u/TOPstatsguy

Hey friends! To everyone who wasn’t able to go to the show, please remember that although we all love the band, the music, and the community, at the end of the day, there are so many amazing places to seek out the community.

Don’t break the bank trying to see the guys, and don’t buy into the FOMO. Don‘t lose touch of the fact that, while Josh and Tyler are kind, wonderful people and they deserve every bit of success, twenty one pilots is still a revenue-generating business with a massive payroll under the Warner Music Group which is a massive media corporation with shareholders and marketing teams that study ways to influence fan psychology, and encouraging parasocial relationships and FOMO are two very effective marketing tactics.

Your sense of purpose and community should not be gatekept by the likes of Ticketmaster, and your emotional connection to the guys should not be exploited to push you into spending money you can’t really afford or being emotionally crushed by missing out on particular shows

That said, I’m very excited and happy for everyone who will get to see the guys, and I’ll keep loving the fans and the music!

Here are the parallel between Twenty One Pilots and Taylor Swift in no particular order:

• Homeschooled
• Grew up in evangelical Christianity
• Come from privileged upper middle class families though their fan base would never admit
• The industry adores them because they're brand-safe and fit a certain private equity-friendly aesthetic
• Their fans treat them like "emotional support billionaires", and have absurd and creepy parasocial expectations
• They low-key kind of resent their fans despite needing them to sell records and stay relevant
• Their fans refuse to let them evolve artistically
• Their fanbases are toxic af
• They stay silent on prescient social and political issues in a way that made sense 10 years ago but feels weirder and weirder as time goes on
• Have a small but disturbing strain of fans who are low key pretty pretty racist
• Their biggest flops outsell their peer's biggest hits
• Every one of their singles is a hit because the radio people love them to death
• They're actually consistently critically acclaimed and highly respected within the industry, despite trendy music circles making a show of disliking them.

And last but not least:

• Everyone pretends to hate them but the streaming numbers shows the hate is performative.