Ten people passionately enjoy a thing that everyone else ignores, and they hold to it for the rest of their lives.
Eventually one of the ten becomes a filmmaker or a popular personality in mainstream culture and references that thing the original ten really enjoyed. The next thing you know every mindless NPC seeking to fill the hole where their personality should be with some object or idea flocks to it and overwhelms the people who originally maintained it. Then corporate media decides to remake it, over-saturate every market with products based on it, and then dumb it all down for mass consumption. Then finally grievance grifters who see the opportunities related to the mass appeal of the thing come in and call it bigoted to stir up controversy and get their names in the news. Then they demand that it be changed and reshaped to represent and please them.
Meanwhile, nine of the original ten people who genuinely and authentically loved the thing are left to watch the rest of the world work to ruin their joy.
This is what it feels like being a fantasy, science fiction, horror, tabletop game, video game, animation, monster, or any other kind of fan today.
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