snh48 is naturally gatekeepy in the sense that there's a steep learning curve, even if you understand chinese but don't follow c-ent. to be very honest, i don't think snhtwt is unreasonably gatekeep-y because when someone shows interest in snh48, i feel that there are always people who are willing to point them to resources and try to answer questions. milan even has a whole glossary which helps immensely with navigating the 132745840693 different acronyms and you can just pop into people's ccs to ask "hey how does this work". but snhtwt does talk a lot about how we need to gatekeep more etc etc and we're really protective of our xox, which is where the gatekeeping can be seen i guess. the thing is that a lot of people are just looking to fetishize the xox or to find out about river scandals without any genuine interest in being a fan or finding out about snh48 properly, which makes us river fans protective i guess. 路人 like to pass judgement and talk about things they don't actually understand, so it's understandable imo that we want to keep these sorts of people from finding out more about the river. but i think that if someone is genuinely interested in learning about the river, there will always be people willing to help them out ^^