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dullahandyke · 1 year

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Sympathetic Deceit: on Fanon, Tropes, and Unneeded Character

To those who were in the Sanders Sides fandom from 2018 to 2020, you should be familiar with the kind of simplistic moral hellscape it was. Personally, I recall the phrase 'Sympathetic Dark Sides' and go through all 5 stages of grief at the same time. I remembered it in the shower today and could not rest until I had written 2.2k about the phenomenon.

To those who weren't, I hope this is legible. Enjoy the shitshow!

Premiering in 2016, Sanders Sides is a web series by Thomas Sanders of Vine fame. Initially a light series about his internal logos, ethos, and pathos bickering over problems and coming to conclusions, the series soon integrated a plot, and eventually, tried its hand at moral complexity. Can’t say it didn’t try.

Along with the three initial sides, who were the unequivocal Good Guys, another side was soon introduced; Anxiety, an outcast and an antagonist. As the episodes went on, Anxiety was drawn more and more into the main group, until finally, the group learned his real name: Virgil. Learning the other sides’s names had been a benchmark of trust, and all the others had revealed theirs – Logan, Patton, and Roman. This symbolised that Virgil had become a part of them, no longer an outcast.

As Virgil revealed his name and joined the group, Roman said that he was ‘nothing compared to the others.’ Cue the introduction of the Dark dichotomy.

After this point, a line was drawn to retroactively define the way that Virgil had been an outcast. Roman, Patton, and Logan were the Light Sides, the good guys, the ones who were immediately trusted. Before he had begun hanging around the Light Sides, Virgil had been a member of the Dark Sides, a nebulous group that... the audience knows almost nothing about other than Virgil’s involvement and the existance of others. After that line was dropped, it was tabled. The four Light Sides blissfully bickered amongst each other with no further mention of the Dark Sides.

Five months later, an episode aired that, on its head, seemed to be another solely Light episode. For half an hour, the Light Sides argued. In the back end of the episode, however, Patton – the paternal figure of emotion and morality – had been acting less and less moral and emotional. He had turned almost calculating, and soon, the other Light Sides unmasked him as Deceit, the first Dark Side revealed with the knowledge of what they are. Thomas was panicked by this appearance, and though Deceit soon disappeared, he required reassurance from the Light Sides that despite Deceit being a part of him, he was a Good Person.

Logan, Logic, butted in and claimed that Good and Bad are relative concepts, but before he could continue, Virgil shut him up, reinforcing the dichotomy. Yes, Thomas, you’re a good person even though Deceit lives within you, believe in yourself and don’t let him get to you, etc etc etc.

After this episode, it was over two years before we saw Deceit again – saw him properly, saw him in more than bit parts. During this time, I’d like to swivel to the fandom’s reaction to Deceit, and the bullshittery to follow.

To someone familiar with fandom, it should be no surprise that Virgil was the most popular side. Once an outcast, now redeemed, the most obviously ‘complex’ character in the show. An edgy angsty side, ripe to be woobied; babied, coddled, treated like a smol precious cinnamon roll. Of course, if you want to draw out the woobie, first you need to damage it, to give it something to heal from. Hurt/Comfort needs the Hurt. However, all of the Light Sides were good – at this point, no reason had been given to question their morality, and the idea that any of them would purposefully harm Virgil after his redemption was not a popular one at all. The Light Sides were not the only characters, though. There were the Dark Sides. There was Deceit.

Deceit, who had only gotten five or so minutes screen-time as himself, the rest of which had him imitating Patton. Deceit, who had been set up as the first serious antagonist and was not touched for two years. Deceit, who had a history. Who had bad blood with Virgil of all sides. It was almost inevitable.

The most common use of this angst was in Deceit’s capacity as a manipulator. He had many parallels to Patton, often considered to be the leader of the Light Sides, and this led to him being considered leader of the Dark Sides. Virgil had defected from the dark, and hey, he had to have had a pretty good reason to defect, right? Most often, it was written either than Deceit had turned Virgil against the Light Sides and that Virgil had realised this, or that Deceit had been a perpetrator of abuse of any kind conceivable. This second interpretation soon spread, into Alternate Universes and everything beyond, with Deceit as a stand-in for any sort of villain. If you wanted to write a story about Virgil recovering from being physically, sexually, psychologically abused, he needed an abuser. High School!Virgil needed a bully. Fantasy!Virgil needed an evil leader to betray. All through this, Deceit’s name was a point of contention. He was the only side thus far not to have one, and while there was no real consensus, one of the most common was Damien, a name commonly associated with demons and evil.

Eventually, however, Deceit appeared again in 2019, when he butted heads with Patton for a full 40 minutes. Though he was rebuffed again, this episode shifted the common perception of Deceit almost entirely. As opposed to his first appearance, during which he appeared unilaterally sinister after imitating a beloved character for the sake of manipulation, this Deceit was charismatic. He was funny, he had good arguments, and many fans welcomed the ‘dimension’ that this brought to the series. They agreed with him, or thought that he had been railroaded by the bias against Dark Sides, or simply liked the cut of his jib. Thus, the tide began to turn against the conception of Deceit as solid evil. However, this was to face a mighty challenge in the coming months: the same black and white morality that Deceit himself was fighting against.

While Virgil had been redeemed, many fans were much less willing to give credence to Deceit. After all, they had just spent two years building him up as the villain of all villains! He wasn’t the only one: there was also a theorised third Dark Side, usually called Anger or some variation, to parallel Logan’s fits of rage. However, Deceit had been the star of the show, and realising him as sympathetic would leave them without an incorrigable villain. A schism formed between those who liked and those who hated Deceit, and this culminated in the beginning of the sympathies: Sympathetic Deceit.

It was incredibly jarring for many fans, who had written Deceit as an manipulator and an abuser and all manner of other evils, to see him suddenly being discussed as if he was a good person. A call to action came, asking that people tag Deceit content which wasn’t wholehearted condemnation. Sympathetic Deceit, they called it, not wanting to see this character be treated with any kind of mercy or dimension. If it sounds like I have a grudge, well, my past kinship with Deceit is business of mine and mine alone.

However, Sympathetic Deceit was not the only tag to come out of this. Soon, as the Deceit sympathisers were beginning to question the morality of Deceit, this doubt spread to the Light Sides. The character that this most prominently affected was Patton, Deceit’s Light counterpart. What had previously been a cute, optimistic, paternal character was being analysed more closely. People were noticing his toxic positivity, his possessiveness, his holier-than-thou moral attitude. Before this point, any fanworks featuring conflict between the Light Sides was the result of misunderstanding or attitudes that changed by the end of the works. However, many people were angry and frustrated with Patton, and they began to write him as manipulative, as an antagonist, as Bad. He didn’t get redeemed in those. Thus was born the tag Unsympathetic Patton.

Unsympathetic was not the same as Evil or Bad; after all, that would have just been recreating the Light and Dark dichotomy, which Unsympathetic Patton was meant to break! Instead, Unsympathetic Patton fics had a few key characteristics. Firstly, he harmed the other sides, be it through malice or ignorance. Secondly, he did not grow from it. He was not redeemed and he did not apologise, and thus, there was no way to Sympathise with him, to see him as more than a nameless villain to attack and run when their time was up.

This convention also spread to other characters – Unsympathetic Virgil, used in tandem with Sympathetic Deceit to paint Virgil as the one at fault for their falling out. Unsympathetic Roman, with his arrogance and proclivity for cutting remarks. Rarest of all was Unsympathetic Logan, but his calculating nature and quickness to anger earned him more than a few works. However, even today, Unsympathetic Patton Sanders is the most common unsympathy tag, though this is likely due to the fact that the tagging trend only came about after the two years of Deceit Villainy, so many Unsympathetic Deceit fics are not tagged as such.

There are many reasons why Patton was the most popular unsympathetic side. He was stubborn and obstinately positive, often pushing the emotions of the other Sides to the wayside. He held a position as a fatherly Christian arbiter of morality that felt wrong to many of the series’s young queer fans. His position as undisputed cinnamon roll of goodness left him far to fall. What matters most, though, is the way that this represents the growing schism between the two groups of fans, which had more in common than they would like to admit.

On one side: the people who had built up Deceit in their heads as this big, scary villain, and clung to their unsympathetic view of him even as the series went on and he became a squarely ‘sympathetic’ figure.

On the other side: people who were on Deceit’s side, and, often in backlash to the other side (some of whom hated Deceit because they were Patton fans), wrote more about Unsympathetic Light Sides. To widen the scape of stories being told, to get back at the Deceit haters, whatever their reasons.

The very next episode, three months after the sympathism schism began, in came Remus. A Dark Side representing intrusive thoughts, he was always going to be a divisive and triggering character. I only knew a new episode had come out because the top post on my dash was reminding people to tag for Sympathetic Remus. I was squarely in the Sympathetic Deceit camp, so I imagine that there was more ‘Unsympathetic Remus’ content outside of my circle that fell more into his placement as a Dark Side, but in my eyes, Remus himself was not the most impactful part of that episode on the fandom’s perception of characters. It was his backstory.

Remus was introduced as a character who represented ‘dark creativity’, such as gore, fetish, and sexuality, in contrast to Roman, who was ‘light’ creativity; romance, fantasy, adventure. Roman and Remus are twins, and the popular fan conception is that they were once one Creativity that was then split. This split is theorised to have come around because of Thomas wanting to distance himself from his unsettling thoughts, viewed through a Christian lens of bad thoughts meaning bad actions. This view is continually espoused by Patton, who was already being cast as Evil by the fanbase. Thus, on came the idea that Patton was directly responsible for Creativity being torn apart and Remus being cast into the Darkness, and on goes more slack to the fire.

In mid-2020, we got an epsiode focused around combatting the idea of Unsympathetic sides, and it’s another one focused around Deceit vs Patton. In this episode, Patton turns out to be the bad influence and Deceit is the one who ‘saves’ Thomas, revealing his name as Janus in a show of trust as Roman berates Thomas for trusting a Dark Side. Patton and Deceit talk about how much one can make mistakes before you should cut them out of your life, and Patton apologises. If I recall correctly, this did calm down some of the Patton haters; after all, he apologised and promised to do better going forward. However, many Patton Unsympathisers did not feel it was enough, or had simply fallen far enough into the groove of Unsympathetic Patton that it was familiar.

Since this episode, there have been side-stories and gag episodes, but no proper plot. Well, TV Tropes tells me that that fabled Anger side has been foreshadowed, but that’s irrelevant for now. I don’t really know how to wrap up this essay, because it’s not like there’s been a conclusion to this. There are still people who hate Deceit and who hate Patton, though they are much lower in numbers than they once were. From what I remember, Unsympathetic Sides became seen as more of a story convention than a representation of true feelings. Sides are seen as unsympathetic for specific AUs where they fit the villains.

To this day, 3 years since its introduction, the Sympathy tagging system is still used. Out of the 20 most recent Sanders Sides fics on AO3, five of them were tagged with some variation of Sympathy or Unsympathy, a ratio shared by the most recent Deceit fics in particular.

I guess this acts as a word of caution against hiatus-brain and ignoring canon for the sake of fanon. Mostly, it acts as a place for me to vent the absolute shitshow that was the fandom. The shitshow that probably still is the fandom. Any current fans, feel free to correct me, I fell out of it around late 2020.

Don’t watch this series. It is not good.

#@fans hope u dont mind me trigger tagging in here. u can block me i dont mind #thomas sanders #sanders sides #see idek who my audience is aside from 'bitter ex-fans' and i dont think we have a support group or anything to tag so #also i barely proofread this hashtag soz

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