Shy friend · 3d
One issue many people who criticize the boycott have is that they focus only on english speaking fans while also criticizing those same people for centering themselves. Yes if you only interact with english speaking fans thats who you'll see but its honestly gross seeing people ignore the existence of the other fanbases just to tear the movement down. Yes a lot of people do have issues with how they boycott but they aren't the majority. If we're being serious the reason people don't see many boycotters around is because they've stopped interacting with the fandom and yeah why would we interact with a fandom of a media we are boycotting. Not to mention the fact that most of these people don't even care about boycotting so why would I try and argue with them on why they should when I can just talk to people who are willing to listen and spread it to a more receptive audience.
And if you check with japanese, korean, and chinese fans many of them consistently do try to contact happy elements while not playing anymore. If we're being realistic the majority of the boycotters are really eastern fans. There target audience that so many people claim doesn't care do care, obviously people who don't care about ibuki and akatsuki aren't boycotting but they also weren't the ones spending money on them in the first place.
In general the argument that japanese fans are still spending money so it doesn't matter is dumb because yes when you make decisions that only impact the fans of what is probably less than 10 characters obviously it isn't going to make a dent in revenue. But even with that the fact that the fans of the characters and units involved care and refuse to spend is still important. In an ideal world everyone would stop spending but as we know most people only care for their favorites (the wider fandom did not care about the issue in the mad party story but knightsPs threatening to boycott was enough for them to backtrack it) even a smaller group of players (which is actually still a large amount when you think about it) deciding to not play and spend is a thing that we should praise and uplift instead of tearing it down and saying they won't change anything.
Yes, there is definitely a narrow, short-sighted understanding of how the fandom responded to 4katsuki from those who downplay the reaction. Most people who quit Enstars have left the fandom, so they are no longer immediately visible in the fandom. Users such as myself who no longer support official content and occupy that sort of "internal critic" position are few and far between. As a result, there is an illusion that fewer people have stopped engaging with Enstars than in reality.
Recently, I saw a Japanese AKATSUKI fan note that the 4katsuki merch produced to celebrate Enstars' tenth anniversary has sold relatively poorly in comparison to other Units'. Happy Elements' decisions have significantly affected the AKATSUKI fandom, and even the broader Enstars fandom environment overall. This certainly isn't contained to the English-speaking fanbase, by any means.
I find it pretty disturbing when someone attempts to rewrite the fandom's history by making claims like there was no movement around 4katsuki or email campaigns, or making arbitrary diagnoses of how many emails were sent. It's probably a given with what I do, but I take documenting events as they happened very seriously. It's especially bizarre to witness as someone who was at ground-zero with trying to raise awareness and help organize when all of this went down.
