my favorite genre of tumblr post is "you are allowed to do [completely normal thing that i've never once in my adult life thought i might not be allowed to do] and any of the thousands of people on here who say otherwise are lying"
"you're allowed to like fictional characters who are bad people" is a take that's 100% correct, makes sense in the context it was written, and boggles my fucking mind that it needed to be said in the first place
My favorite specific version of this is "Actually I like [extremely popular thing, maybe universally acclaimed thing] and I'm not afraid to admit it!"
Since no one else has posted the relevant XKCD comic yet, I get to be the one to do it.
people who don't talk to other people who aren't also extremely online
These are the scars of The Fandom Wars; an event that haunts the leftist Internet. People thinking that since most of my life is consumption of media, that that media must only depict and direct to "good" moral values, and that at all relating to those who in media display "bad" values is itself qua itself ethically wrong.
A stand-alone complex perhaps.
(Sorry I worry this sounds like I think you don't know this and that's not my goal, more just commenting on the obvious awesome (it its original sense of leaving you dumbstruck) phenomenon before us. I thought I was cooking.)
yeah absolutely! it's fascinating seeing the aftershocks of a flame war that happened over a decade ago at this point
I read this and then went to open Twitter and this was one of the first things I saw https://twitter.com/regularaugust/status/1811397441154883862
Voltron definitely for sure was where the flame ignited but there was several years of fuel being laid before then — which I bring up not as an "well, actually-" but as something I think about that I don't see other people mention much anymore in light of what Voltron fandom has done to universal fandom & fannish spaces — such as the circa 2014 Tumblr fad of discussing characters as problematic faves and "[charactername]didnothingwrong" URLs.
Which was, I think, a combination of people who were joking, knowing their fave was in fact "problematic" but not caring or making light of it in a fun way, or knowing it and saying it as a joke because it was completely preposterous to assert and that was the humor of it, and also people who said xyzdidnothingwrong with full genuineness (and were so amazingly biased and wrong). And I think, I theorize, that because of this existing prior to 2016, there was yet other (probably younger) people who started to think it was actually important to discuss what villains do in media as Bad People and that maybe you couldn't like them because what if that makes you a bad person too!!!!
This comment is very long but I hope it makes a single lick of sense and brings something to the conversation. It is just. Something I think about a lot.
No I get it. The thing I think about a lot is when I was a kid my mom explained to me how TV was fake or scripted and it's just stuck with like "Oh this is imaginary"
It just feels like an easy morality thing to get yourself worked up over. Don't investigate how to direct your anger in an a direction that could anyone, get mad at a stranger you'll never know because they like some anime villain
That's a really valuable and important lesson!! Makes me think of how I had an understanding in my childhood at some point that all media is just stories and humanity has been telling stories for as long as we had any kind of language. (Loving stories and storytelling dot com).
And yeah... sigh. There's bigger things to be angry or use energy on than people who like things that you hate or believe you "should" hate.
I wonder how much of this is improved by saying "I need to feel ok doing x" or "my friend should know it's okay to x" or whatever, I think framing it as something the reader isn't necessarily involved in helps the idea echo to times and places it is needed better
And even then that particular one gets thrown out so much in "you cannot criticize this book where there is ample evidence the writer meant the things that are terrible about this character to be 'cool' and laudable" contexts, like yeah depiction isn't necessarily endorsement but also sometimes it very obviously is
unfortunately I've been harassed so much for liking villains that I fully get why they're making those posts. there's entire fandoms I don't touch bc almost all of the people in them have this attitude that you're not allowed to like fictional bad people
