I am constantly befuddled at the fact that everywhere I look online, I see people who have the amazing ability to read/listen to/participate in online drama that looks like it might be tongue-in-cheek but isn't 100% certain to be so, and not only not experience mental trauma because of it, but actually
enjoy it, to the point of starting it just because it's "fun".
I'm not talking about typical trolls; I'm talking about stuff like
this (a discussion thread on
SROMG ♯1222),
this (a discussion thread on
LMOO ♯486), and especially
this. There's the chance that all three of those are tongue-in-cheek, but if there's a
chance that they're not, then there's a
chance that those people will overanalyze anything I write in the same way. They're probably not aware of it, but the possibly joking controversy that they "enjoy" completely ruins my life whenever I read it. If the more recent ones continue like they have been, they could ruin some of my favorite webcomics, too.
And even worse, I'm the only person I know of who's affected by it in this way. I might as well call it "Matt1993's Syndrome", since I must be the only person on Earth who has it. Andy Weir of
Casey & Andy (a webcomic I discovered because there's a few links to it in Irregular Webcomic!) is the only other person I know of who doesn't like political webcomics, but even he clearly doesn't have Matt1993's Syndrome, as he didn't have any problem with working political discussions in the annotations and even a few of the comics. Don't get me wrong, most of the comics cheer me up, but there's also one that's so much like the Forbidden Comment Threads that I'm not even going to try and find it just so I won't have to read that one again.
And since I'm the only one with Matt1993's Syndrome, no one's ever going to advocate for the rights of those with it... :(
I'm not sure how much sense this makes, especially given that I wrote most of it in only 5-15 minutes. I just felt that I had to rant about it. At least if it doesn't make sense, it proves another point about Matt1993's Syndrome: people (or person, anyway) with it are unable to even talk
about controversy without saying something stupid.
depressed