OOC Entry 31 - Hating Bears

The whole month of June has passed without a Blog Banter. So instead of waiting for someone else to provide me with a subject to write about, I will choose one myself.

What I am going to write about is a question that has occupied me since the earliest days of my EVE life: Why do so many people express such hatred of Carebears?

For many, calling someone a Carebear is one of the worst insults to throw at another EVE player. There are scores of corporations whose only purpose it is to make carebears cry. There is a yearly event which has the goal of victimizing them en-masse, and quite a few very vocal members of the nullsec crowd constantly complain about their very existence.

So what is wrong with Carebears?

First let's look at the "Official Definition"

Reading this, I see only one thing I personally find mildly offensive behaviour: "Responds to violent/illegal interaction with other players with a negative and unsporting attitude."

Although I don't quite understand why one should have a sporting attitude towards illegal interaction, the violence part is clear. If you have a fight, it's good form to say 'gf' in local at the end and neither smacktalk like a stupid bully if you won, nor rage with insults if you lost.

But all the rest?

So there are people who mine minerals so I don't have to, and I can buy them should I need them. There are people who run missions and buy lots of shinies with their ISK and loyalty points. Well good for them, they are not in my way and they buy the shinies other people build and sell. Which brings us to the traders and manufacturers. Well they build ships which PvPers can buy and they drag stuff all around New Eden so they can sell it at market hubs. Fair enough, they make a profit, but it also means I don't have to know the market in 20 different regions to find myself a certain module or ship.

Players who do not consider themselves carebears tend to think that their way of playing the game is the greatest way there is. I am no exception to this. Many find missions, mining, trading and manufacturing mostly boring and often even beneath them. So if you are having it so good, and the Carebears are having it so bad, why bother?

Is it the frustration of actually losing ships in fights, while the Carebears don't (at least not as often)? Well playing in a way that has high risks of ship loss is a choice, and if it frustrates you then you better stop.

Maybe it is because each one of us every once in a while has to engage in security status grinding, standings grinding or mining to make certain things possible, and the hatred is a projection of the loathing one has for those repetetive and less interesting activities?

In this often very machoistic culture of EVE, it is a perceived taint on your badass PvPer repsheet for some  to engage in such activities. So maybe the whole hostile attitude against Carebears is like the gay bashing men of questionable personal development engage in? To prove that they themselves are certainly not gay.

Another thing is, that behind their projected personality, the large majority of EVE players are not really badasses but everyday people with everyday problems, personal weaknesses and insecurities. Maybe they are "Carebears" IRL? So to get away from it all they re-imagine themselves as powerful space pilots, and want to eradicate that which reminds them of who they really are in their boring daily lives?

All of the above is just speculation of course. I speculate because I do not understand. My personal goals involve mostly becoming good at exciting and dangerous things. Most of them involve PvP, but I also make ISK by clearing Sleeper Sites, I go mining to help with the manufacturing efforts of our corp, and I fly around in haulers to sell PI products I make, and I bring in POS fuel.

Of course, in wormhole space nobody can be only a Carebear or only a PvPer. To build an existance out there you need to do it all, like running a ranch in the old American Wild West. Sure you take care of your cows and your homestead, but you also need to be good with a gun or otherwise bandits, natives or other ranchers will take your stuff and kill you.

I pesonally have no problem with Carebears. For me that makes no sense. Just like it makes no sense for me to have a problem IRL with people who are office workers, supermarket cashiers, civil servants or janitors. They all do jobs that I find pretty uninteresting. Some of them may even become richer than me (well after rising in the ranks of their professions - even a janitor could theoretically one day become the boss of a cleaning company) but as long as they are not causing me any problems, why should I dislike the Carebears?

Now if only I could shoot the supermarket manager down the street and he'd drop 20 PLEX or some really expensive faction modules.

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P.S. I know I should finish a story. It is more or less done but today I spent the day outside, and then I watched Alliance tournament and couldn't be bothered with proofreading.

P.P.S. The image was created by z0li and was originally posted here