Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nisarg" data-source="post: 1727622" data-attributes="member: 19893">um, yes.. and that's a perfect example of a fandom that was once relatively mainstream that slowly got absorbed by the freak kingdom.In the early and mid-to-late seventies, Star Trek fans were normal people in every sense of the word, who just really loved the series.  There were a few really wierd people in there, some social misfits, but for the most part you had just as many men as women, you had old people, you had kids, you had familiest, etc etc.But slowly, the number of freaks started increasing, more and more, and no one did anything to stop it, they were tolerated.. but people who were uncomfortable with this freakiness slowly started "dropping out" of Trek fandom. They left the scene, only to be replaced with more freaks. By the present day, Trek fandom is solidly in the freak kingdom.. you can't see a reference in pop culture to Star Trek without it being derogatory, implying Trekkies are wierd, socially malajusted, perpetual virgins, slightly insane, and not good people to be around. Its only the largeness of Star Trek that saves it, that there are still a great deal of normal people who watch ST, without being "Trekkies".Furry fandom had way less luck. It went from being a comic-arts subculture that admired stuff like Usagi Ujimbo (sp?) and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the original comic, not the awful tv cartoon), composed of largely normal people, until it got slowly overrun by the Fursuit freaks and the Yiffers and the people who wanted the artists to draw pics of 12 year old wolf-boys being raped... naturally, serious artists started abandoning furry art in droves, matched in velocity only by the normal people who would otherwise have found furry art cool, but today wouldn't touch it with a fifty-foot pole.RPG gaming in North America is probably slightly bigger than Furry fandom, and much smaller than Trek fandom, which has in one way given it the worst of both worlds.. popular culture doesn't even have furries on its radar.. but it sure does have "·D&D geeks". It knows just enough about roleplaying to portray the roleplayers as the geeks and losers on sitcoms, to present the peopel who play it as either nerd-kids or total loser-adults.  For anyone who seriously tries to tell me that RPG fans aren't seen negatively by popular culture please show me a TV or movie reference in recent years where being a roleplayer was seen as a cool or at least "normal" thing to do?  Where RPGs weren't referenced in an insulting way?Nisarg</blockquote>

Verification