#they could never make me hate you zebede

[sushi6top]

A little zebede design

[bananonbinary]

theres something ive been thinking about for a while that i’m not quite sure how to articulate, but i’ll give it a shot.

So like. Obviously fandom is full of heated debate about what characters You Should And Shouldn’t Like. One of the arguments I see tossed around a lot is “well you hate x character who’s kind of a creep, but not y character who’s a murderer.” Most recently, I saw this with Zebede, the friendsim character who wrote rpf, being compared to say, Konyyl, who literally kills people for money.

Let me just get it out of the way that fiction and fandom are supposed to be fun, and I really truly don’t care who you do and do not like. All that aside tho, It’s not really a fair comparison to make? real-person fiction makes people in this specific space uncomfortable, because we’ve probably all come up against it at some point. Murder, not so much. We can only view fictional characters through the lens of our own experiences, so wildly evil acts like “tried to commit genocide” or “actively eats babies” generally (hopefully) isn’t going to ping us as being as terrible as things people have actually done to us personally. (ex. Someone who ISN’T active in fandom spaces and has never heard of rpf before probably wouldn’t have nearly as extreme a reaction to Zebede.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is, “evil” in a fictional character only matters so much as the audience member can personally relate to what happened. Their actual “goodness” is more irrelevant than if their specific actions happen to hit close enough to home with someone to upset them or not, and more importantly, whether their relatability is able to outweigh that. So if you’re ever sitting there wondering “how could ANYONE like such a despicable character??!?!” it’s probably less them overlooking their bad qualities, and more that they don’t face the same types of injustice in their day-to-day lives as you do, and thus that specific problem doesn’t feel as “real” to them as another might. Being able to pick and choose which problems matter is the luxury of fiction.