Thread:AustinDR/@comment-29644557-20180106034454

Hey,

So recently I've been seeing a bunch of different reasons for people downvoting nominations for VFH. Most are good reasons, like repetivitve character types, same franchises, etc. Others are the "I don't like him" or "He's boring" types, and those are properly taken care of. However, I've noticed an increase of "That character is a cliche" or "That character type is dumb", mainly with nominations like Slender Man and Yuno Gasi. With those, I have to ask: are those just "I don't like them" reasons, just covering a whole character type instead of the single character? Additionally, are some of them shaming the nominators for their likes/dislikes?

For example, when Slender Man was nominated, it was attacked by people calling him and the Creepypasta fanom in general "outdated", "overused", and "something only dweebs on the internet like". Not only does calling a character "overused" seem like an "I don't like him" reason, but calling them "outdated" doesn't hold up, as charaters from the early days of media to the most recent have been nominated. And with the "nobody likes him" or the "people who like him are dumb" reasons are just there to shame and belitttle the nominator for what they enjoy.

In Yuno's case, people have reasoned: "yanderes are embarassing anime creations from anime with no content but random gore", basically being an "I don't like them" reason for the entire yandare character archetype and shaming those who do enjoy yandare characters and gore/violent animes.

With all that being said, do you think we should add/enforce some stricter rules about downvoting, ones that reserve downvoting for logical reasons? It's fine if you don't like Slender Man or Yuno Gasi, but should the reason for downvoting be reserved to something more universal? Again, it seems like most of the reasons why Slender Man was downvoted were people who call him overrated, which seems like simple "I don't like him" reasoning. And again, some of these downvotes seem particaularly targeted at making the nominator feel bad, such as in the case of "only dweebs like him" or "they're embarassing creations". 