𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦 𝐭𝐨𝐝𝐚𝐲: 𝐩𝐬𝐲𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞
[ 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘢 𝘷𝘪𝘣𝘦 𝘵𝘣𝘩 ]

While writing that entry about BG3, I was trying to think of the word for that feeling I got and when looking into it, learned about “psychological reactance” and felt like writing it down. Ultimately, this isn’t the thing that I was feeling in my disinterest in BG3 (which was just hype fatigue.) Though it was still kind of an interesting topic.

Psychological reactance is essentially when you feel like you’re being told what to like, or aggressively influenced and so you get this knee-jerk, negative emotional response as a result.

Kind of neat, I guess, that there’s a word for the feeling.

Another term I came across was “overexposure effect” or “overexposure backlash” where when you can’t escape something that’s crazy popular, the repeated exposure starts to feel grating. I definitely think that I’ve felt this for other crazy popular media that felt inescapable in online fandom spaces, though I can’t remember any off the top of my head at the moment (if it were memorable to me, I’d remember it.)

One of the things I’ve been trying to check myself on in the last few years is unprompted negativity and contrarian behaviors. (I have a lot more to say about that topic and my feels about it, but I’ll save that for another entry.)

So part of this is that I really want to give things a fair chance and not just default to hating things because they’re inescapable.

Unplugging from social media has really helped with this, I think—if I’m not in those populated fandom spaces, I don’t get bombarded with the overexposure.

Which like… damn, that’s also a whole topic that one could make a write-up about, too. How many genuinely good movies, games or books have I skipped out on because the overexposure and hype fatigue had me hating on it?

I guess it’s just another reason why I’m so done with social media platforms these days and would rather just… idk, hang out in a more individual, closed space like this with only a handful of friends’ neocities pages to check out every now and then.

The less I see how massive a fandom is, the less likely I am to feel hype fatigue or even that “reactance” feeling.

I just keep thinking about how at the end of it all, I don’t want to look back on my life and see how much I deprived myself of fond memories and experiences solely because I was stuck in a negative or contrarian-adjacent mindset.

The last time I went to an anime convention, I saw a lot of fandoms where the booths in the Artists Alley were doing punch cards. It was actually such a wholesome, community-operated little thing and I thought it was so cool to see in action, even if I was really not into any of the fandoms that were doing it. Luckily, I found one set of people doing it for Final Fantasy XIV and had a blast collecting as many punch card stickers as I could.

But like… imagine how much more fun I could have had if I were even just a casual enjoyer of the other fandoms doing it?

Then there’s how much fanart and fanworks that get made by the sheer armies of fans in those large fandoms. I always say that BG3 fans are “eating good” because there’s no shortage of fanworks to enjoy if you’re into it.

I think I’d like my default reaction to most things be closer to neutral/positive, even if I only ever become a casual or outskirts enjoyer of any huge media. I dunno, man, it just feels like a more pleasant space to be in.