Just binged The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King in two days...

No regrets.

i have a family member who is a white supremacist. he terrifies me. he used to brag openly about gay bashing with his "friends" when he was a teenager. i'm queer and i haven't spoken to him in decades; he was violent with me when i was a kid; he repeatedly tries to stalk me online. he's contacted people i know from work behind my back. the cold terror he inspires in me is really hard to communicate. but when i see some [1/3]

self-righteous ass talk about fans of a fictional character like they’re somehow part of fascism or promoting fascism, it makes me so angry and frustrated. i know what a person who promotes fascism looks like, and it’s not someone innocently writing meta or drawing fanart. it’s fucking real and terrifying. i wish people would get over themselves and grow up. [2/3] having compassion and empathy for characters like kylo doesn’t promote fascism: hate groups are called /hate/ groups for a reason. they are about violent hatred. compassion and empathy are values that are antithetical to them, how the hell could having compassion and empathy be considered promoting hate? it makes no sense. it’s awful and cruel and terribly naive about what these people and the causes behind them are actually like. ugh [3/3]

First of all, thanks for sharing your experience. My skin crawled as I was reading it. I’m deeply sorry you have to deal with such a person, and I hope you have all the support and the understanding (and the protection) you need from your family. Second, that’s my personal experience with neofascists too. Whenever we occupied our school during student protests (maaany years ago), they came in gangs deliberately to stir shit, terrorize us and physically assault people with their chains. Granted, alt-right is superficially different, with a “cleaner” image perhaps, but the core ideology remains the same: hatred of the other, of the “different”, of the stranger, of the feminine, of the disabled. Like you said, that’s antithetical to what villain fans exercise, which is compassion and empathy towards characters who are set up for failure by the narrative since the get go. Sure, we might occasionally cheer at the baddies behaving like baddies, but that’s because a) sometimes fandom is about having fun too and b) we’re a little tired of being spoon-fed with basic moral binaries and with a concept of “good” that doesn’t exactly allow a lot of diversity and nuance in their ranks (I liked antiheroes even before I could form a political conscience, because I instinctively recognized that most of the “heroes” didn’t look at all like me, didn’t behave like me, and being the way I was I could never aspire to be one, but a redeemed antivillain? I could identify with that). But back to the main topic, yeah, do people really think that some nerd cosplaying as Darth Vader or a fangirl calling Kylo Ren her dark prince is the pinnacle of fascismromanticization? Or even a warning sign of some political trend? If so then I encourage them to go out more and get involved in some real activism because that’s where you get to be exposed to actual extreme right sentiment and I’m sorry but it looks nothing like villain woobification or fluffy fanart you deem inappropriate.

Also, not to generalize too much, but the demographic that engages with fannish culture on a regular basis has no overlap with the extreme right: most of us are highly educated + marginalized irl for one reason or another (many of us suffer from depression, social anxiety, mental illnesses, many of us are poc or lgbtq+ or disabled). The only thing this stupid discourse of “romanticizing fascism” via fictional villains accomplishes is pitting people with fundamentally progressive (albeit diverse) views against each other, making it really difficult for us to be each other’s allies, and diverting attention from the REAL issues we should all concern ourselves with. I can guarantee that while we’re busy jumping at each other’s throats for things of no importance whatsoever, the actual extreme right remains laser-focused on their goals.