The early seeds were planted in 2013, but they sprouted into our modern state this summer.
To be fair, there was a certain degree of in-grouping and character jokes before this wave. It's just that people occasionally making a situationally appropriate reference to MSH and MZ being timeclones or whatever is markedly less annoying than a circle of people jerking each other off over their sets of "quirks".
Ah. Yes. You know, this reminds me that there's an awful lot of hatred over my "wizard" thing, except you people are taking it to the extreme and acting like 75% the posts a begimmicked person makes are fanboying over their own gimmicks.
Honestly? I can't speak for anyone else, but I usually only notice it when it's (again) a redtext/reference circlejerk, as opposed to single posts. Might just be because I've developed a reflexive response to glaze my eyes over. Either way, it's not a "personal" personal thing. It's hating the action, not the person, because the action is fucking annoying even if the person is otherwise agreeable. And to a certain extent, I have a slight suspicion that it's an age thing, and that a lot of it is coming from people who haven't grown out of it yet (it being feedback-looping cycles of behavior which dispense social acceptance, though that doesn't change much either, it just shifts from lulsorandom to drinking/religion/academia/[insert your doubleplusgood groupthink of preference here]), in the same way that I've yet to grow out of existential angst and casual misanthropy (though the latter might just run in the family, given the jokes I hear told at gatherings).
I'm still annoyed at the "too cool for the newcomers" mentality that the older users have.
I don't usually see this? But then I spend most of my time in the modding segment.
Amusingly enough, this one of the least appropriate accusations to level at this community
and one of the least appropriate communities to level it at. Among the list of reasons I stuck around in the LB after burning out on DF the first time, the greatest was because of how open and welcoming it was to newcomers. Literally zero qualms about listing this as the most accepting forum I've ever participated in. At risk of sounding like an old fogey here, but you don't know "newfriends can screw off" until you've experienced something like being banned for disagreeing with an oldtimer or having thirty people shout you down and spam you with PMs along the lines of "kill yourself moron" at the friendliest for the same.
It's also part of why I really miss what it used to be like. Certainly I was younger and shittier, but every time I opened the forums I knew that I wouldn't be on the receiving end of anything more than a touch of well-deserved snark from certain people if I said something profoundly stupid. More than that, I knew that I could open just about any thread on the LB, find an interesting conversation, and maybe learn something new. That in a nutshell is why I kept coming back.