#brought to you by some rando on the mtl reddit trying to sway a bunch of strangers to their cause by loudly proclaiming they're an abuse

[razzek]

Saw this kind of post expressing a thing I see rather a lot online and since my knee hurts so bad for no reason I can't sleep I may as well respond to it here.

In just about every fandom space, sooner or later there's always that one person who doesn't like a thing or a fellow fan and in their screed against whatever they say something like "I'm a survivor of x bad thing" as this weird justification for their arguement. And look, my guy. My dude. You gotta stop with that shit.

Before I go any farther I wanna say that whatever happened to you, yeah that sucked. I've been there too. It's a bad feeling, especially when you're young and it just starts to hit you how bad it was. That's a lousy feeling and a real hard place to be. And you're trying to deal, trying to figure out how your world that is functionally the same as it always was is suddenly contorted around the awful thing. And suddenly something you like or some asshole you've never met blunders into that new raw wound and you freak out. I get it. It's hard being in that place in life. It hurts, it makes you mad, and it's so damn unfair that you can't fix it or make things go back to before you knew. For what it's worth, I'm sorry that happened to you. Shit sucks big time.

However. You are not the only person on earth who was hurt in whatever way you're hurting. Your trauma does not make you an expert on the matter and your hurt does not excuse you when you use it as a bludgeon to try and force people to your side through guilt. That thing that makes you feel uncomfortable and weird all of a sudden? Maybe that's the only thing that got someone who went through exactly what you did through this awful period of realization. And maybe it's all just a joke to some strangers online you'll never meet. You will never really know. It's still a dick move to try and force everyone in a room to do what you want through this guilt trip tactic. For one thing, you're almost certainly hurting someone you have more in common with than not. For another, if you don't care enough about strangers to respect that they feel differently about something than you do, why do you think they give two shits about your feelings? It sucks to find out this way but in most fandom spaces, nobody cares how you feel, and they really don't care when you're a total stranger barging in yelling that they should feel bad because something they like made you, a total rando, feel bad.

tl,dr: Using your trauma as a blunt force instrument to try and get your way is not going to work out how you want and it's a pretty good way to give others a stick to hit you with.