Everyone Wants to Be the Underdog

Following Forbes film industry expert Scott Mendelson on Twitter there were a couple of funny instances where people posted ridiculous Tweets trying to cast themselves and their fandom as underdogs.  One was someone claiming "y'all slept on" Sony's Into the Spider-Verse, a movie that made over $300 million and won an Oscar for Best Animated Picture.  But yes, we slept on it.  No one but you loves that movie!  Another one someone posted a meme from The Simpsons with Milhouse alone on a playground and said that this was what fans of some franchise feel like.  But again it was some franchise that made a bunch of money.  So this person was hardly alone.

It reminded me of something former ESPN columnist Bill Simmons used to talk about, which is that most teams would try to pull out some variation of the "No one believes in us!" story for motivation.  Even teams that were heavily favored would act like no one believed they could win to motivate themselves.

The thing is, as the title of the entry says, everyone wants to be the underdog.  Why?  Because if you're the favorite, what's your motivation?  To keep what you have?  Do what everyone expects?  It doesn't really make for a rousing speech, does it?

And of course this happens in politics too.  Recently I saw a Trump ad claiming, "The Swamp hates him and now the Swamp is trying to bring him down."  Never mind that he's hired more lobbyists than any previous administration, he's the outsider, the underdog!

In politics in a way it's good to be the underdog on Election Day because then your followers will be more motivated to show up at the polls.  Another of Hillary's many problems in 2016 was that she was favored to win, which made it easier for people to stay home, thinking that it wouldn't matter.

The other reason people like being the underdog is that way they can feel special.  It's like people who love to brag about being vegans, watching The Wire, or not owning a TV.  Being apart from the majority makes them feel special because they're not like all of us dumb mainstream people.  Those Twits I mentioned at the start want to feel special even though they clearly weren't.  That's the extreme some people will go to.

Everyone wants to be Rocky Balboa and not Apollo Creed.  And yet if you think about it, Apollo was the champion, he was married, he had a bunch of money, and he was a successful businessman.  Whereas Rocky was a loser collecting money for the mob and fighting 10th rate fighters like Spider Rico.  But everyone wants to be Rocky.  SMH.