#i feel like we're operating on drastically different scales here

[burningcomputerpersona]

everybody in my table while actively starting conversations with each other: oh yeah im a huge introvert and i don't have many friends

me who's been silent this entire time wondering how everyone knows each other and is talking to each other: ?????????

[maeamian]

I tend to be less amused by the genre of post where we laugh at the angry reviews of conservatives who don't like that there are queer people in art than many of you, that whole "I don't get it how could this be queer" and "How come they're shoving this down our throat now when the comics..." style comment about Sandman being the specific animus for this post.

Where, like, obviously someone who sincerely wrote those things would have drastically missed the point of the show, but there's a key word in that phrase 'sincerely', a I don't think they're actually operating in a way that adverb applies. I think this scenario is a bit more like that Sartre quote, that they're just fucking around with words because serious people believe in words and they believe in power, fundamentally this isn't different from that news clip the other day where people got mad at Cracker Barrel for introducing their non-meat sausage, no one actually cares about the sausage qua the sausage the sausage is a stand in for how a large movement in our culture is tending towards greater inclusivity and the people who don't like inclusivity don't like *that* and that's what the yelling is about

I think something that people miss when they pick out the absolute point-missingest ones to highlight how dumb our foes are is that said foes don't care they're being dumb on purpose and also, we, the audience, aren't the actual intended target, they don't care if we laugh. The actual point, I think, and the place of critical stress, is on the publishers and creators, firstly they need a one star review that won't get scrubbed for calling someone a slur and will pass the extremely generous faith of the moderation algorithms over at Amazon/Twitter/Whatever and possibly even a casual human perusal, "I hate gay people they put gay people in this" is gonna get that review removed but "I was confused by the presence of gay people" sounds like it's in good faith if you refuse to apply any context to anything, which those algorithms and their overworked moderators do.

The other thing that I think we miss is the scale, we're just looking at like... the four dumbest reviews and going 'oho' but when you're the creator, if you're looking at your reviews you go 'Jeeze there's hundreds and/or thousands of people hating this for this specific reason' and depending on why you were putting that art into the world that can hit you in a lot of ways but plenty of them extremely discouraging. I'm drawing on my experience here as a part of a mildly successful YouTube channel and knowing a few other people with them as well, but that sort of backlash can absolutely make an artist go "I would like to not touch this live wire again" which is far more the point than expressing any sincere confusion about anything. Anyhow this is probably too many words about something that doesn't really matter, I definitely am not *so* annoyed that I think you shouldn't, but it does feel a little bit like by highlighting this sort of review you're helping (not substantially or anything) with their actual goal of making it more annoying to make diverse art.