#of this shitty fandom trend of calling clearly biased things ‘nuanced’

[itsabouttimex2]

Any fandom trends in LMK you literally can’t stand?

Urgh fucking absolutely.

Every now and then (often in the cycle of several months) there’s a new fic that circulates the fandom promising that it’s going to be “The nuanced portrayal of Macaque and Sun Wukong that all of you were waiting for!” and the fandom cheers and claps and begins to hype and recommend this fic to every little corner of the audience that it possibly can, on twitter and reddit and tumblr-

Except the author’s idea of “nuance” is fucking inevitably:

“Sun Wukong gets his asshole verbally ripped and his teeth kicked in open every other chapter and Macaque gets lightly scolded every five chapters and also everyone loves and forgives him and is on his side without any trouble. Also Wukong is a big bumbling dumbass who can’t tie his own shoes without making people hate him. Also Macaque never ever makes mistakes because the author likes him too much just doesn’t. But if he does no one calls him out on it. And if they do they’re in the wrong. And we’re going to address and rip apart Wukong for all of his shortcomings and mistakes, while pretending that Macaque has never done anything wrong. Look how nuanced I’m being!”

This also inevitably comes with a hefty helping of a side dish of “the author doesn’t know the difference between killing for fun and killing in self defense” that is never fun to deal with under any terms, where Sun Wukong puts down Macaque because the latter is a legitimate threat to either Wukong himself, his fellow pilgrims, a town or even the world, and then being treated like a cold-blooded murdered because the author can’t comprehend morality he committed the grave sin of “self-defense”.

(And yes, I’m aware that portraying a flawed relationship as nuanced isn’t a situation of splitting the blame exactly 50/50, it’s engaging with both sides of a situation and giving them proper care in regards to the context arisen from conflict and abrasion, etc. But when you’re hitting us with a 90/10, man? Just tell us that you’re biased! People will still read your stories!)

(And obv this doesn’t include villain AUS)

It’s just so fucking tiresome to hear the constancy hype around a big new “nuanced” fic and then it’s more of the fandom typical “shitting on Sun Wukong”.

The most recent one was genuinely so egregious in spite of the constant hype that I stopped reading Monkie Kid fanfic on A03 almost entirely at this point.

It’s just not worth the hassle.