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Blaseball and the "New York Millenials" team therein: an anthropological - endlessvegetables - 02-04-2021
Lately I've found myself pulled into the general orbit of an online - game? Fandom? Oral tradition? MMO tabletop roleplaying game? Cultural event? - called Blaseball. It's a high speed (ten games per hour) baseball idle game/betting simulator by a tiny indie game studio, where characters get randomly generated names like Jaylen Hotdogfingers or Axel Trololol, and people playing the game on the website can vote to change the rules of the game.
It looked innocuous enough until the fans voted to open the Forbidden Book, which turned Blaseball into a game where these characters can get randomly incinerated by rogue umpires, trapped inside giant peanut shells, and/or mind-controlled by a god who once took over the website and turned it into a JRPG-esque boss battle.
Oh, and that was only the first era.
What particularly piqued my interest is that every Blaseball team has a subsection of the official chat server all to itself, and one of the teams is called the New York Millenials. This team's fans, the Mills (as they call themselves), have arranged themselves around a team where the logo is literally a smartphone emoji on a millenial-pink background and the slogan is "Youth Will Save Us." In a feat of continuous mass-scale improv, they have interpreted their team as living in a walkup apartment they all have to rent, arguing about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher. Also apparently their stadium is called Battin' Island?
It's... reclamatory, is the sense I get from it. Aside from loving writing and roleplaying their team (because the fans of every Blaseball team do that), Mills fans continuously make jokes about avocado toast and selfies, and gleefully call themselves the gayest team in Blaseball. If they're going to get blamed for the disintegration of the world, and since they can't do anything about it from their positions, they may as well make animated gifs of Rome burning. Laugh so that we may not cry, and all that.
Anyway - Blaseball will be returning either late this month or early next month, so now's a good time to sign up for the website, and explore the fanmade wiki for some incredibly detailed lore. (My only real tip is that the geographic locations of the teams are basically irrelevant and you should just pick based on the part of the name that isn't a location.)