It's Popular, So It Sucks!

'''It's Popular, So It Sucks! '''is the fifth chapter of The Two Cats and was published on May 23, 2019.

This chapter reveals information about where Expi works, and explores a new interest of hers.

Meeting at the Water Cooler
Expi goes back to work at the Paitoca Shipping Company, or PSC, where she puts together boxes and prints out shipping labels for mail. One day, she goes to the water cooler area where she runs into two of her coworkers discussing an indie game called "Underground Story." While Expi isn't too into video games, she grows interest due to her love of stories and characters, and she asks Mariko about it later that day. Mariko shows her how to set up an account on the ATL Game Client, and helps Expi purchase the game for herself to play.

First Playthrough
After a long day of work where she works overtime, Expi goes home and decides to start playing, and immediately starts falling in love with the characters and gameplay. She manages to play through the game once, not understanding the different endings, and after playing for the first time she ends up starting again so that she can get the "best ending" of the game. She ends up loving the game so much that she buys merchandise to express her love the game, and hopes that everyone agrees with her feelings about it.

An Overhyped Game?
A few days later, Expi returns to the water cooler where the coworkers she ran into were now talking negatively about Underground Story, saying that the game was overhyped, and that fans of the game "ruined" the experience for them. Expi decides that they're just in the minority, but when she goes online later that day she finds other people saying similar sorts of things about the game, to the point where it makes her feel bad and guilty for getting so much enjoyment out of the game. After a while, Mariko notices how sad she feels, and Expi tells her, Mariko decides to explain that people online and in the gaming community in general enjoy trash talking popular games just for them being popular. She even explains how this happens with her favorite game, Overwatch, and tells Expi that she shouldn't let other people enjoy her favorite games, or influence her opinions in general. After this discussion, Expi decides to go and do another playthrough of Underground Story.

Trivia

 * The game "Underground Story" is a parody of "Undertale," a game released by Toby Fox in 2015. A lot of the details mentioned about it, such as characters like "Tutoral," "Arial," and "Shypal" are parodies of the character Toriel, Sans and Alphys respectively, as well as the mentioned gameplay with it's different endings based off your actions being based off Undertale's actual gameplay.
 * This story was inspired by TV Tropes, in particular the page describing a trope with a similar name. ExpitheCat herself related to this article, after being involved in the MLP:FiM, Undertale and Overwatch communities and fanbases while they gained a major amount of hype backlash, and the chapter was inspired by her feelings about the hype backlash and also intended to tell the moral of "liking what you like."