Resident Evil: Requiem has been highly successful both in terms of sales and online response. Some RE guys like Synthetic Man have been moderately critical, but still called it an OK game. On social media, the main characters have been very popular. Leon was literally designed as a silver fox to appeal to women, and Grace, despite being flat as a board and stammering her way through everything, is still pretty and kind of like the antithesis to a girlboss since the whole point of her character is being less physically capable than Leon. The market is ready for a girl that actually acts like a girl.

For example, one of the easiest ways to tell Leon apart from Grace is that it's a lot harder for her to shoot the Requiem revolver. This has led to memes.

So both conservatives and libs like the game. What's the problem? The shippers. Somehow people got into a social media war over whether Leon should have married Claire or if Grace was "for the queers," or something else. During the war, people started referring to old games, and it came out that the shippers hadn't played any RE game before the remakes. Annoying, but not surprising. But then, it came out that the shippers hadn't even played the remakes, or any RE game ever, and openly admitted this because it's "ableist" or "elitist" to expect them to buy a game to call themselves a fan.

"Tourists" is a term that originated from anime (afaik) that describes people who start watching something because it's popular and generate moronic opinions and demands because they think they're just as influential as people who actually care about it. But it seems that most tourists in gaming just watch livestreams or youtube videos and don't actually play anything.

So if that's the case, then do they even watch anime, or paint 40k figures, or do anything except yap online? Previously I assumed that anyone devoting time to a "fandom" would have at least touched the content once, but the reality seems to be even weirder than that. There are legions of people out there who assimilate their hobbies entirely through social media. "Tourist" or "colonizer" don't seem to be quite as accurate anymore. You can't even call someone a tourist if they never actually visit the place of tourism.

Suddenly all the engagement with gay shipper posts and "make female space marines" and how people take disagreement as an existential attack is making a lot of sense. Online discussion is literally all these people have. They don't derive any enjoyment from the thing beyond opining on it. Of course they're going to destroy the fandom.