Last week's fun adventure with setting up all my collections in one room to take a picture has come to a close. I finally took everything down and put it all away on Sunday, but my tweet featuring a photo of the collection has become one of my most popular tweets ever and is still being retweeted by strangers more than a week later.
That's both good and bad, of course.
And one "bad" aspect which I touched on last week is that people are kind of judgy when they aren't as interested in your hobby as you are, and they've decided you've crossed some arbitrary line into "too much."
I'm a superfan and my engagement with this cartoon absolutely does skirt around obsessiveness--I mean, I can own that. It's not destructive, because it's not like I'm sacrificing necessary time, energy, or money to enjoy what I enjoy at the expense of something more necessary, but yeah, I choose to spend a LOT of my leisure time having fun with this right now, and I have dumped a lot of money into my collections. I'm really past the point in my life where I feel like I have to justify it.
That said? People being assholes about it really make me sick.
Someone screencapped my tweet and posted it on their very popular Instagram, with the caption "W-why though?"
Followed by over 200 comments, most of which were people explicitly mocking me for having a large collection.
The photo, more importantly, was shared uncredited. The person cropped out my username so I could not receive any connection with the post, which means even the people who actually commented that they liked or admired the collection could not come see whose it was.
I can kinda see both sides of this. If the person wanted to mock me and went ahead and included my information, I could have received some drive-by hate from their followers, and maybe could have even accused them of encouraging followers to harass me even though all they actually did was imply that my collection was ridiculous.
That said? No, the answer to "but they might get harassed if I mock them AND give them credit for their intellectual property" is not "erase the owner's information." The right answer is "maybe if my followers would harass this person if they could find them, I shouldn't mock them in the first place."
But that would make too much sense.
Anyway, the top comment here, weirdly, was that "rich people are stupid" and "imagine if your financial decisions were THIS bad" and "wowwww NEVER be this guy." (Every single person who accidentally gendered the owner of the collection assumed I was a man.)
A few people defended my choices, like "if they want to buy stuff and it's their hobby, who cares?" but mostly it was treated like an outrage that someone would spend this much money on something they like. (Hate to say it, but this does cost considerably less than a destination vacation for two, and most people don't say those aren't worth taking once in a while. I don't do that, I do this. Mind your business.)
Another really weird comment that kept recurring was the idea that the owner of this collection and/or the owner's house must be smelly.
That's a weird one, isn't it? One person remarked "I can smell this room."
Not that it really matters overall if you assume my house is filthy, and not that it would reflect on whether I'm a good person, but . . . like, my house is very, very clean, dudes. And organized af.
Then of course there was the obligatory "You know what else is fun? Having sex with others." Oh, wow, ell-oh-ell, if a person has a big collection, they probably don't have a sex life, which means they're a loser, which means we should laugh at them. I've certainly dealt with that perspective on way too many axes to even bother with it here. Next.
One person sneered at how half my stuff was unofficial merchandise. Literally every item in the photo was official merchandise.
And, almost opposite to this, several people sneered at how I did not have any merchandise of a character named Jasper. There is only one official toy of her and I have it. Not sure what else I was supposed to do.
(Jasper is a villain on the show who has a pretty big fanbase despite that she's one of the few remaining "bad guys" who hasn't gotten a redemption arc. The "good guys" basically have her imprisoned, in stasis, in their holding cell. A lot of people who have a ton of criticism for the show mysteriously also love this antagonist a lot. The person who posted this for others to criticize has a username that relates to Jasper.)
Anyway, this is nothing unusual and nothing I haven't seen before as a reaction to how I choose to enjoy something I like. I didn't engage with the person or any of their followers. I just quietly reported the post for intellectual property violations and it was gone within a couple hours. C'mon man, if you want to make fun of me, I at least deserve credit for the photo. You should know better than that.
I sure wish people could, like, leave other people's harmless actions alone.
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