Aug 26, 2023
Shun, you really shouldn't stereotype people like that. Stanford Pre-Law, Shun.
Definitely an interesting political confrontation. Sensational stories like that do tend to be covered on mainstream news. If it bleeds, it leads, after all. But in this case, it appears that it's mostly something talked about on social media, and as we all know, the political echo chambers on Twitter tend to actually be very small relative to the voting population. But here, Ayako brings all the salacious tweets into the real world, where they have to be confronted.
Ironically, this reminds me of a thought I had in the 1980s. OK, so it might actually be 1990 or 1991, but it could just have easily been 1989. We got dial-up internet at home, and that meant I could spend time arguing about nerd stuff on usenet. At the time, we were living in a small town in the sticks. The closest "city" had a population of like 20k, and I realized, there are more people in the US who were into the same kind of nerd stuff I was than there were in that city. If we could just all relocate to the same place, we wouldn't have to be social outcasts anymore. We could create our own city with its own culture distinct from the bullies and the ignorant.
Of course, I long since realized that fandom is a poor means of social cohesion, and that nerds are often just as hard on each other as the bullies are, so I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that maybe if the social media political groups could all relocate together, they might actually be able to live out a scene like this one, and actually have some modicum of political power.
