You Are Not A Fan
In every sport, there are people who are only fans of their home team as long as they're winning. These people are called fair-weather fans, and as far as I can tell, every single one of them is a douchebag. When the team is winning, they're all about the team because it's popular to support the team that's doing well. When the team is losing, they're clearly far too cool to support a team that's not succeeding. I hate those fans. But this isn't about them; this is about people who are worse than that.
This is about a group of fans whom I don't know for sure have a name, so I'm going to give them one. I'm going to call them underground fans. What these fans do is rabidly support whatever people they're supporting, until those people become successful. As soon as that happens, suddenly they're a bunch of sellouts, and not worth paying attention to any more. And that's bullshit.
Case in point: The Offspring. They had the highest selling independent record in the history of the planet with their CD Smash in 1994, selling 16 million copies. That got the attention of the major labels, and after starting up their own independent label, they signed with Columbia. The backlash from fans was immediate, with a relevant quantity decrying them for being sellouts, because they had the gall to move to a label with more resources with which to help them be successful. The music hadn't changed in any way that it wouldn't have changed anyway if they'd stayed with Epitaph, but now that they were with a major label, in those people's minds, they sucked.
If you were a real fan, you wouldn't begrudge the people you're a fan of for making good business decisions. It's nice to be good at something, but unless you're making money at it, it's nothing but a hobby. And if you're getting paid enough that you can do it full-time, then you can get even better at it, while at the same time being free to do whatever else you want. The formula is simple: the more money you make doing something, the more time you can afford to spend doing it.
With underground fans, it's like they only want to be a fan of something if the people behind it are just barely scratching a living, making nothing off their talent, and suffering for it. Because as soon as they start making money from it, the stuff they've already done becomes worse... or something. How dare they be recognized for their talent by people who can pay them to continue using it!
I'll tell you right now, if you've ever stopped being a fan of someone or something because they became successful, then fuck you, you're not a real fan. Using myself as an example, I've been taking time off from writing articles because I'm working on other things, including a book. If you're going to stop reading my content on this website because I had the audacity to publish something in another medium, then stop reading now, fuck off, and never come back; you're not the kind of person I care about, and the world wouldn't be any worse off if you jumped off a bridge.
She is not impressed by you"But we're more enlightened as a people now, and that doesn't happen any more." Bullshit. You think this doesn't happen any more? This happened on Thursday. I'm a fan of a little company out of Halifax, Nova Scotia called Life's A Glitch TV. They have two YouTube channels, Life's A Glitch and Life's A Glitch 2 respectively. The first one is for e-sports, mainly Starcraft 2 replays with commentary, and the second one is more random gaming-related content. It's basically two people putting out content on a nearly daily basis, between two company channels plus each of them has their own solo channel. They work hard.
Starcraft 2 is their bread and butter at this point, but because they're not idiots they realize that Starcraft 2 alone can only take them so far, especially when the Starcraft casting community is already so saturated with talent. The other online game that's really big right now is League of Legends (LoL), and they've both been playing the game themselves for several months, so they decided the thing to do was to record themselves playing LoL games and put them up on their main channel in addition to the existing Starcraft schedule. That way people who like LoL will find the channel and subscribe, people who like their Starcraft casts but have not been exposed to LoL can see something new and maybe decide they like it, and people who only like Starcraft can simply ignore the LoL games; everybody wins.
On Thursday they put the game up on their main channel, and the shitshow began almost immediately. Within hours there were dozens of people who were leaving comments on the video just to say they were unsubscribing, because LagTV had the audacity to put up a non-Starcraft video on their main channel. To recap what's going on here: LagTV did something they need to do in order to continue growing and being successful, without taking away anything from those who weren't interested in the new content, and people were literally picking up their tiny shriveled ball and going home over it.
Fuck those people. They're not real fans, and the community is better off without them. If you don't like the new content, then don't watch the new content. It's as simple as that. The only change to your life from LagTV adding content you're not interested in is that sometimes you'll see a video in your subscription feed that you don't want to watch. You know what you do in that case? You don't watch it. It's not a fucking heart transplant.
"But I'm only sharing my opinion." Fuck your opinion. If you want to control the content a channel puts out, then start your own fucking channel. Then you can record an hour and a half of footage a week, edit it to a presentable level, and see how easy it is to do. Who knows, maybe you'll even get 100,000 subscribers like LagTV has. Then you know what's going to happen? You'll try to branch out into something new, to gain more viewers, and people are going to bitch at you about how you're not the same as you used to be, the old stuff was better than this new shit, and they're leaving because they don't like you any more. You know what you're going to do? You're going to not give a shit, because fuck those people, it's your channel and you can do whatever the fuck you want on it.
I'm sick of people who only like someone if they're not getting any success for what they're doing. If that's you, then fuck you. What the hell have you ever done that's worth anyone else's time to care about? There are seven billion people on this planet, and the most impressive thing 99.99% of them have ever done is not choke on their own vomit yet. If you're going to stop liking someone because they're being rewarded financially for what they're doing, then that's your right as an asshole; but keep it to yourself, because you're not a real fan, you don't represent the opinion of the real fans, and nobody would miss you if you disappeared.