or anything (unlike a lot of popular things today). And the only people who really had something against Pokemon were probably the soccer moms who thought it was Satanic or something. But later on, I noticed things just got kinda weird.

At first, I thought the Pokemon community was just a bit below average at worst (aside from the anime's fanbase, but that's another story about a kinda separate part of the fanbase that most fans don't even bother with). With the only problems being how everyone seems to like arguing about which generation is the best, and how some of the pokemon designs have attracted the attention of a few furries. It seems that only a little bit of the fanbase is furries though, and the rest of the fanbase probably doesn't even like them. And the arguing part doesn't even seem to be that bad (I mean people have the right to make fun of a walking trash bag, you know). But recently, I noticed some really bad things from this community. Like how about a month ago, there were at least three people from Pokemon's YouTube community being exposed for trying to date minors over Twitter and Discord. And one of those three people was a pretty famous dude with over 500K subscribers who has been noticed by Nintendo before (this was also the dude the other two were associated with). All sorts of people like Etika and KeemStar talked about this string of events, giving everything a lot of internet attention. And a whole bunch of people have basically been saying that the Pokemon community is ruined now. Later on, I tried looking things up to see if this was the only bad thing that happened to this community. I found a couple things involving complete nobodies that usually weren't even really relevant to Pokemon, but the worst thing I found out was that back in 2015, there were apparently two people invited to that year's VGC who wanted to come in with guns and kill people just to become famous by getting on the news. And yes, KeemStar talked about that once as well. The police stopped them before they could hurt anyone, but just hearing about it made me feel so disgusted at the community that this could've happened in the first place, especially when problems like this probably haven't even happened to any other video game tournament other than that one Madden NFL championship last year. A few years ago, I actually wanted to be really good at competitive Pokemon, to maybe dream of participating in one of those championships one day. I guess I probably shouldn't do that anymore, for my safety. All these horrible things kinda seem to be ruining Pokemon for me.

I discussed this with a few people before, and at least one of them argued that I shouldn't worry because apparently all fanbases are horrible, when that's actually a complete lie. All sorts of fanbases, even quite a few popular ones, can have fanbases with pretty much zero noticeable problems in them, that completely avoid everything that can make a fanbase bad. And I feel the people who like to say all fanbases secretly suck are the ones from Tumblr or something who just want to create some kind of dumb excuse to get people to stop rightfully hating on stupid things. I don't wanna be that self proclaimed "fandom trash" type that just accepts that creeps, psychos and all sorts of other degenerates are just a common part of the internet and can't be stopped. I want to avoid dealing with such things. On a side note though, some people might say that fanbases become terrible mainly because of large group efforts of people doing stupid things to the point where a community has a stigma/ stereotypes against it (such as how the Fire Emblem and Fortnite communities probably don't have criminals in the fanbases, but have all sorts of less disgusting but still stupid things done by a big chunk of those communities). I'm not really sure if that last statement about group efforts ruining things more than specific instances about a few well known people doing crazy stuff is necessarily true, however.

Looking back on some things, I feel like even though liking Pokemon has almost always been generally socially acceptable because of its long running success, I feel like even most of the people who talk about the franchise these days don't even care as much about the recent years of the series, and are mainly people who just casually talk about it out of mainly liking how good they remember Pokemon being back in the day as nostalgia or something (this isn't necessarily about the people who only like gen 1). I mean it seems most people don't even like the recent years of Pokemon anyway. They always seem to talk about how gen 7 didn't have as much content as other generations, how the new stuff in the Alola games weren't even that important, and how the games were just full of hand-holding and overly long cutscenes. A lot of people (including myself) didn't even buy Ultra Sun and Moon because of how the changes from the previous games weren't important enough. And people really criticized the Let's Go games for being really dumbed down for the really little kids. In fact, a few nintendo interviews have shown Game Freak basically believing they can get away with having less content and dumbing things down because the little kids who apparently mainly like smartphone games and Fortnite don't mind. And I've already noticed how I haven't been caring about modern Pokemon as much as I did in previous generations anyway. Maybe I should care even less about the games now, and just admit that the last really good Pokemon games were made nine years ago (HGSS).

So what do you guys think about the state of the Pokemon community after all these weird things I mentioned that happened? Is it ruined by these things (maybe it is)? Is a fanbase mainly ruined by the things entire groups of people do, or can it also be ruined by just a small few controversies involving really important people with big followings? And what should I be doing after posting this five paragraph essay? Please give all your thoughts on this in the replies.
 

Stellar

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I read your whole "essay," and really don't think this is a Pokemon issue. This is an issue of numbers. Pokemon is one of the biggest fanbases in existence. Statistically speaking, more people = more degenerates. Those outlier cases tend to garner more attention and press, which gives the appearance of a more negative fanbase as a whole. This can and probably does happen in any fanbase, even ones like Fortnite, even if you personally say it doesn't.

tl;dr: The internet attracts weirdos. Big surprise.
 

DHR-107

Robot from the Future
is a Member of Senior Staffis a Community Contributoris a Smogon Discord Contributoris a Pokemon Researcheris a Smogon Media Contributor
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Stellar covered everything I would have done.

I'm locking this due to the fact that Smogon tries to keep itself above most of that "drama" as you call it. I didn't even know a tonne of stuff had even happened a month ago outside of a few minor people mentioning it on the Smogon main discord. You must remember that many people don't even watch Youtube channels for Pokemon. They have no idea about the people you speak of. It's a bit much to claim the entire fandom is "ruined" because of the acts of a few people.

There is no discussion here. Pick your forums better and engage with "better" people.
 
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