Like, I DO think people get too wound up over fictional constructs--that, very pointedly, are not real and whose actions are made up and do not actually affect any real people--doing horrible things in-story, but I also think it's fair for someone to say, "This action sits poorly with me even in a fictional setting, in such an intense way that I cannot move past that or find sympathy for," and "People are saying this bad behavior isn't actually bad, in a way that is meant to be taken seriously and at face-value, and that makes me severely uncomfortable."

Granted, this all gets muddled very easily because that's not what people mean most of the time, they just want to over-moralize fiction and say, "If you like this pRoBLeMaTiC thing for any reason, you are a menace to society" for Superiority Points. (They also like to invent problems that don't actually exist to "prove" that they have the moral high ground in not liking something remember when people tried to say catra/adora was incest because they grew up together because I sure do.) But I feel like there is a split between people who use "[character] apologism" in the sense of "I will be okay with this character doing whatever fucked-up thing they want in the story because I like them" vs "If you find this character compelling or want them to succeed, you would one-to-one condone their actions irl" vs "I have seen people genuinely say, with no joking or irony, that this character never actually caused any type of harm to the other characters within the story, and I don't like that."