These Damn Cosplaying Kids Need To Get Off My Lawn!

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You can argue all you want about the difference it makes, but in the end, those people up in the stands rooting for a Football team are rooting for an actual, existing thing, complete with real people playing a real game. At the end of the day, the stuff in video games, comic books, anime, movies, etc. is just fiction; none of it is real. Because of this, I think people look at something that is actually real as being more "worthy" of obsessive fandom than something that is, ultimately, all made up.

Professional sportspeople are in their own fantasy which they think is real. That's much worse than cosplayers, who at least know that their fantasy is a fantasy.

Take a native from the Amazon out of his environment to watch a game of football and he'd be confused as hell. Guys pretending to be in battle? What the hell for? Why would you treat a game like it's the most important thing on earth? Win or lose the only thing hurt is your ego.

Huh? No, a Football player playing Football is actually playing Football, he's not fantasizing that he's playing a sport. When he catches a ball, he catches a ball, when he gets hit, he gets hit. When you play a video game or read a comic book (or regular book), no one is really getting shot, aliens aren't really invading, etc.

The fact that a person unfamiliar with sports wouldn't understand it is irrelevant, but our Amazonian friend would still understand the difference between actual people engaged in an actual competition, and people dressing up as make-believe characters. It doesn't mean one of those is more right or better than the others, it's simply reality vs. fantasy.

That wasn't what I meant. The outcomes of a football game are irrelevant, unless you're playing in rural India to feed your family or survive (which doesn't happen). Yet when you watch it you'd think that universal armaggeddon was at stake. Coaches walking around with wrinkly foreheads looking incredibly serious, players gesticulating wildly and ecstatically when they score, fans jumping up and down roaring after a goal. They are all fantasising that it's important while in fact, it's pretty ridiculous and not important at all. To THEM it is important - which is exactly the same as what cosplayers feel.

Well, if they are a professional athlete, it IS important: it's how they make money, it's their job.

As for its importance, not to get too philosophical here, but in the grand scheme of things, pretty much everything isn't very important, and people choose different things that matter to them and the degree it does. Think of how furious certain people got when it was announced the Heath Ledger was going to play the Joker, or that Spider-man's web-shooters would be organic instead of an invention he made, or that Thor was now going to be female, and so on and so on. Is any of that stuff really important? In the grand scheme of things, no, not really, just like it's not really that important who wins the Super Bowl.

But the big difference between Thor becoming female and whether or not JJ Watt wins MVP is that JJ Watt is still a real person, Thor (female or no) isn't. Again, this doesn't make one of them better or more correct for people to get obsessed over, simply different, and I personally feel that's why being obsessed over sports is generally considered more socially acceptable than being obsessed over comic books: one is based in reality, the other in fantasy.