lol, honestly, that post is some A+ trolling from FF7R's social media manager. Like
@minami758 said, Twitter is all about engagement, and it's a platform
designed so that the most polarizing content rises to the top (which is a lot more worrying for what it's doing to our politics than feeding a dumb ship war). I'm sure they're aware that the shippers are among the most vocal/active people on the platform. Whereas a benign post celebrating let's say the friendship of the AVALANCHE trio (which is what SE actually posted about for International Friendship day on their blog/website thing) wouldn't get much engagement, this was really the
perfect post to rile up the shippers without contracting canon. Also, it's the end of the month, so maybe they just needed to hit some engagement numbers or whatever.
Some more unsolicited advice from yours truly, but my suggestion would be not to look to every new piece of information/marketing as if it might contain the secret answer to the decades-old question of which girl Cloud really wants to fuck. (Again, I personally think it was already answered 23 years ago after disc one). Speaking from personal experience, you'll just start internalizing arguments from the other side, which will end up skewing your view of the work into a more myopic one and diminishing your enjoyment of it overall. Just because a sizable chunk of people hold a certain point of view doesn't give it more legitimacy (I don't want to stray too far off topic here, but really, just look at our politics).
This is cheesy, but the best thing about works of art/entertainment is that they can help reveal something about yourself and the world around you. Participating in fandom is a great (and often times creatively fulfilling) extension of that, but if it becomes something that is a constant source of anger/anxiety instead, I would take a step back and think back to what drew you into it in the first place rather than focusing all your energy on the negativity.
Twitter is a particularly bad place for fandoms in general, not because the fans are particularly toxic, but because it is designed so that the craziest/most polarizing posts get the most attention/clout, which creates a feedback loop that devolves into more and more toxicity. More posts=more clicks=more ad revenue for an ad-based platform. Twitter incentivizes this behavior because it profits from it. That's capitalism, baby!
I will get off my soapbox now.
Also I made a tumblr thing, just in case you notice someone talking like me, it's probably because it's me. Because there is more than CloTi and I want to talk about Aerith too, in LTD and non-LTD stuff, so it's hard to follow the rules here
with
@odekopeko we have been talking a lot on Twitter, I thought I wanted to put my words in coherent posts.
Would love to read! Do you mind linking to it?
