UPDATE: made it into a movie poster HAHA

Sugar, Spice, and Purgatory!

Too often these days, I feel like I’m living in the dumbest of all worlds. 

The country I live in is happily sliding down the slippery slope into becoming a fundamentalist fascist dictatorship and the whole world is facing a tsunami of authoritarian populism, among other bullshit. It’s fucking terrifying.

Meanwhile in the online world, you see scold pieces about how problematic it is to like villains. 

Seriously? 

A story blew up about 6-year-old girl who dressed up as Homelander for Halloween -- haha whoops, who is gonna tell her she’s glorifying a rapist racist fascist? There was apparently a whole ensuing kerfuffle where rightwing Homelander fans started claiming he’s not actually a villain, which led to thinkpieces about how worrying it is that people are no longer able to tell a fictional villain from a good guy. 

Clearly this is the true epidemic of our age.

You keep seeing this mindset of: Aha, I recognized a fictional fascist/abuser/problematique~ character!! I’m a good person with good politics and I will now mock and harass their dumb fascists fans and get my progressive brownie points!

Ugh. Some of my exhausted rage over this is due to me being prone to liking problematique~ characters and ships; I’m specifically defensive of my terrible blorbo and feel absolutely no obligation to justify it or prove that I like him in the “right” way, i.e. by flattening him into a one-dimensional caricature only worthy of hate. He’s often cited to be a red flag character, but it’s actually fairly easy to recognize when people like him for fucked up reasons; they’ll happily bring their shitty politics into it and spout misogynistic garbage about female characters, etc. As for the rest of us... how about you give people the benefit of the doubt instead of automatically assuming they’re media illiterate morons? People might like or relate to a villain because they empathize with their trauma or maladaptive coping mechanism or a particular neurodivergence that’s rare to see in a “good guy” character, and for a myriad of other reasons. 

It’s none of your business, frankly, and at this point, I feel like this whole avenue of discourse is purely toxic. Reducing the world to a paranoid black & white and scorning nuance is a dangerous, deeply right-wing practice, and dressing it up in progressive concern trolling doesn’t change that fact; it only makes harder to swallow because you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, worrying when your progressive allies are going to exile you to the shame corner over liking the wrong thing.

There’s that line from the Last Jedi: That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love.

It struck me as pretty trite and corny at first, but these days I feel like it’s a very good guideline to engaging in politics, fandom, and probably life in general. Scorn, hate and judgment might be satisfying to engage in, but ultimately, the discourse just traps us in an insufferable hamster wheel cage match.

tl;dr ...I’m tired. But I’m grateful for the cozy Homie corner and for people willing to engage with compassion and nuance.