I’m coming for the Twitterverse with this one.
The sick, para-social relationships that seem to be endemic with visual kei fans on Twitter needs to stop. It is detached from the real world and bordering on group psychosis. From thirst trapping on a post in a language they won’t be able to understand even with translation tools to starting witch hunts to rectify whatever moral lapsing of the week gets someone triggered, I see nothing of value from engaging with the larger community en-masse and trying to pass on knowledge, artists, or even just banter. A lot of this younger community has only ever existed in the post-boom phase and they have zero interest in learning or trying to be a part of what came before, just trying to ride the wave and live in the now.
That’s perfectly fine until one runs up against the wall of unacceptable behavior, with good intentions on the end of a stick shoved so far up the ass it comes out the gullet. It’s probably been going on for as long as broadcasting your stream of consciousness into the void has been normalized, but it only came up when I got wind of people on Twitter dragging gulu gulu’s vocalist Ai through the mud. This wasn’t an isolated incident either - this has aftershocks where people suddenly remember that “he did a bad thing” and they go off to tag him in demeaning, demoralizing, rude, and frankly horrific tweets while hiding under the shield of absolute relative moralism and pretending that this insanely small digital hill symbolizes the ultimate binary choice and you’re either with them or against them. Never mind that those same people would be crying in the corner if an equal level of vitriol was spewed at them out of the void because a group of people willingly misinterpreted your actions as a pretext to get angry - not because they’re “weak”, but because what they’re spitting online is that corrosive. They can dish it out but they can’t take it and I bet by this point, they’re ready to switch tabs back to Twitter to cancel me. Hold on, I ain’t done yet.
Then, I was alerted to the endless thirst trapping of fans fifteen years late to the scene either digitally prostrating themselves in front of bandomen profiles or similarly detached individuals taking to reddit to disappoint their parents and become a visual kei hoe (bring condoms!). That existed as a part of the boom, but at least that kind of lunacy wasn’t able to synchronize like routers. Now everyone’s entertaining the delusions of others until this becomes a normalized experience where you can tell your favorite band member that you don’t know and have never met that you would like to have babies with him when he’s trying to promote his next live. I bet that goes over real well via text.
What grinds my gears into a perfect circle are those very detached individuals who feel the need to call out band men on other’s behalf for inconsequential transgressions. Key word: inconsequential. I do not subscribe to the ideology of applying my cultural perspective on another, especially one that I don’t fully understand. We have Setsuna involved in a botched murder-suicide and SHINTARO raping and recording underage women a lot like y’all, and it’s curtains. Someone wears black body spray? I AWAKEN! Die from Dir en grey wore a Nazi armband two decades ago for a photo shoot? Turn off “children”, delete all your Dir en grey, then cancel him without determining more context and if he still espouses those same beliefs, or if he was just putting the “shock” in “visual shock”. I don’t understand how people can froth about cultural appropriation until they are Twitter blue in the face behind the safety of their anime avatar and weeb-influenced handle, all because a band man wore braids or spray painted himself black.
Self-awareness zero. Nuance and detail are things that are lost when restricted to communicating your every thought in five sentences or less. Don’t start fires from now on - that’s appropriating caveman culture.
I finished the first paragraph the way I did because visual kei is such a rich and interesting topic, and a lot of us fans have very few people to talk about it with IRL. It wasn’t all roses before the boom, but I really miss the time before everyone and their dog had easy instant access to the internet and Twitter, especially in relation to the visual scene. Fans would talk about music and would be excited to share news of new bands, new releases, and new looks. There would be tangible sadness when a beloved band breaks up. News was so much harder to come by and translate so everything was appreciated that much more. Even sampling music wasn’t easy because there was no YouTube and the internet was much less developed. The dedication of those that came before built the foundation of what became the visual kei boom. That dedication is the only reason why anyone is reading this now. It took a long time between when visual kei was booming in Japan and when it first became an international export because Japan is an insular country that likes to keep its culture close to the vest. Every single thirsty tweet, off-the-cuff comment, or witch hunt is taking the scene several steps back to those times where none of them wanted to interact with international fans. They have enough of that to deal with at home.
To me, there is a very THICC line between what Setsuna/Shintaro have been found guilty of doing in a court of law, and someone that makes a choice that is distasteful to your culture but has no offensive meaning in theirs. If you’re too busy subdividing the hair follicles of reason to determine if it’s an acceptable time to turn up, you’ve missed the plot. These social media algorithms have hijacked brains into believing individual opinions are far more important than they are, but the paradox of that observation is that the sum of these toxic tweets is greater than the parts.
And because it’s 2022 and I know how online discourse works, I have to add this disclaimer - I am not a Nazi apologist, pedophile, disgruntled white man with a bag of Doritos on his shoulder, grifter, spokesman for a visual record company speaking on their behalf, or your mother. I’m just one of the few old guard left who has been around long enough to know how things used to be, and I have no desire to go back there just so people on Twitter can look morally pure for the next two weeks. Don’t miss the point I am trying to make in an attempt to write another Tweet, push your agenda, and get your dopamine fix. The online behavior of the international scene is absolutely atrocious and it’s been allowed to fester like a cancer because there’s no oversight.
Oh, and none of that was my unpopular opinion. That’s all fact. My unpopular opinion is that for as notorious as it’s become for it’s toxicity, I find everything I discussed above far worse in comparison than anything on Batsu or MH. At least Batsu had moderators…