#good values aren’t quantified by how many proshippers you harass in a year

[hypaalicious]

Fictional characters are more Concept than Person.

Something I came across on Twitter the other day that made me go, “yes, this is exactly what I’ve been trying to put into words for a hot min!”

I still (futilely, perhaps) hope that the antis or people who are otherwise heavy into fandom discourse internalize this. Fictional characters are nothing but a concept, so to attach morality to them in any way is very flawed.

It may be hard to hear for some of y’all, but what you engage in fictionally has no bearing on anything materially. There’s staunch lesbians who will buss it wide open for male characters. There’s people who wouldn’t harm a fly who are comfortable regularly consuming extremely dark or taboo media. There are literally no rules to this shit, no 1:1 relation of fictional preferences to real life values. To believe otherwise does not make you safer, but it does keep you dangerously naive and easily manipulated.

If you cannot maintain an appropriate psychological distance between who you are as a person and the media you create/consume, that is a problem, not a virtue. Well-adjusted individuals treat fiction as an escape and not a stand in for being a Good Person™️. If more folks settled with this, then at least 90% of the heated discourse/witch hunts in fandoms wouldn’t exist and we’d be much better off for it.