>>88446I dropped that board after season 4 came out and any criticism of the occasional fucking-dumb episode was met with discussion shut-downs, shitposting, and "Shut up stop doompauling" from the fucking newfags, of all people.
Unironic shitposting is the death of any board, especially shitposting focused at anyone that interrupts the circlejerkers, the other death of any board. If people think they can't discuss X topic or Y topic without getting shouted down by tards that circlejerk and start drama to make their worthless cringe-cancer lives feel eventful, they'll go elsewhere to discuss those topics. Nobody goes into leftist media forums to have objective discussions about Feminist Ghostbusters. Nobody goes on /mlp/ to discuss MLP, it's all just circlejerking bumping generals full of entitled parasites desperately hoping someone better than them will write shitty greentext for them. Those losers stay in those generals because they hunger for content made specifically for them, they're too lazy to make it themselves, and they know they couldn't get it anywhere else. In those generals, they're protected from the unironic shitposters, who, in their quest to be seen as cool adult edgy 4chan users, will often act like an old-fashioned cringe cancer circlejerk over the littlest thing possible. Anything to keep the herd together and feeling good.
Speaking of which, there's something I saw years ago that's stuck with me for a long time, it's why I know cringe cancer is cancer.
When I was much younger, I was "surfing the web" as they said back then, it's basically when you browse the internet looking for new content instead of hoping it shows up in your feed or on your forums or in your ads. I found a "Cringe confessions" site for people to say ridiculously fake stories and get reassuring back-pats for it. "This one time, I was in a queue to get a video game and I'm a gamer gurl, but this cringey neckbeard man called me a fake gamer girl and I beat him up!" would get a round of applause from the cringers, just like faked screenshots of texts. I watched them give each other obviously-fake stories and screenshots of obviously-fake AOL/Skype conversations for a while in fascination, amazed that people that claimed to be grown-ass adults could be so obviously dense.
Kids were in this group, too, admitting they were kids but trying extra hard to look cool to be taken seriously by the cool kids. The board had a particularly large amount of self-loathing Sonic Fans trying to fit in with the jaded old people saying shit like "Yeah my fanbase is such cancer, this one time someone dressed like sonic snatched my copy of Sonic Heroes out of my hand and ran out of the store with it while saying come on step it up" and getting applause for it. Kids, kids pretending to be adults, adults acting like kids, this group had it all.
Then, it happened. One teenager with an edgy "I'm so smart and badass" signature said the following "Cringe horror story", and it's something that will stay with me forever:
>"We had a history class today, and a war veteran that fought Nazi Germany in WW2 showed up to talk to us about the war. One quiet nerdy girl with a Hetalia backpack nobody talks to suddenly stood up and called the man a horrible monster for killing her favorite character, she said he was 'so sexy' and he should have been allowed to rule the world. The war veteran started crying, and he ran out of the room in tears."That idiot… expected me to believe that? I was expected to believe a WW2 war veteran would be reduced to tears by a teenaged girl calling him a monster for "Killing Nazi Germany, her favorite Hetalia character"?
No. He expected THEM to believe that. And the cringers did believe that, stroking him and "Oh, that's so terrible, I feel so bad for you"ing even though they gave him a hilariously fake story. I left the site in disgust and went back to emulated Genesis games.