the missing piece of this puzzle is that millennials and gen z have been systematically alienated from all levers of power in society. there are no politicians speaking to us (only over us, around us), none of the political parties are training us to take over from the aging ruling class. despite millennials pushing into their 40s now, we're still treated as the terminally immature "me" generation, a bunch of entitled gold-star-for-trying whiners who don't appreciate the finer details of adulthood (ie we see that the con is a con and they absolutely cannot allow us to interrupt the con). so much of the mania around interrogating problematic texts comes down to the depressing fact that media is the only social object that still responds to us. corporations aren't accessible, politicians aren't accessible, most journalists aren't accessible, they all just do shit and build consent for bad ideas that hurt everyone and they say they do it for us because we want it and then ignore everyone who says they don't.
but if i get mad at an artist online, that artist might get mad right back. that's a dynamic relationship. that's something i have the ability to affect.
corporations like disney have done a spectacular job training us to have religious brand loyalty, to value icons over artists, to convince us that everything is fine as long as the right people are in power. seriously, most disney movies are about how hereditary monarchy is good actually. it's weird and gross and i feel a little crazy that it doesn't get talked about more.
online is the only place that feels like it belongs to us, and you can't read tone into written words, you can't have a face to face conversation, so all information is emotionally neutral. in that context, everything that disagrees with you is a potential threat to your home. when the only thing that belongs to you is entertainment, and someone comes along who tries to do something to that entertainment that you vehemently dislike, the only response some folks can summon up is "justice."
people are messy. people NEED to be messy, and fuck up, and make mistakes. we need grumpy cantankerous assholes just as much as we need starry-eyed shonen protagonist wannabes. if we had more public spaces you didn't have to pay to access, more comprehensive public transit, cheaper housing and food so you could work less and hang out with people more irl, and if our democracy actually responded to the needs of younger generations, this problem would be so much less pervasive. we don't just need better moderation and more empathetic/permissive/live-let-live attitudes about people we disagree with (that don't cause or intend to cause material harm on actual human beings, that's an important distinction), we need to claw all our public infrastructure the absolute fuck out of the hands of profit-driven private interests, so that we can actually do something about the dreadful state of online media literacy and regulate this online thing so that our spaces can't be interrupted every six months by another rich jackass with a gambling addiction. we need actual digital stability and platforms that are publicly controlled if we ever expect to actually do something about this shit
This is really good.
Something else that I think plays into it is that the youngest kids doing this--the ones who are in their teens to early twenties and who are genuinely terrified of what it says about someone if they consume Bad Media--are all coming of age in a time when propaganda and scams overrun the internet, and they don't have much experience with a time before that was mainstream (or rather, before the mainstream was online and everything became less of a flea market and more like a Wal-Mart where half the shelves are stocked with counterfeits and empty packages).
The literal readings and heightened suspicion that media is trying to trick them into accepting the Normalization of something horrible become a lot more understandable in light of the fact that some of these kids' earliest political experiences were probably seeing major journalism outlets credulously running The Nice Nazi Next Door articles and pretending every single thing conservatives do is an isolated coincidence that doesn't suggest any kind of agenda. They know what a dog whistle is, but they have never known a time before people were just blasting out "Stonewall Jackson's Way" on kazoo and then going, "Oh, I guess everyone who likes music is a Nazi to you. π"
Like, some part of it is definitely that dunking on a main character has become a social media group bonding activity, but every incident I've seen of this fucking people over badly has had a genuine undercurrent of belief that allowing for any nuance or compassion or grace toward the target makes you a dupe or useful idiot, because if you concede anything in an online argument against a bad actor, you've helped them. If you're telling that person off and suddenly one of your friends ventures that maybe you're not being fair to them--did they get to your friend and make them sympathetic to their ideology? It quickly becomes impossible to have a real discussion about the content of work if one participant believes the other would not be writing about bad things without an attendant moral lesson if they weren't trying to use Romanticization to sugar the pill of hideous beliefs.
It's scary because it's not consistent, and like you said, there's that brand loyalty--the same people who have decided that fanfic is a vector for thought contagion will watch House of the Dragon or South Park without blinking because...well, if it was subversive and freaky, it wouldn't be so normal, right? They wouldn't just let that be on TV. And they understand that they have the internal complexity to view media critically without being influenced by its values; they just don't trust anyone else to do that, which makes slightly more sense for folks who may have been just old enough in 2016 to get the full emotional impact of realizing their loved ones had happily bought into a monster's lies.
