#the most interesting thing abt the tts hatedom is def the sonnenburg anti-varian conspiracy tho

[bestworstcase]

Hi, im a bit lost in fandom in general and just found your blog, i hope you dont mind my asking this. You mention every now and then there being some hatedom-y niches, is it related to any political or significative offline division? Not trying to make you single out anyone, just curious whether this was a bigotry problem as in star wars, hp or other bigger sagas or just people being rude (not that its very good either). Thanx

kind…of

ok

so

the hatedom-y side of the tts fandom largely exists in this weird intersection between 1. people who are outraged that the nerdy teen boy wasn’t the protagonist of the disney princess cartoon, 2. people who wanted tts to be the sweet slice of life adventures of eugene and his girlfriend, and 3. people with a bone to pick with the sexism and (more rarely) racism inherent in the narrative itself; which creates this…odd dynamic where like, you get people furiously and correctly condemning tts for, say, sidelining the only living mom in the whole series or treating the only character of color in the main cast like an idiot manbaby who needs to be babysat by a child half his age—but then those exact same people will turn around and seethe because cassandra had the audacity to be the deuteragonist instead of their male character of choice gmfjdkdh

( which imo is one of the reasons why a lot of moonvarian / moongene content isn’t… especially good; the au concepts in and of themselves have lots of potential! but more often than not they end up kind of awkwardly railroading varian/eugene into cassandra’s narrative role bc they’re coming from a place of thinking she “stole” that from one of them gkfhdks. see also, the “chris changed the story to spite varian fans” flavor of moonvarian conspiracy, in defiance of all evidence that moon!cass was the plan from the very beginning. )

and then sort of parallel to that there is a lot. A LOT. of fandom racism vis-a-vis how the separatists of saporia are handled in fanworks, particularly in varian-centric circles where they get twisted into cackling sadistic monsters in order to facilitate varian angst. but that’s not exclusive to the hatedom-y side, the whole fandom does it /:

to an extent i think the tts hatedom is kinda… like there’s always this underlying misogyny in the way hatedomy folks interpret and talk about cassandra (and often, rapunzel) but it’s also largely comprised of people who are at least nominally socially progressive and have seized on the, very real, issues tts has with its portrayals of women and people of color as a way of legitimizing their hatred of the show (and of chris sonnenburg, who of course gets blamed 100% for everything bad and given zero credit for anything good, because god forbid we acknowledge that anyone else involved in the creation of this show might have a smidgen of agency or responsibility for how it turned out! lmao surely tts would have been perfect if only the crusty cishet white man who is sort of abrasive on twitter weren’t the one in charge 🙄)—so delving into the hatedom often ends up feeling like “lol okay, nice views you have in this glass house of yours”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

worth noting here is that 9 times out of 10 when hatedom-y fans start talking about sexism or racism in tts itself it’s for the sake of shitting on sonnenburg vs like, trying to have meaningful or constructive critical discussions of the text or of trends in fanwork—as with any hatedom, when the focus is on proving the validity of one’s hatred for a piece of media, eventually the cynical hatemongering subsumes everything else and it all starts to feel more than a little unhinged. the most egregious example of this is of course the tangled salt marathon