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Is Our Community Toxic?


Is the Fire Emblem Comunity Toxic?  

66 members have voted

  1. 1. Do yoiu consider the FE community toxic?



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Recently, a discussion topic was made about a Top 10 video which featured the most "toxic" communities in video gaming.

Here is a link to the discussion topic if you haven't seen it yet:

After examining if our community is toxic, I came to the conclusion that this statement is, for the most part, untrue. Apparently, some fans seem to beg to differ. So I figured I would host a poll to see what the community thinks. Are we "toxic?"  Also, I would like to see what most veteran fans think as opposed to newer fans. So after voting, please state what you consider yourself to be.

Side Note: I didn't exactly know where to put this, so if this isn't where it should belong feel free to move it.

Edited by 1japanfan
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I don't know. I've only ever been a part of two FE communities. The first one was the general FE board on IGN all those years back. Though at the time, it was really only FE7-10 that the community really knew/cared about. For the most part, we mostly only mocked a handful of users who were trolls(Who happened to like SS a bunch), so this turned into a circle of users there(Myself included) constantly taking shots at SS. I wouldn't say we were toxic, but we had some asshole-y tendencies due to constant fuckery by trolls(Back in my day, it was called flamebait). We were even getting a fangame going that fell apart, and we were pretty open to everybody being a part of it.

Then I pretty much distanced myself from the FE community at large. In between the release of Shadow Dragon and the announcement of Shadows of Valentia/FE: Switch, I was pretty much completely dark on the fandom. Apparently this was when the FE community started being considered "toxic". Then, joining here, everything seems pretty fine.

Some debates get a little heated, but really nothing out of the ordinary.

Apparently the GameFAQs and Reddit communities suck, but, I mean... what do you expect?

Edited by Slumber
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As a whole, no, but there is always a toxic vocal minority wherever you go that garner a lot of attention and bad publicity for the community as a whole.

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I honestly don't care either way. I'm the kinda person that doesn't identify with the things and communities that I like and just keep to myself.

That being said, I couldn't really give an accurate summation, considering SF is the only forum that I actually go to (even if much less so than before). Well, there is KH Insider as well, but I've been so inactive for the amount of time I've had it that I wonder if it even counts. BUT ANYWHO, I'd say generally no, but there are definitely toxic individuals that can get rather vocal at moments; an example being when FE Warriors was announced with only so much as a title and already got ragged

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I think community divides were like 

  1. Genalogy/Thracia versus GBA games
  2. a very little 7 and 8 versus  6 
  3. Early day tier list drama 20/20 growth units versus jeigens and using promotiion items "early"
  4. Sacred Stones versus all other English releases up to Radiant Dawn
  5. GBA versus telius games
  6. GBA AND telius versus Shadow dragon/new mysterey
  7. GBA versus Awakening and later Fates

Some of them are practically historic

  1. It goes without saying that the tone of the kaga games and the three advance games is drastically different. However the issue was really exasperated because emultaors were beyond the willingness of most people to use, and even people wanting to give kaga a chance were "primed" to dislike it because they heard about it too much from the people saying how good it was. Think of how school system's are famous for making people hating "great literature" because people don't encounter books like Great Gatsby themselves and feel forced to go through it without being allowed to comment. Or imagine being best friends with a Joss Whedon fanatic who shit talked all your favorite sci-fi shows before you got to see Firefly for the first time... you would not like it.
  2.  Blazing sword also fell victim to a too-early fan translation. Additionally many fans of binding blade and sacred stones had a hard time seeing the advantages of its hard mode because the early game is admittedly kind of a hard sell. Led to sub-arguments about Roy as a charather and depending on Smash Bros to help 'imagine" the personality of the charathers relative to FE7/8 Supports.
  3. The tier list dramas were probbably worsened by a much smaller youtube/twitch at the time. It was a lot harder when debating units to tell if someone was being a smart-ass or actually experienced in a text only medium. 
  4. 8>English releases up to Radiant Dawn. Mostly a low difficulty thing. Only lasted on Gamefaqs and Reddit really, generated lasting memes about Seth, probbably only lasted because for some reason people could not hear the counteragument about Binding Blade/Path of Radiance also being pretty easy.
  5.  Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn demanded pretty exorbitant prices at release compared to the much more easily available GBA games, and a smaller version of the FE4/5 people cramming story down the throats BEFORE they played it themselves occurred, especially since they only argued for POR and 3/4 of RD.
  6. The early NS supporters were not in a good position.
  7. It was much more intense at the launch and first two years of having awakening- I think that could be counted as really confrontantial, in my opinion by the time of Fates it died down to gentle teasing, which is all it amounts to in the current day. However at its peak, Awakening's fan's retroactively condemned the earlier games for their low sales, some GBA and Kaga fans accused Awakening of inducing sexual pleasure, etc. 

Some people talk about  SMT#FE as if it could equal any of these, but the way I experienced it, all the "fighting" took place during the pre-release period, with some defending the images/trailers/"english censorship", and some condemning it. After it actually came out, it fell into relative unanimity and then obscurity.

Edited by Reality
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I would consider our community to be Bird type more than anything, considering the name of the site and all.

Not that I'd care whether we're toxic or not, since I'm just here to talk about a cool video game series that I like, and also Fire Emblem because why not.  Not sure why this warrants an additional topic considering we're going to touch on the same things that people in the linked topic talk about.

Edited by Refa
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20 minutes ago, unique said:

i have never considered any "community" "toxic", because that's literally millions of people

1. Go play a moba and you'll understand what a "toxic community" truly is.

2. People in the internet like to just loosely toss around terms that become popular, some because they feel like they're smarter or more sophisticated for doing so or some other stupid reasons.

"Toxic community" should be use to defined a community that more frequently than not, you'll encounter people just full of hatred who have shoved the term "Self-Improvement" into the void and moved "It's everybody's else fault" into the front of their mindset. MOBA communities tend to be the most toxic because there's just flat out bigotry and racism in these. It is only in this type of game where I've heard people verbally assault someone in a game so fucking much that I wished I could just physically hurt them and destroy their sense of "no consequences" built up from anonymity.

The only thing "toxic" about THIS community is the obsession with pairings/ships.

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6 minutes ago, Dr. Tarrasque said:

1. Go play a moba and you'll understand what a "toxic community" truly is.

2. People in the internet like to just loosely toss around terms that become popular, some because they feel like they're smarter or more sophisticated for doing so or some other stupid reasons.

"Toxic community" should be use to defined a community that more frequently than not, you'll encounter people just full of hatred who have shoved the term "Self-Improvement" into the void and moved "It's everybody's else fault" into the front of their mindset. MOBA communities tend to be the most toxic because there's just flat out bigotry and racism in these. It is only in this type of game where I've heard people verbally assault someone in a game so fucking much that I wished I could just physically hurt them and destroy their sense of "no consequences" built up from anonymity.

The only thing "toxic" about THIS community is the obsession with pairings/ships.

*cough*League of Legends*cough*

I have never been invested into a community enough to tell if they're toxic or not, except the one mentioned above.

You can resume that community with: Below my league are noobs, BM for most things and Champion Mastery spam for everything they do.

Getting back to Fire Emblem, I can see that couple wars are an issue, but that's also seen in other places (Anime for example)

Edited by MasashiH
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Just now, MasashiH said:

*cough*League of Legends*cough*

I have never been invested into a community enough to tell if they're toxic or not, except the one mentioned above.

You can resume that community with: Below my league are noobs, BM for most things and Champion Mastery spam for everything they do.

You forgot ''it's always my team's fault and it's never mine''.

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I've yet to run across a 'toxic' community. And I've played almost 3000 hours of Dota 2. The real problem is that everyone lets a couple of bad apples colour their opinion of a groups of people that most of the time, range in hundreds of thousands to miliions of people.

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I suppose I would be a newer fan. I started the series with PoR and then went on to play FE7 through FE14. 

I don't think SF in particular is toxic - the users just seem to be a tad bit more adamant about their views is all. Which there is nothing wrong with, of course.

That said, every fandom has a pocket of toxicity; people just tend to let a couple bad apples spoil the bunch. Their loss, I suppose, if it deters them from getting into a potentially good series.

Edited by saisymbolic
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My experience with the toxic elements of the community is no minority. I recently got back in contact with members of other Fire Emblem communities. Serenes is not viewed favorably. Though after the shit I saw regarding fates, oh and by the way, still see. I do not wonder why for a single femtosecond.

While I am rather blunt with my opinions and I don't get what I mean as clearly as I possibly can as I'd rather not write out a thesis or dissertation every time I open my mouth. I admit, the laziness is my fault. While Fire Emblem is nowhere near the level of your average MOBA, it is bad. It was bad when I joined FEPlanet way back in 2009. The problem is, people within the fandom and especially Serenes refuse to acknowledge the multitude of divides within the fandom. 

Divides in and of themselves are not inherently a bad thing. It's a natural outcome of having differing opinions. The problem is that the way I have been experiencing this is the ferocity of which people will defend their opinions. Back when I joined the community in 2009(FEPlanet) even I could see the schism between the Seisen no Keifu(Yes, I use the Japanese names of games that didn't come over here) players and pretty much everyone else. Looking back on it. There was also the Seisen-3D split. The GBA-Tellius split. The Elibe-Magvel split. The Shadow Dragon-FE1 split. These are caused by differing opinions, which are not inherently bad.

Thing is, on FEPlanet, I never saw much, if any hostility. Yeah, you'd get some hazing if you weren't a Seisen fan, it was annoying and nothing more. Then New Mystery came around. That game that a lot of people love to point at and say, "Well, if it came over here, it would've saved the franchise, because of Avatars." This created more splits in the fandom, including the FE3-FE12 split. But again, what we were most annoyed about over on FEPlanet was the fact that it wasn't going to come over here. 

Then awakening gets announced, we all celebrate over there. We also had gotten the news that this was going to be the last FE game if it didn't do well. I got the game and enjoyed it, it quickly became my favorite game in the series(Though that changed back to FE7, with Awakening being a close second). Then I found out about Serenes having a forum, so I came over here. I saw hatred and vitriol for my favorite game, sure I made a couple of friends. But my opinion didn't really matter much as I had the gall to like awakening and that must mean that I started with Awakening and never played another Fire Emblem game(At that point I had played and beat Fuuin no Tsurugi, Rekka no Ken, Sacred Stones, and Path of Radiance. I gotten most of the way through Radiant Dawn and tried to beat Shadow Dragon and just noped out of Seisen).

Then the fates hype train started a year after I returned after having been driven off. Apparently pattern recognition with the Fire Emblem series and Nintendo as a whole were not welcome. Anyone that tried to state what was going to happen without going with the flow of the fandom were hated and told to leave. Many, many members of the forum defended Camilla(and still do) from any sort of criticism(same type of people who are rippin apart Faye, just fyi). But okay, I could've taken this. I could've written it off as just a one off. Then information about fates got released, then more... then more... then more. Then the game got released. And that's where the massive problems I have with the fandom start. And it wasn't a minority. 

Honestly, from my personal experience as stated here, many people on Serenes are hypocritical elitists who believe that the only way a Fire Emblem game should be played or made is their own way and even when they get their way, they still complain(a lot like another certain fandom). However, that is not to say that Serenes and the fandom as a whole are toxic. It's that I don't see the toxic elements as this tiny vocal minority. It's from what I've seen, a rather sizable chunk. If I had to say, About a 75%-25% split. With 75% of the fandom being decent people and 25% of it being... well for lack of a better term, toxic(As for my opinion of Serenes 80-20, with 80% being decent people).

 

Sorry for the massive post, I had to explain my experience with FE communities as a whole and of course give a nuanced answer to a particular question instead of just yes or no. By the way, if you're curious about what I mean, go dive into the Fates board for a while and look for topics pertaining to skinship.

Edited by Thran Starcrod
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1 hour ago, Sunwoo said:

Why do you care?

No, seriously. This is not a one-off snark comment. Why do you care? Why are you taking so much stock in what random people on the Internet who don't know you think about a fandom you are part of?

I don't care if the FE community, or any other community I'm part of is "toxic". For the most part, I don't care if people think I'm toxic because I know why I react the way I do and what I actually have a problem with. If people want to misunderstand my actual stance (whether because they don't get what I'm saying or because they just want to make me look bad), or if people make a judgment about something I say without actually knowing the full story (do I have a history with this specific topic or person), that's their problem. Not mine. And I don't care.

Yes, the community has some people that are bad. Every community has that. But people who whine about the fanbase being toxic are just as bad and annoying as the actual toxic members.

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I said it over in the other thread, and I'll say it again here: "toxic" is one of those labels that has been so mis- and overused that it's become meaningless, a la "Mary Sue." Even the worst elements of FE fandom don't hold a candle to the really toxic fandoms, where you can be harassed, sent death threats and completely socially ostracized to the point of being driven out of the community because you don't share the same views as the more zealous elements of fandom, even if that opposing view is just having a different ship, and the creators of the media are certainly not spared if they incur the fandom's wrath. Are some parts of every fandom loud, obnoxious, combative, argumentative and/or any and all combination thereof? Of course. Does that make them toxic? Not in the slightest.

Edited by AzureSen
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Where's the option for "Can you repeat the question?"

But a better question would be, is the community more toxic than any given community of a certain size? I don't think so.

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as a whole no

we don't activily try to ddos and dox eachother like other communities because we're loosing at a game or we have a very negative opinion on a game.

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Not really.  I see some people get rather passionate about their preferences, but I don't see it getting personal the way I've seen in Clash Royale some other communities.

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I honestly couldn't really say. I'm not really an active participant in hardly any fanbases, to be frank. The impression I get is that there's kind of a big rift between people who got into the series with and only really play Awakening and Fates (and I guess maybe Heroes) and the people who were playing the game since before that. That's not necessarily toxic in and of itself, but the relationship between those two factions is very frequently a decidedly adversarial one, which isn't really a good thing, if perhaps unavoidable.

I've been thinking about this a bit lately, and I'm still not really sure what my feelings are on the matter. The Fire Emblem fandom in general is a very mixed bag for me.

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Toxicity applies less to fanbases, and more to websites, which encapsulate small portions of a fanbase. The silent majority of purchasers of Awakening or Fates or any other FE or video game in general aren't online talking about it. They're enjoying it by themselves without need to express their love of character x, or disgust with character y. If they like something or dislike something, they know it and that is all matters.

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Eh, there are a few toxic comments every now and then, like those who love to crap on TMS#FE and insult their fans by calling them "Lowest Common Denominator" or some shit, but as a whole, the SF community is pretty cool.

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Newer fan, definitely don't think it's toxic.

I'm gonna concur with what @Sunwoo said in this regard.

When I see people throwing around the term "toxic people", it comes across as judgmental, hypocritical, and nescient of others' perspectives.  Like, when someone proclaims on Facebook that they're "eliminating the toxic people from their life", I can't help but wonder what those "toxic people" think about this person and what their side of the story might be.  Its frequent, unexplained use makes the word "toxic" totally ambiguous and void, which ends up making discussions regarding toxicity extremely frustrating, and to me not taking those who slug the word around seriously.

I don't think that FE is uniquely bad in any way.  I've certainly come across fandoms and sites that are a lot worse than this.  You can tell me this is a more toxic site/fandom than most when a sizable portion of its members go to prison for cyberbullying and/or issuing rape/death threats.

Edited by Ertrick36
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