This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
The Bad Wolf: um has any one ever been to england, it's a strange land where every one and their mom (or mum if your english) watch Doctor Who. I'd suggest Battlestar Galactica fan's as the peak of jackassery its just obscure enough none of their friends have heard about it, but their convinced its the best show ever and they can quote time magazine to prove it.
Tanto: Counterargument: Sports fandom.
Exhibit A: Sports radio.
Exhibit B: Sports discussion boards.
I rest my case.
Red Shoe: I actually take them as an example: the crazy ones are a pretty small subset of sports fandom. Fandom Jackassery maximizes as they become the only ones left. As obscurity increases, the "non-crazy" fans drop out, leaving only the assholes, up until you reach the point where you'd have a fandom composed entirely of assholes were it not for the fact that the assholes wouldn't enjoy each others' company.
Phartman: I'm not exactly sure how to classify sports fans, really. All I have to go on is the fact that I've never met a commited sports fan who possessed any form of wit or humor. But surely those disgusting signs
held up by Bears fans ought to qualify them for some honorable mention. The bloated ham-creature holding up that first sign either didn't now how offensive that would be, or worse: he was proud of it. So he's either an idiot or an asshole; there's really no wiggle room there.
And I'm not into anime, but I know enough people who are to gather that they're not an especially irate bunch. Then again, I haven't met every anime fan out there, so who knows? Of course, I haven't met every diehard sports fan either...
Sikon: "Coincidentally, this peak occurs at exactly the obscurity level of Doctor Who." - Ha ha, brilliant. What about anime, by the way? Which obscurity level is the peak there?
Looney Toons: Is this an implicit proposal to work up a gradiated scale of fandom obscurity?
Sikon: I didn't think of it, but now I think it would be a good idea to come up with at least an approximate scale for each media. (Including wikis, because it applies to them too.)
Red Shoe: Re anime fans: You clearly didn't go to high school with my high school friends.
Phartman: Clearly so: I was homeschooled. Most of the ones I've met were pretty polite, but I've only ever met anime fans one-on-one. I didn't even know that Otaku were herding creatures. I guess they get a bit testy when gathered in large groups.
Fencedude: What I've noticed is the narrower an anime fan's "fandom" is, the bigger jackass they are going to be. People who like a wide variety of anime are generally ok, while the people who are obsessive fans of ONE anime (say...Naruto) are more likely to be a complete jackass, moron, or both.
Sikon: To Red Shoe: Some of us possibly couldn't... due to living in a different country altogether. (No, not in Japan.)
Dr Dedman: I'd put the critical mark at around the third anime you see. Rookie Otaku are usually too overwhelmed to be truly obnoxious (Dragonball might be an exception). The other thing is it moves on, I suspect right now it's Naruto, 3-4 years ago it was Trigun. If a show was THE SHOW and is now a footnote, the jackassery was enormous.
Grev: Heh, this could also apply to actor fandoms, too...although I think that line is skewed towards the mainstream for some reason...and the peak is a lot lower, too.
Red Shoe: So, at the risk of starting a war, here's a first stab at a partial ordering of jackassery:
- Low Jackassery, Low Obscurity:
- Ascending Jackassery:
- Star Trek (as a franchise)
- Star Wars
- Battlestar Galactica
- Peak Jackassery:
- Star Trek (specific series to the exclusion of others)
- Doctor Who
- Descending Jackassery:
- Power Rangers
- Babylon5
- Farscape
- The Tomorrow People
- Low Jackassery, High Obscurity
- War of the Worlds
- Vr5
- Sapphire And Steel
- I could name a dozen more shows here, but you probably haven't heard of them.
Licky Lindsay: this is starting to remind me of the "geek hierarchy" you used to see everywhere on the Net. http://www.brunching.com/geekhierarchy.html
Phartman: Hey, if it does start a flame war, at least it will prove you right.
Daibhid C: I'd like to propose that Peak Jackassary specifically applies to Classic Who, and the RTD series is merely ascendant.
Red Shoe: New Who is indeed a strange case. Much lower obscurity, but one look at the percentage of rec.arts.drwho posters who are rabid racists, homophobes, religious zealots, antireligious zealots, or just plain dedicated to hating everything for the sake of pure unadulterated schadenfreude, and it's hard to accept that the level of jackassery has gone down. Actually, with all the homophobes it's brought out of the woodwork, it may have even gone up. If the law holds, this simply means that the standard deviation of jackassery has gotten a lot smaller — which, of course, makes Farscape fans nicer and CSI fans more assish.
Fast Eddie: The graph would be easier to understand without the "Show Popularity" legend, as popularity is a side issue. Unless I misunderstand your use of the Mainstream-Obscure axis, and maybe I do. // Later: Okay, I think I see it. A moderately popular show will have more jackassery than either a very popular or very unpopular show, where Mainstream=very popular and Obscure=very unpopular. Got hung up on the other senses of "Mainstream" and "Obscure". Maybe the endpoints of the bottom axis should be "More Popular" and "Less Popular".
Morgan Wick: Wait. Is the key factor how well-known it is, or how much people like it?
Daibhid C: I abandoned radw in favour of the moderated group for the reasons stated by Red Shoe long before the new series started, and I find it hard to imagine how it's managed to get worse (although I can believe it probably has). I think New Who fandom is semi-independent and doesn't have much effect on the jackassery of the classic fans except to give them someone new to shout abuse at. Which scares them off radw, and ensures it maintains its high jackass level.
Bobby G: Just a note - I added the qualifier about the USA because in the UK, Doctor Who is actually more popular than many of the other shows mentioned here (the 2007 Christmas special was the most watched Christmas programme over here after Eastenders.
Maureen Macdonald: No arguments about the US fans being giant dicks (although they probably have small ones.) The only other Whovian I've met here has been a guy I earlier nicknamed "Mussolini" for his control freak tendencies. However, I'll argue that the serious hard-core fanbase is filled with pricks everywhere you go. NuWho might be very popular (bless!) but how many of those nice people are fans? It's a tough distinction to make. I compare it to the Simpsons. Plenty of people watch and enjoy the show but the hardcore aficionados can be really whiny pricks. Oddly enough, you can get varying levels of obscurity within the fanbase. If you go to a message board dedicated to just the show it'll be chaos. Go to a more obscure group dedicated to one charecter, or hating on a member of the production team, or Doctor/Doctor pr0n and everyone gets along because everyone is there for the same reason.
alphamone: the problem in the US is that the tv stations that broadcast the series, and a large amount of the population see doctor who as a cult show, and not a prime or near prime time show (In australia, the old series was played at around 5pm the last time it was replayed, which finished back in 2005ish, while the new series is played at 6pmish), which it is in the UK and Australia (the only country that bought all the serials during the initial run, with the exception of the first doctors 12 part dalek story that's name escapes me at the moment.)
Bobby G: I've reinstated the note about the USA, for the simple reason that there is absolutely no way you can say that (new) Doctor Who is an obscure show in the UK. I dare say many British Doctor Who fans are jackasses, but given that the current show is pretty mainstream over here, it's nothing to do with this law. :Hell, not even classic Doctor Who is obscure in the UK really.
fleb: I haven't read this page in a few months, so seeing it fresh again got a few laughs. I really like the Wiki Magic-fueled Rule of Three trinity of paragraphs at the end:
- Coincidentally, this peak occurs at exactly the obscurity level of Doctor Who in the USA; in the UK it would be considerably towards the left-hand side of the plot. One Piece in the US and UK, as well, for that matter.
And Fallout.
The drop ends right at the Earth Bound level.
Entropic Decay: So how do you explain the Harry Potter fanbase?
Slaughter: Can anyone tell me why everyone and his mother proclaims NMA as the biggest bunch of jackasses in the universe? Anyone who thinks the NMA forums is full of jackasses has never been to the Bethesda Fallout 3 Forum. Jackass users from BOTH sides of the argument (Old fans vs New Fans) and tyrannical moderators know as "The Bethestapo" make it into one of the worst forums in existance. As a NMA lurker since 2005, I can say that NMA was much, much worse before. There was a admin know as Roshambo who was pretty much a "One-Man-Bethestapo" on the side of NMA. Until he grew disgusted and banned himself. Everyone thanked god.
Rebochan: I did, in fact, go to those forums for awhile...and every day was a warzone. I finally gave up. I noticed that the mods so-called "tyranny" tended to be exaggerated as a war against whichever side you were on. I also spoke with a Bethesda community organizer at PAX last year and mentioned the forums. I have never seen a grown man cringe like that.
So where do video games in general fit on the chart? I've had such a rough time finding somewhere to talk about gaming that isn't full of jackasses that I've become convinced that the entire internet was replaced by /v/.
Regiment: To everyone asking "So explain the X fanbase!", the most vocal fans are always the craziest, and usually the most jackass-ey. For instance, sports are very popular, but you don't hear about the guy that wears a Red Sox tee-shirt to work, you hear about the guy that names his son "Red Sox Smith" (crazy) or the one that trashed someone's car because there was a Red Sox sticker on it (jackass). If something's less popular, there tend to be fewer casual fans, who are the silent-and-polite majority, and the ratio of normals-to-wackjobs falls. As popularity falls farther, the wackjobs either don't know about it, or prefer to just randomly bash it from their preferred fandoms- and like the article says, if the fandom is 5 guys, and one's a wackjob, they'll stop hanging out with him.
To summarize: Large fanbase X looks jackassier than medium fanbase Y becaue X, being larger, naturally has more fans than Y, and because of that has more vocal wackjobs, which are the only voices you hear.
