Loosing obsession with it gains fan base

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When I was in third and fourth grade, manatees were the center of my world. The local zoo was building a manatee exhibit but it was delayed when the building caught fire. Eventually manatees were becoming more popular with people and I lost my manatee obsession. For years meerkats have been my obsession but after Meerkat Manor got so popular and everybody “loved” them, my obsession with them sort of dwindled. Thankfully, ever since Flower the meerkat died Meerkat Manor is losing popularity. Eventually people will forget about them again. A magazine published an article about them in the 80’s people were enthralled, they soon forgot about them and then saw Timon and found out he was a meerkat. They forgot about him after a while. It won’t be any different with Meerkat Manor. It’s probably a blessing in disguise that Titan A.E. was an epic box office fail. Next to meerkats, fossas are my favorite animal. Fossa did get some media exposure when Madagascar came out. Even though they were more physically like a fossa than Timon is like a meerkat, they were boring and forgettable. Fossas are so unheard of I can’t even find a stuffed animal of one, not even one from the Madagascar movie. The only fossa item I have ever seen as a trading card from a game called Xeko. I’d rather have a stuffed animal or something I can cuddle but then I could probably sew my own. It seems that Disney is trying to kill Lion King. I see princess stuff all the time but haven’t seen a new Simba stuffed animal in years. The newest Lion King item I have seen was a coloring book from the dollar store that was copyrighted 2005. Whenever I had an obsession and when it got a sudden fan base I became un-obsessed. Am I the only one or are there others?

I can definitely relate. When Nintendo went mainstream, I automatically went from loving them to absolutely hating them. Now I'm incredibly reluctant to buy their products.
I think it was because it just seemed pointless to know loads about a subject most people knew loads about or something...
I don't even like using Ubuntu Linux that much now because of Wubi and stuff making it easier for non-Linux users to use it...
I'm starting to loose my interest in BONES now too since so many people watch it.
I think another aspect is that my obsessions are very personal to me. I feel too exposed when everyone knows about them, usually I might as well be speaking in a foreign language.
EMZ=]

For me, usually when a lot of people love something, I absolutely hate it, like when SpongeBob came out. But when it started getting unpopular, I ironically started enjoying it much more. I'm like that with a ton of things. It's usually the fan base of what's popular that I can't stand the most. Espeically when fan characters start coming into play and people get more into those than the actual original characters. I hate fan characters.

I experience something similar. I'm extremely defensive about my major special interests. Luckily, they are all relatively obscure topics, so I don't often find others who are into them. But if I do, I get really angry, because the neurotypical acts as if they are as big of a "fan" of the topic as I do. They don't understand the level of passion, intensity, and knowledge that an Aspie has for his/her special interest(s). Quite simply, I don't like to share my special interests, which is why I think I gravitate towards more obscure topics for the truly Aspie-ish rambling ones. I agree with Emor about how it's useless to have an encyclopedic amount of knowledge about an everyday subject. I like to impress people with random, rarely known facts about my special interests.

And I can only imagine how irritating this Meerkat Manor popularity explosion was for you, PunkyKat, because it was YOUR interest first. So, the sudden popularity of the show makes it feel like people are taking the interest away from you. It's like taking a part of yourself.
-OddDuckNash99-

Nope, the only reason I lost my obsession with cats is because I was made fun of constantly by my schoolmates about it.

Hm, I was once obsessed with Pokemon and seemed to lose interest in it when it got more popular. However, SpongeBob is popular yet I'm still really obsessed with it.

I know exactly what you mean...I was pretty obsessed with Final Fantasy for some reason when I was little (I, IV, and V mostly), and then VII came out and everyone and their mom was crazy about it, and I lost interest completely =/

I try to come back to the early ones every once in a while, now that the popularity has died down, but now that I'm older, I realize how linear they really are, and how much more fun the Dragon Warrior/Quest games are. Eh.

I haven't had any problems with Batman lately, though...I'm actually enjoying the wealth of stuff that's come out recently =) Now we just need the Adam West series to come out on DVD (or at least TV again) =/

not to offend but meerkats ate not yours to obsess over i love meerkats and have and will till thr day i death

If The Kinks's fan base were to start growing again, I'd still be obsessed as ever. Something like that will make me even more interested because I'd be in even more of the company of others.

Yeah, that happens to me too. I get upset when my interest isn't my own. Maybe it stems from some old territorial aspect of my personality. Whatever the case, I don't mind sharing my interests with close friends or people I care about. But when it comes to the "masses", I don't have much in common with everyday people and I rather like it that way.

I remember when I was obsessed with two vampire anime when I was in my mid to late teens - Hellsing and Trinity Blood. I prided myself on liking something "dark" with vampires in it, especially since so many of my previous obsessions had been fairly light-hearted up until that point. But then all of a sudden Twilight happened, and everybody and their moms (literally) became obsessed with "dark" vampire stuff. At that point, my obsessions with Hellsing and Trinity Blood - which had begun to fade anyway - disappeared. I was ashamed to like stuff with vampires in it for a long time after that.

I also stayed away from watching Pirates of the Caribbean when I first became a Johnny Depp fan at the beginning of last year, because I thought that it was too popular and that if I actually started to like it, people would just accuse me of following a trend. Thankfully, Pirate-mania seems to have died down even with the release of the latest movie, so I feel more comfortable about watching them. I'm still not completely comfortable with the idea of allowing them to become a major special interest though.

I like things regardless of their popularity. It's nicer to have an interest in things generally considered mainstream because it's easier to talk to people.

I do notice things tend to lose their original appeal (In the case of music or television sort of things) when they become popular because the creators want to appeal to a lot of people. So I lose interest when that happens.

Also if things are popular, sometimes I just hear about them so much I'm put off it simply out of annoyance.

I do like that special feeling you get when you have a strange or unique interest and find someone else randomly who shares it. It's different from finding someone who shares an interest that is rather common.

Much better when you can talk to people about something you enjoy.

I get slightly annoyed sometimes if people enjoy it for different reasons though. If it feels like they don't 'get' it. Doesn't happen often though.

One of my interests is an alternative fashion from Japan called "Gothic Lolita." It has only caught on a little in the West and I've yet to meet people outside of internet communities who wear the fashion.



If everyone all the sudden started trying to dress all "Lolita" or called themselves being a "Harajuku girl", it would lose it panache with me. Lolita is quite strict as far as quality and aesthetics and I'm sure most of the mainstream would make it look cheap and costume-y if they adopted it.

I laughed at this topic at first because in some respects it's true in a way. When something becomes popularized it becomes tainted by whatever social milieu is presently rooted in the general public, lol.

Disney is obsessed with Princess s**t because it sells. People are f*****g broke, am I right?

Anyways, even more interesting is the topic of becoming un-obsessed with something. This has happened to me a lot in my life and always after an emotional rift.

Things I have special interests in become apart of my emotional and physical self and when my interests become severed from me or them from myself it has an uncanny ability to cause for me anyways a great deal of disassociation patterns of thinking/feeling, depression, crisis of identity, anxiety, so on and so forth. This is what makes criticism so difficult to accept.

Warning: monologue incoming;

I used to love plant science, but stopped being interested when I hit a road=block of some sort that I couldn't handle at the time (mathematics). I used to love computer science related things, but lost my mentor when I was young to drug use in the 90's. I used to be a skilled artist at art school, but I became so attached to personal ideas or thoughts, that developing a project or idea took me a very long time, because the amount of care I put into all my pieces. I worked myself sick trying to keep up - migraines all the time.

Each work I did I felt as though it was apart of myself and when you are in a school that does production art work for the game industry it amounts to extreme anxiety and much added stress. The stress of art school, the deadlines, all that killed or at least harmed that part of myself, so I shut it off and changed majors again after three years in my BFA program.

I switched to writing, went to a liberal arts, finished my AA and transferred to an interdisciplinary research University for Global Studies, a branch of international relations, completely changing everything about myself in accordance to this new special interest. This inevitably ended for me too after a year I couldn't keep up with the constant writing assignments because the same thing happened again. The short-writings, weekly writings, research papers, simple three-point essays, became such a burden because each one could only be accomplished if I again did the same thing I did in art school which was to embody the paper I was writing, unable to deattach myself as separate from what I was writing.

If I wrote a paper on Malcolm X I couldn't get the character of Malcolm out of my head for over a month because the amount of focused attention I had spent understanding this person. The same is true for many other research papers I had done. It's not necessarily a bad thing it's just that at this University there's massive amounts of writing. I began to hae difficulty distinguishing one class from another in terms of assignments because they were too similar in scope.

After I write a very well researched paper I live with it for a very long time, it isn't finished, and sometimes day-to-day living and self-care go down hill, creating a very unhealthy pattern of decompensation periodically.

This is why I left Liberal Arts, while I adore it, I don't think it's a proper fit for my personality. I can't cope well in that environment - at least not where I am now.

I'm trying to go back to plant science, melding it with computer science, using my artistic-conceptual ability, pairing it with my love for solving or understanding global problems and people. I think there is a way to heal special interests, because they never leave you I don't think. If anything it is a very cathartic process and relief when you finally recover all those lost obsessions after you've licked your woes clean.

CHEERS!