This happens to me constantly, as someone who writes online for a living. But it’s happened to everyone. If you spend enough time talking about television, movies, books, or pretty much any kind of storytelling online eventually someone will comment:
“It’s not that deep.”
Maybe you wrote 2,000 words analyzing a character’s choices. Maybe you talked about the politics driving a fantasy story. Maybe you examined what a fictional relationship says about gender, power, trauma, or family. Maybe you simply admitted that a particular scene or character arc made you emotional.
Someone, somewhere, will inevitably decide that you care too much. And they’ll feel compelled to let you know that.
“It’s not that deep” usually isn’t criticism. It doesn’t offer another interpretation or explain why your argument is wrong. It’s policing the act of caring. It says:
You thought about this too much.
You care about this too much.
You took this too seriously.
You should be embarrassed.
We’ve created an online culture where enthusiasm is “cringe,” sincerity is embarrassing, and knowing a lot about something means you need to “touch grass.” Irony is safe. Detachment is cool. Caring deeply about something leaves you vulnerable. And the Internet is not a place to be vulnerable.
But maybe it actually is that deep. Maybe (Certainly) stories matter. Because humans have always cared deeply about stories. Stories have always been the way we interpret the world, morality, culture, and what makes us human. The medium changes, the role of stories doesn’t.
We’re Still Sitting Around the Fire Looking For Connection
Long before we had television, movies, books, or widespread literacy, humans told stories. We gathered around fires and told stories about gods and monsters. Heroes and villains. Love and war. Betrayal and death. Families torn apart and impossible journeys home.
Yes, those stories entertained people. But entertainment was never their only purpose.
Stories helped people make sense of things they couldn’t understand. They preserved histories and cultural memories. They passed values from one generation to another. They warned about dangers. They helped people wrestle with questions about morality, death, grief, violence, uncertainty, and fear.
We’re still doing that.The fire became a stage. The stage became a book. Eventually we got movie theaters and television screens.
Now millions of people watch a fictional war over a throne and immediately go online to talk to other people about what they just saw. Or they watch a group of stranger band together to survive in a zombie-filled world and cheer for their victories.
The technology changed. The human impulse didn’t.
The Characters Aren’t Real, But The Impact Is
Of course Daenerys Targaryen isn’t real.
Neither is Alicent Hightower. Neither is Louis de Pointe du Lac. Neither is Buffy Summers, Darth Vader, or any of the other fictional people we’ve spent decades arguing about.
But the things happening to fictional characters often are very real.
Grief is real.
Abuse is real.
War is real.
Patriarchy is real.
Political corruption is real.
Family dysfunction is real.
So are ambition, fear, loyalty, betrayal, love, trauma, prejudice, and loss.
Stories give us a place to examine those things from a safe distance. They let us ask uncomfortable questions without necessarily having to answer them.
When does loyalty become complicity? Can someone who has done terrible things change? Are they owed forgiveness? What does atonement look like in a family? What does power do to people? What do children owe their parents? What happens when institutions fail? What makes someone a monster? How much can a person endure before it changes who they are?
We aren’t necessarily sitting on the couch consciously thinking, I am now using this HBO drama to interrogate my moral framework.
But our brains are processing these stories, pulling out the big concepts, and applying them to the real world because that’s what we do as humans. We make the connections. We ask the questions. We look for ways to interpret what it means to be human in different sets of circumstances.
Sometimes the Dragon Leads You to a History Book Or A TikTok Channel
One of my favorite things about fantasy fandom is watching people fall down historical rabbit holes because of it.
You start reading about the Red Wedding and discover the Black Dinner and the Massacre of Glencoe. You become fascinated with the Targaryen civil war and suddenly you’re reading about medieval succession crises, royal marriages, the Anarchy, or the Wars of the Roses.
Then you want to know what people ate. What they wore. How castles worked. How armor was made. What childbirth was like. What ordinary people did all day while kings were busy murdering one another over crowns.
And this is where the internet can be genuinely extraordinary.
Platforms like History Hit, along with historians, archaeologists, museums, historical cooks, costumers, and enthusiastic amateurs on social media, have made obscure pieces of history accessible to people who might never have encountered them otherwise.
You can finish watching a fantasy show at 10 p.m. and by midnight be watching someone recreate a 600-year-old recipe in their kitchen.
Maybe tomorrow you order a book about it. Maybe you visit a museum. Maybe you discover that you absolutely love medieval history.
All because you watched Daemon Targaryen and Caraxes level Tumbleton in the House of the Dragon season finale.
That isn’t intellectual decline. That’s curiosity. That’s caring. And it’s something that we need in a culture that has become commodified, homogenized, and bland where people are shamed and silenced for finding joy.
The Internet Was Supposed to Help People Be More Curious
And this is where I think we need to separate the internet itself from what internet culture has become. Because the internet can be an incredible tool.
For those of us old enough to remember life before it, it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary it was to suddenly be able to find other people who cared about the same strange things you did.
Maybe nobody you knew cared about vampire folklore. Or medieval cooking. Or horror movies. Or historical costuming. Or one science fiction show that got canceled after two seasons in 1998.
Then suddenly you could find your people.
Artists found audiences. Writers found readers. Fans found other fans. Historians found people who desperately wanted to hear about history.
Someone with an incredibly niche interest could discover that there were 7000 other people scattered around the world who wanted to talk about exactly the same incredibly niche thing.
The internet was the road that helped us find somewhere to go. But increasingly, we’ve made the road the destination. Instead of using the internet to find art, knowledge, stories, people, and communities, the dominant activity has become simply being online.
Scroll.
React.
Comment.
Argue.
Scroll.
React.
Comment.
Argue.
And somewhere along the way, we created the expectation that everything requires our opinion. I’m as guilty of this behavior as anyone else. We all do it. But that’s we all need to rethink how we’re using the Internet and social media.
Maybe We Don’t Need to Comment on Everything
One of the greatest things the internet ever did was democratize publishing. You no longer needed a newspaper column, a publishing contract, or a television show to say something worth hearing.
I don’t want to lose that. I wouldn’t have a job without that. I wouldn’t have been able to connect with so many people that I genuinely like and respect without that.
The nerd who knows everything about medieval textiles deserves a platform. So does the fan with an interesting interpretation of Alicent Hightower’s feminism. So does the amateur historian, the fan artist, the cosplayer, and the person who has been studying vampire folklore for 30 years simply because they love it.
But democratizing participation also democratized interruption. We gained the ability to respond instantly to virtually anyone. Somewhere along the way, the ability to comment became the assumption that we should comment.
But not every thought needs to be shared. Not every disagreement requires intervention.And not every stranger needs to know that you think the thing they love is stupid.
There was once some natural distance between encountering someone else’s thoughts and inserting yourself into their conversation. Social media erased much of that distance.
Maybe giving everyone the ability to comment on everything accidentally taught us that everything requires our comment. And platforms designed around engagement have every reason to keep encouraging us to do it.
The Internet Rewards Contempt
The result is an online culture that often seems far more comfortable with contempt than sincerity.
Something is “mid.”
Someone is “cringe.”
Someone needs to “touch grass.”
Someone wrote too much.
Someone knows too much.
Someone cares too much.
And there it is again:
“It’s not that deep.”
But notice what’s missing from that statement.
An argument.
If someone says, “I don’t think Alicent’s story is really about patriarchal complicity, and here’s why,” that person is participating in the discussion.
If someone says, “Imagine writing all that about a TV show,” they aren’t disagreeing with you. They’re not engaging in an exchange of view points. They’re trying to make you ashamed for caring about something.
That’s the difference between disagreement and contempt. And when contempt becomes the dominant response to sincerity, people learn something from it.
Eventually, People Learn to Shut Up
Maybe someone posts their first piece of fan art and strangers make fun of it. So they don’t post the second one.
Someone spends hours writing an essay about a character they love, only to have people mock them for taking television too seriously.
The next essay stays in their drafts. Someone wants to wear the costume they spent 50 hours making. Ask the question about a character’s story. Share their theory. Admit that a scene made them cry. But they know someone is waiting to call them cringe. So they don’t.
That has consequences.
Because eventually the people making things and caring about things get quieter while the people sneering at things get louder.
And the irony is that those supposedly “cringe” people were the ones making the internet interesting in the first place.
- The artists.
- The writers.
- The cosplayers.
- The historians.
- The obsessive nerds.
- The person who knows everything about medieval textiles.
- The person who can explain vampire folklore across six cultures.
- The fan who noticed the tiny detail in episode three that completely changes how you interpret episode eight.
The weirdos were never ruining the internet. They were the culture. And when they go quiet, all that’s left is the contempt. That makes platforms money, so they encourage it. Shit takes, negative posts, endless critical comments. It’s all to make money, and silence the creatives.
We’re Drowning in Content But Starving for Creativity And Authenticity
The internet became a marketplace. Everything became content. Everyone became a brand. Every hobby became a potential side hustle. Every personality became something that could be monetized.
Buy this.
Subscribe to this.
Use my code.
Click my affiliate link.
Optimize your engagement.
Grow your audience.
Build your personal brand.
Monetize your passion.
Even creativity increasingly gets discussed in terms of its market value. And maybe people are getting tired. We don’t need more content. We need more creativity. We need more passion. We need more fans.
I want the weird painting someone made because they couldn’t stop thinking about a character.
I want the 4,000-word essay about a fictional queen.
I want the elaborate cosplay that took someone six months to sew.
I want the fan fiction.
I want the podcast made by three people who are unreasonably obsessed with vampires.
I want the historian recreating a Tudor dinner because they think everyone needs to know how weird Tudor food was.
I want things that don’t exist because an algorithm decided they would perform well.
I want things that exist because somebody cared enough to make them.
Fandom Can Still Be One of the Good Places
At its best, fandom is the opposite of passive consumption. A story isn’t the end of the experience. It’s the beginning.
Someone watches a show and creates art.
Someone writes an essay.
Someone researches history.
Someone learns to sew because they want to recreate a costume.
Someone starts a podcast.
Someone reads mythology.
Someone meets a friend.
People living on opposite sides of the world discover that they have one wonderfully strange thing in common. Healthy fandom says:
You care about this weird thing? Holy shit, so do I.
And maybe that kind of connection matters more now than it did even a decade ago.
Because people are lonely. They’re isolated. The world is bleak and scary and people are desperate for connection. Fandoms can provide that.
But now, algorithms decide what we see. Influencers sell us lifestyles. Outrage keeps us scrolling. And somewhere inside all that noise, people are still trying to find their people.
The artists.
The nerds.
The weirdos.
The people who actually give a damn about something.
People shame them to keep them quiet, and monetize their apathy in order to try and make big money being “influencers”.
Caring Deeply Doesn’t Mean Behaving Badly
Of course, fandom isn’t automatically a utopia. Anyone who has spent five minutes in a large fandom knows better than that.
Ship wars become vicious. Actors get harassed because people hate their characters. Disagreement becomes a moral failing. Criticism gets treated as betrayal. Parasocial relationships become unhealthy. People develop purity tests for who is allowed to be a “real” fan.
Sometimes fandom reproduces exactly the kind of cruelty it should provide an escape from.
Passion doesn’t automatically make a community good. But caring deeply isn’t the problem. Forgetting that the person on the other side of the screen is human is.
Healthy fandom doesn’t require everyone to agree. It requires enough generosity to let other people care differently.
Yes. It IS That Deep.
Maybe every television show isn’t profound. And not every fan theory isn’t brilliant. Maybe sometimes a dragon really is just a dragon.
That’s fine.
But humans have been telling stories about monsters, lovers, villains, heroes, families, wars, gods, and impossible choices for thousands of years.
Stories help us process fear.
And they make us curious.
They expose us to ideas.
Stories also lead us toward history, art, and knowledge. And they give us something to gather around.
Maybe we need an internet that does more of that again. An internet that helps us find the historian who knows everything about Anne Boleyn. The person cooking Roman food in their kitchen. The artist painting dragons. The woman writing 3,000 words about a fictional queen. The nerd who knows an unreasonable amount about vampire mythology.
Maybe the internet should be the tool that helps us find those people instead of an environment that teaches them to shut up.
So write the essay. Make the fan art. Wear the costume. Read the history. Talk about the dragon. Find the artists. Find the weirdos. Find the nerds. And when somebody inevitably appears in the comments to tell you:
“It’s not that deep.”
Don’t apologize.
Yes, it is that deep.
Because caring about things is one of the things that makes us human. Keep being human. Keep trying to make sense out of the world. Keep thinking about ways to make this world better. Keep telling stories.
Absolutely agree. Wonderful insights and observations!