The Tilde

ONLINE CULTURE MAG

The Scapegoats of the Internet

Ah, the internet, a wonderful piece of technology, the pinnacle of civilization that truly shows how far humanity has come within the last century alone. But unfortunately, with all great things, there are other byproducts that come to ruin the beauty. In this case, bringing so many people together from all around the world has had one major effect on media: whenever something gets popular, the people will relentlessly hate on it until the heat death of the universe. No matter what the media is, a game, a series, hell even something as simple as a popular artist or actor can be spited and bullied for no good reason. This is far from a new phenomenon, even back in the day of the 2000s, things were already being hated for being popular. The most notorious example is the hatred towards people like Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black, people who merely made music that one could view as annoying or bad, and it devolved into hate campaigns that ranged from internet games mocking them to things as horrible as a full episode on the internet show death battle which was simply thinly veiled bullying with a poorly aged animation.

Fast forward a few years, we arrive at the internet’s next punching bag: Five Nights at Freddy’s. Despite being a horror game with several dark elements, the mostly child audience of the series lead to the oversaturation of the series, which resulted in blind hatred of the series, the creator Scott Cawthon and the fanbase as a whole. Although the series and the hatred has died down in modern days, the marks of these previous actions still linger around. While the previously mentioned cases seem to only be relating to one and done media that is later forgotten for one reason or another, the blind hatred of anything and everything sonic the hedgehog has been around since the dark ages of the game series. No matter how much it improves, no matter how much fun they might be, no one from outside the fandom refuses to let go of the sins of sonic 06. Even now, as a whole new sonic game is released, it is ridiculed simply for being sonic with no other reasons being brought up, or if they are, they are very nitpicky and out of pure bad faith.

No matter how far the world advances, the internet refuses to adapt in some ways, as far as civilization exists, we will have some digital scapegoat that everyone and anyone is willing to hate on. Even for media that could be enjoyed by said people, these cases of mob mentality hinder one’s judgement.

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