"It's a mentality that often doesn't come from runners themselves, but rather viewers' misunderstanding of the earnest passion that a runner driven for WR." @authorblues

One of the biggest problems I've seen within the Speedrunning community is a serious misunderstanding of the viewers intentions. It feels that many people around the community somehow feel a bit entitled to viewership. In this particular case you attribute the viewers' thirst for WRs as some sort of misunderstanding but that is not very likely to be true.

Why do more people watch the Super Bowl than any other Football game? Why does the Olympics garner such a big viewership? Humans are naturally attracted to greatness, There are a lot of people want to see the best of the best ducking it out. These people are not misguided, they just know what they want and their mistake might lie in watching a casual runner.

But why are these people watching casual runners and trying to push them into this WR Mindset instead of finding the runners who are here for the high level of competition? Simple observation will suggest that both the people who are playing for fun and those who are playing for records are sharing the same community, so the outside observer they are one and the same. If you say that there is a predominant "WR Culture" among viewers, that's only evidence that the competitive speedrunners are the ones that are bringing in most fans into the community itself, or at least the more engaged type of fans.

From a common sense standpoint it feels very logical, if someone is looking for the best competitors, they are likely to browse everyone in the community if they find someone with the potential to be better, they are likely to become "speedrunning fans". If you as a viewer are in for the personality and sheer fun aspect of it, you are more likely to stay with the runner you like and become a fan of him rather than follow the entire scene.

The onus is on every runner to define themselves, if don't want to have any sort of "WR Culture" pressure on you, simply to tell your viewers that you are not about that WR life, and that if they don't like that they can leave.

For many people WRs are in fact the end all of their speedrunning experience, the goal is what makes the speedrun worth watching and that's not something you should be expecting to change. That'd be like trying to convince someone who just attended a NBA game to watch your pickup game of basketball with your friends, you can certainly try, but there's no guarantees.

If people want to treat speedrunning as a hobby they'll just have to build their own audience for it, but if they have times in leaderboards, and constantly interact with the competitive-minded part of the communty, don't be surprised if random people discover you and expect more from you, nobody is forcing you to stream or to keep a public figure.