Have I ever felt embarrassed by the things that you used to like?

    Ever since it’s begun to be noticed by those outside of its own specialized online spaces I’ve been embarrassed by my past obsession with World War 2 tanks. It seems like a weird subject to be obsessed with, but my interest broadly followed the trends of the internet.

    When I was younger I was always interested in war-adjacent media, it made up a lot of the games and toys which I played with, but about mid-way through middle school my interest grew more specific. I got a computer, allowing me to play games which I could previously watch only, like War Thunder. War Thunder is a game about vehicle combat, where you begin in the interwar era, as you play you slowly advance to vehicles further along through history. I became more interested in the tanks themselves over the gameplay, and began to consume content about the vehicles I was spending the most time playing, World War 2 vehicles. It started out with a youtube video here or there, but eventually began to encompass a large portion of what I was watching on a daily basis..

    However as I entered highschool, and became more active in social media, my new interest was somewhat challenged. Things mostly stayed the same, I played War Thunder often, and would look at communities on forums while watching videos. At the time, liking World War 2 was somewhat “in style”, with many historically themed youtubers starting out their channels with summaries of the world war, or talking about specific details of the conflict. However the internet can’t always stay obsessed with the same thing for long, and the larger the community grew and the more popular the youtubers became, the more obscure details had to become to be new and interesting. I was caught up in this whole process and would watch these videos while also looking around websites for more obscure tanks that I could learn about. As I grew more entrenched in the subject, the community began to take a culture of exclusivity and elitism, deriding the more general content for being on overplayed subjects. This is where things slowly began to go wrong as these people began to believe that this assortment of specific facts about war and tanks made them “history experts” or “history nerds”, or some other sort of title.

    Things only got worse when people started acting in this manner outside of the forums, and like that in real life, allowing the outside world to meet with the community and its shortcomings began to be more obvious. The idea of the “history nerd student” being distraught as they entered an actual history class and were surprised to see it wasn’t naming a series of tanks and their specifications became a trope to start laughing at. The elitism of the community kind of fell apart when you were dealing with people who very much did not care if you could recognize 2 tanks or 200. As this happened, another issue popped up, the more obscure facts began to either be overplayed or uninteresting themselves. This is the point where I began to make my exit from the community, as it wasn't interesting anymore, the public-perception on the internet turning against the community didn’t help.

    World War 2 was mine, and many other peoples’ first foray into the subject of history, but as time goes on it seems that the obsession with the topic burnt out many people on the subject. I look back at the time as a short period of time which brought a lot of people, including myself, into history, which I believe is broadly a good thing. This time of me studying history will always have a place in my heart, but I broadly avoid speaking of it due to deterioration of the discussions, and the fact that I’ve broadly moved on in search of new horizons.