success seems fucking terrifying. you go from being a random-ass person to being a Brand. people get this idealized vision of you in their head and feel betrayed if it ever turns out that wasn't actually true in the first place.
like. i aspire to some amount of success with my little video games, but i also specifically aspire to not too much success. i would never want to be a household name. i would never want them to make a fox flux movie (it would be unbelievably bad). i like that people who bumble across the game are people who probably already vibe with the game, and i like when they talk to me about it.
i keep seeing people today comparing scott cawthorn to jk rowling. and that is very strange to me because one of them is the billionaire best-selling author in human history who for years has actively used her platform of direct broadcast to millions to demonize a minority and legitimize a hate movement, and the other is a guy who donated to the republican candidate for president and never mentioned it publicly.
and unless you have been internet stalked before and thus have memorized a list of everything that's public record, it would probably never even occur to you that someone could look up your political donations, any more than you'd expect someone to look up what brand of cereal to buy. that would feel fucking crazy.
i don't think donating to trump is good, mind you. it's just mundane. my dad probably did it. individuals limits are relatively low, so he may even have donated as much as scott. but no one put their hopes and dreams on my dad, so he does not go under the microscope. meanwhile i don't think my dad was ever in the running for queen of the terfs
on the other hand it's also encouraging, in a mildly uncomfortable way, that there can be palpable backlash against someone even for something as common as donating to republicans — because maybe it means that something common can still be made socially unacceptable? of course he got a movie deal anyway, so the combined power of that backlash was about equal to that of a pool noodle.
i have no horse in this race. i'm only dimly aware the series kept going after fnaf 2. i do not know the weight of scott cawthorn's soul. but i accidentally thought about him as a person for a moment and it stuck in me. presumably he has made a lot of money though i am not sure of the exact exchange rate to knowing you are resented
there's something here about normality. jkr is explicitly trying to define normality. scott did something that he thought, one would assume, was already perfectly normal. people post reviews of the fnaf movie with disclaimers that don't worry they pirated it, even though that gives it more social juice, because watching media is normal and posting about media is normal and piracy is normal. but boycotts are not so normal. i'm reminded of the occasional post about chick-fil-a going "this isn't hard, it's not even good!" but if that's how you genuinely feel then you can't boycott it, not ever, because you were never going to buy it in the first place.
american culture has such strong puritan undertones of No Fun Allowed, and yet also a strong reluctance to actually avoid a thing out of personal principle. but i guess the puritan thing is less about principle and more about social pressure. nothing's motivating quite like having all your peers yell at you, after all. meanwhile if you're the only one avoiding something, you feel left out and it's unclear if you really made a difference.
anyway, don't write any javascript, that's homophobic
