The Tumblr Files - Official Thread (Case I: Steven Universe) - An exposé on the media and people that destroyed the Internet

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

Subtext is the key. The game itself can be about whatever you want but preferably a setting, tone and themes you haven't seen in a while. Of course, your a creative first in this case, so you genuinely have to be interested in the world you're trying to develop which is what Undertale got right. If you think in terms of "I have to avoid this left wing shit" or "I gotta add right wing values the chuds will love" you're on your way to making something that's just ok at best. Hell, it doesn't even have to be an RPG, it can be a wacky sports game, silly novelty or crafting sim (Schedule 1). If we're still talking Undertale, alot of the shit that game ushered in were novel to alot of people, including myself. 10 years later, even the meme of "quirky Earthbound inspired game that's about depression"™ has gotten tired.

edit: I swear to god I was going somewhere with this post. But in my world, a game like that would pretty unhinged.

Part of it is what I've seen referred to as "the Ideological Turing Test" (do you understand another person's beliefs well enough to make an argument as though you share those beliefs and have someone who actually holds those beliefs think that you agree with them?). Before Current Year, people disagreed with one another but generally understood what each other were getting at. Now, because the ideological superstructure of corporate gay race communism is so incoherent and tenuous, they've had to employ full-spectrum dominance on censorship to prevent people from hearing opposing arguments (about a decade ago they called it "Accountability Journalism" - giving "equal time" to "both sides" is ayckshully immoral because the other side are heckin' nazis and giving them a platform is literally violence. So now when anyone disagrees with us, rather than having an opposing viewpoint on to discuss the issues, we'll just tell you (our interpretation of) what they believe so you can know how wrong and evil it is.)

Telling any kind of good story requires a working understanding of how different people with different perspectives (your characters) see the world. The way you make a story that isn't naked propaganda is by having characters that disagree with the point that you think you're making not be two dimensional strawmen. "My opinion is exactly right and everyone who disagrees is stupid, evil, or both" is how you get modern slop writing.

 

[Carmen The Aids Rabbit]

Oh boy, Undertale 4.0 releasing soon. Can't wait for the never ending waves of faggots shitting up every damn social media site with memes and fanart.

I mean, all Toby had to do was say "delta rune tomorrow" and these niggers didn't shut up about it for the whole day.

The fact these people take something as trivial as the game's announcement and turn it into meme comes comes off as a cult of personality to me, I don't think that even if Toby got exposed for some awful discord mod tier shit these people would change their minds about him.
How the fuck do people become this fanatical over a game is beyond me, if it wasn't for their sheer numbers, this would had been funny

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

What I'm most intrigued by is when or if Toby will ever go mask-off and say the quiet part out loud: "Ha ha TRANS RIGHTS! I've been pushing to make your precious video games queer and leftist this whole time! Eat crap, chuds!" Given the people he's working with and the fanbase he's amassed, I'm getting the impression that Toby's become this master at boiling the frog and warping Internet culture as he does it. The things I found while researching for Case III only added more fuel to the fire.

On the other hand, Toby has the balls to launch his next two chapters alongside the next Mario Kart, a best-selling series that hasn't had a proper new entry since 2014. If anything, it may still remain within the bounds of his Twitter/Tumblr/BlueSky bubble while all the normies/outsiders play other games on Switch 2 instead.

The fact these people take something as trivial as the game's announcement and turn it into meme comes comes off as a cult of personality to me, I don't think that even if Toby got exposed for some awful discord mod tier shit these people would change their minds about him.
How the fuck do people become this fanatical over a game is beyond me, if it wasn't for their sheer numbers, this would had been funny

I'd boil it down to Toby's fans just being that obsessed over their game, especially since it's become a meme to ask for it and Silksong at every indie announcement event that's happened. When a fanbase receives no content, especially in the post-TikTok era of low attention spans, people get completely unhinged. There are just some games that the aforementioned bubble puts on a pedestal and worships, for better or for worse.

It kinda reminds me of the days when the most wanted games of all time were Half-Life 3, Shenmue 3, or Beyond Good & Evil 2, and fans of those franchises would beg for them at every E3, grasp at every straw looking for hints, and make up Greentexts of the sheer chaos that would ensue upon their announcements.


Game announcement culture really used to be something else.

 

[The_Gam3]

It kinda reminds me of the days when the most wanted games of all time were Half-Life 3, Shenmue 3, or Beyond Good & Evil 2

Those were the days lol. Now one of them is being worked on when the devs feel like it, the other one was very underwhelming and the last one is vaporware though probably for the best.

 

[invisibult plus+]

I think I can explain how Fox got a cult of personality around him**. When I played Undertale for the first time, it felt very genuine. It was pure and wholesome and all those buzzwords you hear when people talk about "special" games. Fox got in at a good time, when indies were beginning to eclipse AAA studios. He did know people, but as a composer he knew how to touch people's hearts the right way.

The problem is, Undertale wasn't his "dream game."

It's said that his "dream game" came to him when he had a bad fever in college. So once he got the money and connections he needed to make this "dream game," he decided to get with troons (who are making their own stuff apparently), and start putting out chapters. This sounds good on paper. String your audience along to keep interest while giving yourself enough leeway to make your game as you'd want it. There are even 2-3 years between releases, which isn't a long time for most games (other than the vague release dates but now we have a rate). Except, those vague release dates? For a basic bitch RPG made in GameMaker? Don't bode well when you go "development is going well" all the time and are so cagey with information that you won't even give basic details about characters.

In a really fast-moving environment where people are getting SICK. AND. FUCKING. TIRED. Of mystery box storytelling and heckin' tropes from over a decade ago? That might keep your fanbase engaged, but eventually people will get tired of you. Even fans will say, "Fuck this shit." Time will tell if Fox's goodwill from Undertale and the first two chapters will keep him going, but I wouldn't be telling you all this if it weren't leading up to something very specific.

**When you make people love something, and keep it away from them for long, that makes people want it even more.

Tumblr would call this a heckin' abuse tactic a la lovebombing and love withholding. I am going to give Fox the benefit of the doubt, because back then, while he knew Undertale would be popular, he wanted it to fade away eventually. He didn't realize how loved Undertale would become. When you cultivate a fanbase of porn-scrawling psychos, accidentally or not, you'd want to stay relatively anonymous. You'd want to keep them at arm's length. You could even, "come on guys, it's not that serious *laughs*" to tell them to calm the fuck down without saying so outright.

Something that stood out to me, though, which might seem minor to some of you, was that at an event with people like the Omori dev doing drawings for display, he just drew his dog doodle in the bottom right corner. It really pissed me off back then because I didn't see a silly little indie dev doodling for a con. I saw someone who got everything a creator would want. This was a man who couldn't bother to take anything seriously, or respect people enough to do something besides a doodle. I saw someone who got more opportunities than God- and didn't appreciate any of it. It wasn't the thing that turned me away from him, but still one of them. Combine that with years of being led along, and I just got fed up. I'm not going to powerlevel and give all the reasons I got sick of this bullshit clownery. Let's just say that watching someone take this life- a life that's yours and where people respect your real, actual purpose- for complete and total granted, it's a bigger slap in the face than you could ever know.

TL;DR: No one wants you to eat some psycho's "homemade" cupcake, but show some fucking gratitude for the life you have. Don't be a jerkoff and act like people are idiots for caring about your work.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

In a really fast-moving environment where people are getting SICK. AND. FUCKING. TIRED. Of mystery box storytelling and heckin' tropes from over a decade ago? That might keep your fanbase engaged, but eventually people will get tired of you. Even fans will say, "Fuck this shit." Time will tell if Fox's goodwill from Undertale and the first two chapters will keep him going...

It's something I've seen brought up a few times over the years, but I kinda feel pulling the "speculation" card to get YouTube and Twitter is in a way, Toby taking a page from Super Smash Bros. It's basically free advertising for him.

A core pillar of the Super Smash Bros. fandom has always been speculation about what characters will make it into the next game. This is a fact. However, at least after Brawl released, the fandom knew to dial things down a bit with no info on when the next game would arrive. Even when Smash for 3DS and Wii U was confirmed in 2011, speculation wouldn't truly kick into high gear until the game's first trailer in 2013. In spite of revisionist history saying over and over that the Wii U was a failure, hype for the next entries in the series was still pretty high. Especially so once DLC was confirmed for the game, in addition to a ballot opening for people to suggest characters.

Later on, however, people were left with a sour taste in their mouths once Smash 4 ended and one of the final characters was "yet another Fire Emblem character", and since it just so happened that Nintendo's next console was already confirmed, instead of taking time to cool down, the fans immediately jumped ship from speculating about Smash to speculating about the NX, knowing that eventually the next Smash game would be confirmed for it, and they could wash the sour taste Corrin left out of their mouths. Except, once the Switch did get revealed, nothing Smash-related was at the press conference. Even Mr. Smash Bros. himself, Masahiro Sakurai, had seemingly gone M.I.A., casing doubt that his next project would even be Smash for Switch.

The Nintendo fandom could not settle for this. By this point, speculation had been baked into the fandom's mythos like a terminal cancer that couldn't be removed. If it wasn't speculation about the Switch console, it was speculation about system features, speculation about what would be in the next direct, speculation about Mario Odyssey, speculation about other games, and so on. Even when Smash Ultimate was finally announced in March of 2018, the game's big hook being the fact that every character and almost every stage from across the series was coming back meant that there wasn't much left to reveal for the game, with only 4 more wholey new characters (two of which wern't divisive) left.

When DLC kicked off for Ultimate, the characters they revealed were reaching levels of spectacle and impossibility previously unfathomable a decade ago. Such as Smashtuber favorite, Joker from Persona 5, getting in, or the return of Banjo-Kazooie, or Terry Bogard getting in and bringing the SNK-verse along with him. It all came crashing down all over again when the final character for the first Fighters Pass was, again, "yet another Fire Emblem character." To make matters even worse, it was a character from an entry that was far more warmly recieved than Fates was. Three Houses was arguably the game Nintendo Twitter was playing that previous summer.

When Smash Ultimate was done and over with, the urge to speculate couldn't even die peacefully, as both Nickelodeon and WB showed up with their own crossover platform fighters, and the speculation community just moved onto those in hopes of capturing the same magic. "Oh, what if Nick managed to have their own Banjo-Kazooie-level moment and they got the rights to Doug back", as an example. Thankfully, the whole thing has died off as of now, with the general consensus online being that people just aren't ready for another Smash Bros., given how badly things escelated with Ultimate, and want Sakurai to make a different game instead, which, thankfully, is happening.

Other media from the era when Undertale was being worked on, like Gravity Falls and Steven Universe, also used this technique to varying results. Game developers and publishers harnessing the power of speculation even goes all the way back to the marketing for the original PlayStation, where Sony sprinkled in hints about the console and its launch lineup to get gamers talking, because they were already that tuned-in to the zeitgeist of the day.

 

[invisibult plus+]

Other media from the era when Undertale was being worked on, like Gravity Falls and Steven Universe, also used this technique to varying results. Game developers and publishers harnessingthe power of speculation even goes all the way back to the marketing for the original PlayStation, where Sony sprinkled in hints about the console and its launch lineup to get gamers talking, because they were already that tuned-in to the zeitgeist of the day.

I think he's falling behind in that respect. Other developers are giving out demos and letting people advertise their games for them via gameplay. Even smaller meme games did this through TikTok and the like. This rogue-lite for example put out a trailer almost 2 years, then just over a week ago, with a demo that's been out for around eight months. The trailers are more flat out exposition but be that as it may.

Demos aren't new, either, but, ironically enough, people are taking a page from Deltarune's playbook with a "try before you buy" approach. I think marketing tactics are going to shift more over time as people's attention spans shrink, and they get more reliant on seeing the games they'd play.

 

[Cnidarian]

I think he's falling behind in that respect. Other developers are giving out demos and letting people advertise their games for them via gameplay. Even smaller meme games did this through TikTok and the like. This rogue-lite for example put out a trailer almost 2 years, then just over a week ago, with a demo that's been out for around eight months. The trailers are more flat out exposition but be that as it may.

That video thumbnail is giving the worst vibes and I will not play it.

 

[invisibult plus+]

That video thumbnail is giving the worst vibes and I will not play it.

That's fair.

Anyway, speaking of marketing, a certain dating sim got an article. Keeping with the same trends as GVH and Validate. I'm just going to quote a highlight:

It's Aya's first day at the ominously-named 'Love-Love All-Girls High School', and they're (understandably) a little nervous. Shy and socially anxious, they hope they'll manage to make a friend or two. Turns out their classmates are eager - perhaps a little too eager - to get acquainted. Aya is set upon by a stampede of besotted young women, but Aya doesn't have romance on the brain themselves. "I Just Want To Be Single!" they yell. Cue chirpy acapella theme music.

I Just Want To Be Single!!: Season One, recently released on Steam in Early Access, is a game you'd be forgiven for overlooking on a Steam Store that today is packed with visual novels from Western indie devs. A handful carry a reverence and understanding of the medium (the excellent VA-11 HALL-A, for example), but many take a mocking, ironic approach, or exist primarily to titillate, such that fans have grown wary. Tsundere Studio's debut, I Just Want To Be Single!! stands out from this crowd.

Billed as 'aromantic, asexual, and nonbinary', I Just Want To Be Single!!'s player protagonist, Aya, is a reflection of its mononymous lead developer 'm.'. "I'm still figuring things out about myself and this game is an extension of that," m. tells me over Discord. "The story in this game is largely about finding yourself and who you want to become."

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

That video thumbnail is giving the worst vibes and I will not play it.

The hole in the "O" leaves much to the imagination.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

That video thumbnail is giving the worst vibes and I will not play it.

I can't help but notice that the Aussie gov't helped fund it or at least gave them tax breaks

 

[invisibult plus+]

I can't help but notice that the Aussie gov't helped fund it or at least gave them tax breaks

Maybe it spared them from coof jail.

 

[There Is Light At The End]

>Case I was 8 pages and 4842 words.
>Case III is currently up to 3770 words and it's only 1/3rd of the way done.
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Will some of it include adventure time? It has almost all parts of Steven universe but with less lesbianism at least at the start

 

[GratsTheat783]

On here and on /v/, I've noticed a lot more negative sentiment towards Toby Fox. Is it happening elsewhere? I think his Internet Darling status has to come to an end at some point.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

Will some of it include adventure time? It has almost all parts of Steven universe but with less lesbianism at least at the start

While Adventure Time is very important to CN history and all, it falls out of the range of history I'm covering in the Tumblr Files (i.e. 2015-2016).

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

On here and on /v/, I've noticed a lot more negative sentiment towards Toby Fox. Is it happening elsewhere? I think his Internet Darling status has to come to an end at some point.

/v/'s always been a bit passive-aggressive when it comes to Toby. Apparently, /v/ liked UT at first, then it reached MLP-levels of popularity and they found out about how gay and spazzy it was, and it snowballed from there. There's a small-knit community of UT fans on 4chan hanging out in general threads, but I feel Toby's "Internet Darling status coming to an end" has more to do with the shifts in culture more than anything.

 

[Senior Frogmin]

/v/'s always been a bit passive-aggressive when it comes to Toby. Apparently, /v/ liked UT at first, then it reached MLP-levels of popularity and they found out about how gay and spazzy it was, and it snowballed from there. There's a small-knit community of UT fans on 4chan hanging out in general threads, but I feel Toby's "Internet Darling status coming to an end" has more to do with the shifts in culture more than anything.

Of course there was a few spats of people calling it furfag shit since UT first came out, but if you ask me, the only reason why some /v/irgins hated it because it was inescapable at that time and everyone was talking about it. During their own video game award ceremony they had an award called "Least Worst of Most Hated Award" an Undertale won. Recency bias is a real thing.

 

[The_Gam3]

While Adventure Time is very important to CN history and all, it falls out of the range of history I'm covering in the Tumblr Files (i.e. 2015-2016).

Lemme take a guess. Is it Homestuck idk. I'm going to keep playing this guessing game.

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

/v/'s always been a bit passive-aggressive when it comes to Toby. Apparently, /v/ liked UT at first, then it reached MLP-levels of popularity and they found out about how gay and spazzy it was, and it snowballed from there. There's a small-knit community of UT fans on 4chan hanging out in general threads, but I feel Toby's "Internet Darling status coming to an end" has more to do with the shifts in culture more than anything.

I wonder if it will happen faster than we imagine. His condition of "funny maymay man" reeks me of someone who never had been shoved through a locker - probably because back then he didn't deserve it. With fame, he seems to be gaining an "asshole-ish" personality, an deserving of the equivalent of a wedgie.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

I wonder if it will happen faster than we imagine. His condition of "funny maymay man" reeks me of someone who never had been shoved through a locker - probably because back then he didn't deserve it. With fame, he seems to be gaining an "asshole-ish" personality, an deserving of the equivalent of a wedgie.

I'm honestly surprised UT's been out for almost a decade and the zeitgeist that Toby released it in is still holding on. I thought the "funny maymay gay gay homosexual gay" cult of personality that Tumblr and Twitter housed would've been dead by 2020/2021. If anything, what I consider to be "cultural progress" has very much slowed down since 2015, to the point of stagnation, even.

I'd go into detail further, but then I'd sound like a broken record.