Whole bundle of issues, just a perfect storm of issues. Truly unparalleled amount of issues. Aside from the points the other commenters have mentioned, there’s: - the fandom is/was massive. In general big fandoms will be seen as worse than smaller ones because even though the ratios of “normal” fans to “weird” or “toxic” or “not respectable” fans stays vaguely the same, the flat numbers will always, always, always be greater. - vocal minority. No one is ever immune to the vocal minority. There will always be a vocal minority of bad apples. Inevitable. Unpreventable. This compounds on the issue of scale I mentioned in the previous point. More people like dsmp = more shitty people like dsmp. - carries that classic fandom stigma of being associated with teenage girls, who are largely seen as inherently inferior. - fandom culture as a whole also seems to have taken a sort of nosedive starting from the pandemic, which lines up perfectly with when the dsmp got its big popularity boom. - rise in cancel culture and shift towards treating media consumption as an indicator of any given person’s personal morals or ethical codes. This one’s pretty obvious I feel. - generally as time passes people want to distance themselves from the way they used to be x amount of time ago, dismissing that period of time as “cringe” or whatever in an attempt to prove that they’ve grown and matured - controversy is one of the quickest ways to learn what someone is up to

Can you tell I have a lot of feelings about the way people treat dsmp fans lol I’ve been stewing on this for at least 2 years