There are so many weird people in the world—and that’s exactly why the world holds together. “Proper” isn’t the only thing that’s right. For example: the new year arrives, and for me that meant announcing a new work… and of course, even that comes with incomprehensible nitpicking. The kind of accusations that are so wildly off-target, anyone can see they’re not worth engaging with.
When something is this hard to make sense of—logic that exists only inside the person’s own head—other people can only label it as “weird.” If it’s outside common sense and you can’t even have a conversation, all you can do is shove it into the “weird” box and leave it there.
In real life, that usually means you get isolated naturally. But online, there are ways to keep yourself parked in a visible spot. And maybe the reason people can’t get anyone to listen is because being unheard is just… sad.
“My ex-girlfriend said we’re not meeting after all. I thought I’d finally get to see her—!!”
New Year’s.
I opened some random news program on YouTube, and in the chat someone wrote:
“My ex-girlfriend said we’re not meeting after all. I thought I’d finally get to see her—!!”
Of course it had nothing to do with the program. They weren’t part of the holiday homecoming rush, either. It was just a meaningless complaint tossed out because they wanted someone watching the news to read it.
Stuff like that gets ignored. Naturally. If you’re lucky, someone nibbles a little.
They don’t know where “appropriate communication” is supposed to happen—or they can’t be bothered to find it—so even if it makes them a weirdo, they fire off a flare like: “I’M HERE!”
They don’t have the energy or the understanding to hold a normal conversation.
But they still want to scream: “I want to be here.”
I run two Discord servers—one Japanese, one English—and even there, you occasionally get trolls. Discord’s countermeasures are pretty strict, so most of them get banned within an hour. Some people get so heated they get reported even though they didn’t mean to troll. They just wanted a place to belong, and they didn’t know how to do it. And then they get banned, mechanically, by a bot.
Of course, as an admin, I don’t want anyone to cause trouble. But still.
In the end, being treated as “weird” is just a relative judgment from society. In a small, familiar group, it’s fine to be as lopsided as you want. Having one or two local weirdos is normal—that’s all it is.
But the internet—those undefined masses, those giant communities—are harsh toward anything that doesn’t fit. People who couldn’t even gather in real life come online and scream to be loved, and that scream becomes “weird.”
At the end of last year, a company put out a statement responding to our allegations, and it was incoherent. Honestly, it was nothing but AI output—thin on logic, thin on evidence, objectively a mess—so nobody even tried to patch it up. Still, it contained things that hurt creators, so the related companies ended up scrambling, because they couldn’t not respond.
Even I tried to understand what was happening, but I couldn’t help interpreting it as a panic-cry: “I want to stay in the industry!” And they failed, didn’t they. They didn’t know how to do it, but they were cornered by the fear of disappearing from the world, so they tossed an AI-written rebuttal into the public—just to prove they were still connected.
Everyone wants someone to look at them. And when they don’t know how, they keep suffering.
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