My immediate answer - Sonic fans.
I don’t really know what Sega and the Sonic Team can do anymore to make these fans happy. They’ve revisited the classic formula a few times, they tried going modern routes, they tried 2-D sprites in some entries, they try going full 3D and whatever. Nothing ever seems to be enough and that’s even when they’ve tried listening to the fanbase a few times.
Nothing seems to matter, regardless. The fans will find something to be upset about with Sonic. Anything.
This happens to any fandom over time. The folks engaged enough to stick around so long tend to obsess over whatever the “original” is. They peel apart every little blemish of a new release under a microscope, before it comes out.
Toxicity breeds.
Compared to old forums, I think the structure of places like Reddit/Discord inflames it. It’s cultish.
So do YouTubers and such, as video algorithms likes punchy ragebait more than (say) nerdy lore analysis.
I first experienced this in the Avatar community, and seeing so much hate breed makes me sad.
See: the Korra/NATLA hate videos. The Reddit groupthink that parrots the same points, including straight up misinformation. Breathless worship of ATLA these days, waning interest in deeper lore like the novels and longfics. Even the idea of an upscale/touch up is shot down, because the video artifacts in the original are “perfect.”
And a lot of that history is archived. For instance, read through the comments in the Korra episode premiere threads, and it’s nothing like the fandom now.
But the pattern seems to be everywhere.
And I think it’s partially a mirage. I suspect a lot of fans (like me) are just not engaged with fandom social media. And many more are “dormant” and will come back whenever something big and new drops.
Leftists. It’s the one group universally hated by the whole political spectrum, including other leftists.
Not to detract but Sonic mania. It did everything right. Everyone loved it. And then they just kicked out the creative team behind it and decided to never make a sequel since it showed how poorly sega had been managing the franchise. Bethesda did the same thing with fallout new vegas.
lemmy
Mentions anything…. Switch to Linux!
that’s the least of it really
Switch to Linux… Switch to Arch!
I’ve already switched to Arch!
…
Switch all your friends to Arch!
I’ve just installed gentoo on my grandmother’s PC and left a post it note with some basic portage commands. No complaints so far! Since they lost their phone I’ve not received an annoying tech support email for weeks
There can only be one answer.
ALL OF THEM
I swear to fuck all fandoms love to do is bitch about the content they “love”.
The main way they do the bitching is by constantly “moving the goal posts”.
Baltimore Ravens fans have one of the most entertaining and dynamic quarterbacks to ever play football but he sucks because never won the Super Bowl.
Star Trek Fans, the new trek sucks because it violates that single line of diaalogue that Harry Mudd said in that one episode……
IPA wackos, I can’t stand this places IPAs because they don’t put a whole roasted chicken in the cup with the beer.
ALL OF THEM
This is the right answer. Because the truth is, you can’t have a fandom without passion. And people that are passionate enough to consider themselves part of a fandom community (regardless of it’s source) are passionate enough to be vocal and opinionated about it. And there will ALWAYS be some who crank the whine up to 11 and annoy everyone else.
It’s not an issue with any one particular fan community, it’s a feature of all of them.
Hehe yeah, it is a feature not a bug.
IPA wackos, I can’t stand this places IPAs because they don’t put a whole roasted chicken in the cup with the beer.
… yea okay, that’s fair.
Still though, IPAs run a huge gamut for some reason. I feel like the degree of variety you find in the IPA category is really strangely big. Like, if I order a stout or a porter I know about what I’m going to get, flavor-wise. But with an IPA it can run from fairly mild to way-past-grapefruit-juice.
hey man… You do You.
I am a Whiskey and Coke guy so everything to do with IPAs is lost on me.
Just imagine if you ordered a jack and coke, and you had no way of knowing if they’re actually going to give you watered-down diet coke and the mildest single malt scotch they could find, or cherry coke and a really intense rye, or anything in between. And at every new place, it’s just a gamble what you’ll get.
That’s kinda what its like.
Hardcore Sonic fan here: It’s not that Sonic fans are hard to please, it’s that it’s a fandom that doesn’t have as strong a sense of consensus as a lot of other fandoms. There’s a few obvious favorites in the series (S3K and SA2 mostly) but even then not to the point where people get to thinking not liking them is objectively wrong (vs., say, Kirby, as someone who likes most of the series but thinks Kirby Super Star is an awful game.) There isn’t really one thing that “every” Sonic fan really wants.
This results in outsider commentary from people who are used to fandoms with strong consensus invoking the Goomba Fallacy all the time.
Hell, I’ll also note that I sometimes see people say that Sonic fans are too easy to please because a lot of us liked something like Frontiers in spite of it’s miryad of flaws.
I mean it makes sense that it’s hard to please Sonic fans. It wasn’t ever a good game, and so it literally exists solely due to nostalgia. Therefore if the base concept sucks they’re never gonna be able to make something fans like.
Yeah but, Sonic did try to grow out of its one-trick-pony phase here and there. Its just the attempts were lacking a creative drive to make them work, so they ended up borrowing aspects of other games, even Mario games who were their key competitor at the time.
Somebody or something keeps throwing a wrench in whatever plans that there would’ve been to make Sonic interesting. It’s been over two and a half decades of trying but you have to credit that they are trying to do something with Sonic.
Then why do the fan game developers consistently nail what everyone wants? Christian Whitehead made a career out of it. Sonic Mania was the fruit of that labor. There is the modernization of Sonic Adventure 2 project that rebuilds the game on UE5 I think that everyone was universally floored by.
It isn’t that Sega has an impossible task to please Sonic fans, it’s that either their corpo overlords dont let them do what is needed to pull it off, or their egos are too large to allow them to listen to their fanbase. Sonic Team was internally pissed that Sonic Mania was more popular than the project they had worked on at the same time (I believe it was Sonic Forces), and then later the new 2.5d Sonic game didn’t do so well which rubbed them raw even more.
Sonic fans dont shy away from communicating what it is that they want, you know this to be true.
Star Wars
(“Honourable” mention: Star Trek fans. The blind nuTrek hate is something else.) Edit: The expected downvotes may as well be upvotes for purposes of this comment lol. See everyone? Case in point.I’m not a trek fan, but I would be if they quit teasing me with SciFi tech that no one knows how to use. They know they can pull people out if the transport buffer, they know they can use replicators to make anything, quit selling me melodrama in a space ship and deal with the implications of this stuff. Why are you killing people when you can literally clone them? Why are they losing a fight against the Borg when you can send 1million Rikers with super soakers filled with oxidizing agents to equal parts rust and seduce them? There’s no imagination.
you can send 1million Rikers
William or Thomas?
Fuck it, find the prettiest version of both and give them the Tuvix treatment and dress them up in something silly.
Uniform is half red half yellow.
Wrong number of pips on the collar (abandon ship!!!)
Frankly even this is excessive. You could just use the transporter to move 5ft cubes of the enemy vessel into overlapping spaces until the ship is destroyed or bisect it by moving a 1in slice to the left.
Nah. Mando, Rogue One, Lower Decks, and New Worlds wouldn’t have all been received well if they were difficult to please. It just takes doing more than the absolute bare minimum of shitting out slop and expecting the deluge of garbage to somehow please people that have already received far, far better in the past.
Both IPs have their expected tropes and ‘feel’ already established, for better or worse. It shouldn’t surprise people that massive deviations in uncreative directions weren’t well received.
When peoples’ well liked IPs turn out to be nothing more than a coat of paint on Generic SciFi Script #350386, OFC fans won’t respond well.
I love the idea of Star Wars, but every movie since Empire has been a toy advert.
I feel it only really gets a chance to shine when you pull out out of its comfort zone of the Skywalker family. Rogue One, Andor, most of The Mandalorian.
This. I couldn’t give a shit about the skywalkers, I want old republic, I want the madalorian wars, I want the sith schism. Star wars is full of fucking amazing things, literally thousands of years worth of wild ride historical events, and we never get to see any of it. The first step to writing is looking at your work and asking, “is this the most interesting part of the story?” If it’s not, why arent you telling that part?
I wholeheartedly disagree, lol.
A bit of a hot take… bigger communities tend to get harder to please, regardless of anything else
I saw a few gacha game communities (please don’t judge me lol) grow in real time, because gacha games need as large as a player base as possible for their business strategy (which is a separate topic)… Saw the level of toxicity rises in real time as my main game’s community get bigger. Like the community literally went from being okay with just about anything to arguing over the weirdest details on character designs and complaining about every live-service event. And then there’s all the rumor about communities of Hoyoverse games… including once when someone almost murdered the company CEO over a bunny girl event (I’m not making this up)
Among similar sized ones I’m not entirely sure
It’s not perfect nor will it ever be perfect, but they are on to something with Sonic Frontiers.
I cannot speak for all Sonic fans, but the only time I have ever been completely disappointed by an official Sonic game is definitely the 3DS Sonic Boom game. I tried. A single level in and I wasn’t a fan. That, and of course that one runner game that gets constantly recycled through every single IP under the sun. You know the mobile game.
The only other time I’ve been disappointed is the latest Sonic Transformed because they’re going the route of having too many non-Sega characters in a Sonic racing game. Similar reasoning as to why I hate all Mario & Sonic Olympics titles. Cut the Big N and I’d probably still not like them because they ain’t my cup of tea, but at least I wouldn’t hate them.
I’m the easy type of Sonic fan to please, for the most part¹. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a game that starts slow paced like Sonic and the 7 Rings or something as buggy as Sonic '06, I’m here for a good time, not a long time. As long as the game is completable and isn’t the transformed racing series ( Riders was 1000x better ), I’m down to try it.
¹ As an arachnophobe, we do NOT bring up the Sonic Boom cartoon episode where Styx gets cursed. Nor do we bring up the fact I’m sore about not being good at Spinball on Genesis/Mega Drive.
