#all my characters are gay and all my actually evil villains are conservative ppl

[bthump]

wingsfreedom replied to your post “It really bums me that people are hung up on all bad things Griffith...”

I often feel fans of righteous characters are more problematic and scary than fans of villains. They have this tendency to see villains in the worst possible light because it makes the good characters look even better. And some of them just prefer villains that’re totally evil, they find such good vs evil narrative more satisfying, it’s simple, black and white, no debate, no ambiguity, pure feel good story.

lol i completely agree.

under a cut bc i went on a long barely relevant rant about The Discourse lmao

i keep trying to turn this into an organized essay about how much i hate tumblr discourse, villaincourse in this case, but tbh i just don’t have the stamina to dig into that subject properly lol. so just like, suffice to say, hating obviously flawed and/or villainous characters and their fans while loving less obviously flawed and/or heroic characters, and calling that a moral position to take, is really fucked up and just demonstrates such a total inability to actually engage critically with fiction that idk how ppl take fans like that seriously.

and when i say “inability to engage with fiction critically” i mean they take things at such face value it’s ridiculous. The narrative says this character is good, therefore they’re good. The narrative says this character is bad, therefore they’re bad. This generally fails to take into account things like rampant gay coding of villains, heroes demonstrating mainstream conservative ideals, “loveable misogynist” protags who often still get the pure cinnamon roll treatment, the fact that pretty much all mainstream media is going to be unprogressive at its core because it’s literally “mainstream,” american exceptionalism propaganda everywhere, women reduced to love interest roles, women objectified by the camera, lack of diversity, assumption of a straight white man as the audience, assumption that anyone other than a straight white man is harder to identify with, villains who are “evil” because they take resistance against the privileged class too far, stories where the heroes and villains do the same thing but when the heroes do it it’s justified or excusable and when the villains do it it’s a sign that they’re evil, stories where ugly = bad and beauty = good, stories where ugliness is foreignness (to britain/north america/majority white countries) and beauty is white, the way there hasn’t been a blockbuster film with a textually non-straight main character ever, mental illness symptoms as signs of evil, monsters as unknowable other, etc etc etc etc

anyway all that shit has v little to do with berserk (tho some def applies), i just had to get some of it out of my system lol.

my basic point is just that, to bring this back and use an example from Berserk, if someone can’t see that eg it’s fucked up that Griffith is not only a gay coded and textually feminine antagonist, but gets even more gender non conforming looking when he becomes Femto, and it’s fucked up that the protagonist sexually assaults his girlfriend and we’re still meant to root for him, etc, then they absolutely do not have the necessary skill set to call other people out for problematic taste in fictional characters with any authority.

If you can’t or refuse to see the ways the thing you like is problematic, the last thing you should be doing is calling fans of other things problematic. Log, eye, etc. Tbh even if you can critique your own faves you shouldn’t be pointing fingers imo - you can't know exactly why someone likes the thing they like, whether they’re aware it’s problematic (maybe more aware than you), whether they’re able to compartmentalize that fact and why, and those are all things you need to know before declaring a group of fans Bad for what fictional entertainment they like.

tl;dr

everything is problematic. golden retriever cinnamon roll characters are problematic, your favourite blockbuster is problematic, hollywood is problematic, anime is problematic, cartoons are problematic, magic fantasy oppression parallels are problematic, guts is problematic, griffith is problematic, casca is problematic, tumblr demanding that women be arbiters of morality is ironically problematic (misogynist) as fuck, etc etc. at least ime villain fans tend to be a little more aware on average that what they like is problematic, as opposed to people who think it’s intrinsically more moral to like heroes.

#wingsfreedom #problematic doesn't even look like a word to me anymore lol #a #b #theme: discourse #theme: fandom