#why is the innocent sweet sparkly cartoon the one with the contentious fandom?

[freedfromthegalactichivemind]

I just want to take a moment to wonder / baffle at how different fandoms can be. It seems like some things are constant between all fandoms - an abundance of smutfic and art, self-insert and OC character-creation fun, people inserting characters into popular memes, people making the wildest aus (Let's fanart them as werewolves!" and the like). However, there are just such interesting differences. In Spop fandom, I will never, NEVER get over how much visceral HATRED exists for Hordak on one "side" of the fandom and how much of the same kind of hatred exists for Catra on another "side" of the fandom. Additionally, discourse over Glimmer and etc. It seems like all the people in this fandom (who haven't just said hang it all to just make cute fanart and funny comics) talk about are WAR CRIMES and "who deserves redemption more?" in a show that is clearly about restoration and kindness. Horde Prime's destroying planets aside, I can count the canonical deaths in this series ON ONE HAND. And everyone's upset at all of the war crimes committed in a largely non-lethal local-to-the-main-setting-planet war on this... almost utopian planet where we'd all probably like to live. Meanwhile, over in Trigun fandom... The body count is in the literal millions and not in passing mentions of genocide Jell-O at dinner, but in triumphant arms to the sky as a burning fleet of spaceships incinerate in the sky in a deliberate attempt at a genocide (not as a side-effect of ruling). Many on-screen deaths of characters you get to KNOW. There is this huge complex moral dilemma centered around the survival-needs of a population that depends upon sentient beings that are both dependent upon them and overused and abused by them. There's another huge complex moral dilemma revolving around the justification of lethal force vs. the prices of a life of chosen, ardent pacifism. It's not a Y-7 series by any means and the manga / comics version of it gets really super dark (yet somehow Trigun Stampede made the Tesla-arc even darker, bravo, I'm gonna be sick). And yet the villains - from the mini-boss assassin characters to the ur-villain who LITERALLY WANTS TO DESTROY ALL OF HUMANITY and also wishes to manipulate his hero-brother to his side through severe traumatizing emotional torture... it's like... there are loads of people in this fandom who are "Oh, Millions Knives is my favorite character!" and it doesn't seem like anyone bats an eyelash. There are probably more fandom essays exploring Knives' side of things and why he feels the way he does and how his character-arc makes sense than even people in any way actively against him. Yes, most people in this fandom "side with Vash" (as do I), but it's like... we understand the villain here, or try to, and here's a fandom where people find sympathy for and "humanity" in the blatantly cruel person who on-screen slaughters swaths of people in some of the most gruesome ways possible. It's like, in this fandom, if someone's a Knives-fan, or a Legato-fan, or a Midvalley-fan, or even those of us who love the greatest villain of all, he who shines in the darkness, BRILLIANT DYNAMITES NEON!!! (oh, my two-episode wonder, missed you in Stampede oh so much, my sparkler-smoking baby...) it's like... no one cares? It's like "Yeah, they're great characters, aren't they?" It's just so... different. In the non-fatal sparkly princess show, everyone's scrutinizing everyone else for liking characters who do (largely non-lethal) WAR CRIMES! and then the mature-anime/manga fandom I am in where there's this whole extinction of humanity and the uses of their adjacent created-resource-species at stake everyone's like... chill. And enjoying the villains - and different ones, at that, is NORMAL.