#like i don't want to meow meow him and i don't necessarily want him ''''''redeemed''''' i'm just having fun watching him in situations

[mycenaae]

i have to say like ... i still don't like izzy as a person but his character is so funny and him getting a little more nuance this season makes his endless suffering (brought about mostly by his own choices) deeply entertaining to watch. man who voted for toes getting chopped off party shocked when toes get chopped off. i'm still rooting for him to take up the mantle of blackbeard when ed inevitably retires to go open jeff's inn by the sea (featuring hotel restaurant, blackbeard's bar and grill and other delicacies and delights and fishing gear)

[princeescaluswords]

I’m unsure how to say this but a lot (not always or even a majority) of the time when I see people complain about people liking black/white morality in characters it’s tied to them being upset that people aren’t whitewashing the actions of villains. There’s an intense need for others in the audience to treat the actions of the antagonist as understandable and redeemable no matter how unrepentant the character is about horrific actions. It seems more often they want to simplify the nuances down to the point that the character isn’t help responsible at all.

I am in complete agreement that too often people who employ "black-and-white morality" as a criticism against a fictional character are simply trying to recast a villain's actions as somehow justified. I find there are very few black-and-white protagonists portrayed in media anymore, especially since the turn of the millennium, United States audiences simply don't have the taste for them.

The greatest irony to me is that the parts of the fandom who rail against a heroic protagonist's "black-and-white thinking" eventually become guilty of it themselves. They choose to scorn evaluating individuals and actions through the lens of a rigid and unbending moral system only to replace it with evaluating individuals and actions through the lends of a rigid and unbending emotional partisanship. In other words, every engagement they have with a character to whom they have an emotional or physical attraction must, in the end, be positive. To use the common parlance, their "poor little meow-meow" must be defended against any negative evaluation, even if blood drips from their hands. In the world of politics, this is called partisanship or a cult of personality, and it can be quite dangerous; in the world of fandom, it can lead to similar, if far less serious, behavior.

Before I give an illustrative example, I want to remind people of the difference between protagonist, antagonist, hero and villain. The protagonist is the primary actor in the story; their decisions are the focus and they are changed by the plot. Antagonists are obstacles in that story with which they must grapple. There is not necessarily a moral component to the relationship between protagonist and antagonist. When there is a moral component to that relationship, they are called a hero and a villain.

My personal fandom, Teen Wolf, has a heroic protagonist in Scott McCall. In a stroke of misfortune that has had repercussions for years, the villain of Seasons 1 and 4, Peter Hale, once criticized Scott for "black-and-white thinking" and the villain-stans ran with it, even though this idea literally can not hold up to any close inspection. Here's the quote that started it from the episode Fireflies (3x03):

Peter: Oh, come on. How much damage can they do? So they off a few homeless people, a drunk stumbling out of a bar too late. So what? Let Scott deal with it. Let him be the hero of his morally black and white world. The real survivors, you and I, we live in shades of gray. Then again, even if you did kill them, you're still an Alpha. You can always make more werewolves.

I can guarantee you that no one in the production wanted the audience to think that this was a legitimate criticism. Peter was arguing that Derek, his nephew, allow his sister and one of the teenagers for which he is responsible to run moon-mad and kill innocents rather than risk injury to them or him, because this was all part of Deucalion's (one of the villains of Season 3) plans.

Peter's position isn't shades of gray. There's no moral trade-off happening here. It's selfishness. Letting Cora and Boyd murder innocents isn't going to stop Deucalion's plans. It's going to undermine Derek by driving a wedge between the alpha and his other remaining family member, one of his two remaining betas, and with Scott, who is -- and parts of the fandom are extraordinarily content to forget this -- Derek's consistent and reliable ally throughout the season. If Derek accepts this advice, it will increase Peter's influence by convincing the alpha that he is more like Peter; that they're the same. They're not.

But, in the unending labor of villain defense, the true context of this scene is purposefully discarded in order to paint Scott as the true danger because of a "black and white world" he doesn't actually live in. Scott's refusal to kill victims or allow innocent people to be killed is oversimplified to a No-Killing Rule he never had. His suspicions about Peter and Derek -- vastly overstated by parts of the fandom -- are transformed from not unreasonable cautions about people who tried to murder him and his friends and lied to him repeatedly about it but into moral rigidity that causes him to judge others unfairly. One BNF has argued that Scott sorts people into Villain and Victim as a function of his black-and-white morality and can't comprehend that people can be both, even as Scott canonically argues that there is hope for Peter, comes to Peter's and Derek's aid, and speaks not one word of criticism to the sheriff.

The whole enterprise is illegitimate because there are plenty of scenes where Scott acknowledges that his attempts to save innocents might end up in other people dying. In Party Guessed (2x09), Visionary (3x08), Lunar Ellipse (3x12), and The Beast of Beacon Hills (5x19), Scott acknowledges that they might have to kill. The key of course is the word reluctant; the truth is that Scott's morality isn't so inflexible that he can't conceive of killing, but it is strong enough that he's never going to make it his first choice. Yet he doesn't cast Peter or Derek into the outer dark for their eagerness to kill. He works with both of them, especially Derek. Several times he does go to Peter for help and advice. He's so non-judgmental of Peter the serial killer that Stiles, his best friend, scolds him twice about it. And when that very same Stiles accidentally kills someone in self-defense and in a panic hides the fact, Scott is shaken, but he doesn't end his friendship with Stiles or even make a moral judgement -- he doesn't throw Stiles out of the pack or call him a monster, no matter what deranged anti anons might think -- a disappointed Scott tells Stiles to go talk to his Dad, the sheriff, which I think is an appropriate response when your friend accidentally kills someone.

But that's where the true black-and-white thinking comes in for the fandom. Scott believes that killing, however necessary or unplanned, is a bad thing, though he clearly doesn't believe that the person who kills is unsalvageable or even unworthy of his love or affection. But parts of the fandom do not share this ability with Scott. In a strange twist, in order to 'stan' a character, they must treat the character as justified no matter what they choose to do, so a villain's crimes -- in Peter's case manipulation, treachery, and serial murder -- must be justified, and any who oppose it in the slightest must be wrong at their core. No matter how much they protest otherwise, they can't acknowledge that the heroic protagonist should be able to react to what a villain does. Thus the very act of a heroic protagonist rejecting the crimes that anyone in their right mind would reject becomes the actual crime.

So suddenly, the heroic protagonist becomes their enemy. If the heroic protagonist has made mistakes as well, they're a hypocrite for even suggesting that the villain's crimes are actual crimes. Stans of a villain draw a bright line around their favorite. Anything within that line is justified, and anything outside of that line is hypocrisy or moral vacuity. This is a black-and-white dichotomy.

[eight-freakin-gids]

Give me your blorbos from Demon Slayer

Blorbos from my Demon Slayer

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most): Tanjiro. In a rare twist, a Shonen Jump series made the protagonist actually be my favorite character. I admire his unrelenting kindness and empathy.

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped): Can it be anyone other than Nezuko? Downright terminal baby disease.

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave): I'm gonna go with Kagaya Ubuyashiki. I don't know if he's necessarily underappreciated, but I certainly don't see as much about him compared to other characters. Similar to Tanjiro, I also appreciate him for his kindness. But also, anyone voiced by Mathew Mercer becomes an auto-favorite.

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week): Suma. I just think she's cute...

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave): Genya. I want to avoid manga spoilers, so I won't elaborate much on why I like him. Sure, he's a jerk, but just... give him some time.

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason): Enmu. I don't hate him or anything, but he's one of the few major demon characters that stands out in my mind as not having any redemption or rekindled humanity in his death. Between that and how fun it is to see him fail in Mugen Train, he's someone I wouldn't mind seeing squirm a bit.

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell): It's Muzan. In a series where almost literally every antagonist has some seed of humanity buried deep within them, Muzan stands out as a blackheart among blackhearts. His literal only redeeming quality in my eyes is I chuckle to myself whenever I remember my sister calls him Michael Jackson.

Thanks for asking, Zatsy. I rarely get to do these ask games, and this one was pretty fun!