ok so . i think this is in large part due to the pandemic lockdowns. but did the fandom feel fast to anyone else. dsmp specifically but also adjascent smps (osmp, 30smp, etc)
like, you'd watch a crazyinsane lore stream and then log on here or instagram or whatever and artists had already churned out what looked like weeks of work. huge analysis posts would drop practically as soon as the stream ended
there was this constant pressure to be online imo. when people would get cancelled or called out youd see ppl on twitter tagging like 20 people saying "moots u still follow. unfollow within 24hours or im blocking u" or people with "offline for 2 days for finals sorry!!" in their dn and like. constant discourse that u were expecred to immediately have an opinion on without knowing all the facts yet.like if u didnt immediately disavow whoever was being called out this time people would be like "why havent u retweeted this thread! why arent u talking abt this!" (definitely more on twt than here, but still)
also i think part of it was a LOT of mcyt fans at the time were adhd and hyperfixating so once ppls fixations ended they moved on. and also some fandoms (COUGH. DSMP) ppls interest in the servers fizzled out as they were able* to go outside and go places and travel and do things other than play minecraft
(*not that they should have been travelling or meeting up or going to cons. considering we were AND ARE in a pandemic! and very few ccs even wear masks or take tests!)
but with the amount of drama and controversies. hell we even had bnfs, tho no one called them that lol (sad-ist for the whole dsmp fandom, dakota tbhyourelame for dnf/dteam and all of mcyt as well really, derivakat, bio bioloveds for boobers, theres definitely a lot more super well known fans that im blanking on rn). and an insane amount of art was made, 77,000 dsmp fics, 170,000 more fics in the video blogging rpf tag (tho not all of those are mcyt of course), fansongs and animatics and playlists and art and art and more art... thousands and thousands of discourse threads...
as the dsmp (which was as far as i can tell the biggest of all the 2020-2022 smps) was ending people were leaving the fandom, bc it was a lot of people's first fandom and i guess it's not like common knowledge that u can stay after something ends haha. and then the stuff about dream's allegations came out and that made a huge amount of people understandably decide to leave and stop associating with him or the wider dsmp or even mcyt at all
and so the fandom got way smaller really fast. and now it's like. i think "fallen into obscurity" would be dramatic but it's not nearly as popular as it used to be. and a lot of mcyt fandom in general took a big hit once lockdowns ended and people stopped caring abt taking covid precautions though it wasnt to the scale that the dsmp did. hermitcrafters are still doing their thing, there's qsmp, the esmp and llsmp fandoms are definitely still going strong. but compared to what it was, the dsmp fandom feels like a ghost town
idk. i feel like with the level of intensity of people's obsessions, and the drama, and the controversies, and the lore, and the amount of art made, it feels like it shouldve taken years and years to get to that point. but it was really just early 2020 to mid 2022. and after mid 2021 stuff was already fizzing out. idk it's just crazy to me
