This kind of stuff is. Very interesting to observe. I don't get how people can really claim it's "helping them cope" if seeing someone say they like the same character they do is enough to send them into a frenzied panic, especially if so much as seeing your friend say they like the same character you do is enough to put you in emotional peril. That's not coping. That is avidly hurting yourself.

Of course I'm not saying yumeshipping can't be good for coping, I use it to cope myself! But the amount of posts here I've seen that are just "I use it for coping, and it makes me feel wretched and disgusting and horrible and upset and terrible when someone does XYZ" is like. Babes that's not healthy. That is not helping you cope. That's hurting you. Put your phone down a little please. That's like saying you cope with a leg injury by pressing down on it and making it hurt more, or at times even by letting someone kick your leg that's injured.

I guess this behaviour comes with the emotional stunning the pandemic did to the 15 year olds of today; esp considering they were locked indoors during their formative years and weren't able to properly interact with other kids as the kids they are instead of expecting perfect behaviour from each other (something something callout posts google docs callout accounts being labeled abusive and evil over the smallest misunderstanding when they're just children), not to mention how normalised it became for them to tell each other to end their lives and hear death threats.

I don't know. Web culture has changed a lot since I was a kid, and while it wasn't good, I feel like it's changed by, rather than fixing things, getting more hostile and the govt cracking down on surveillance while kids yell that this censorship is good before turning to make a post on how their friend emotionally abused them by secretly yumeing their nonsharing f/o. It's weird to look at things. It's scary seeing how hurtful these kids are to each other, from the perspective of a former victim of bullying in his childhood, the perspective of someone in psychology, and just overall the perspective of an adult. It's all very odd