#STOP EQUATING SEMI-SHITTY PEOPLE TO FASCISTS

[captaintiny]

ok this has been bothering me for a long time and i never really knew how to put it in words until it suddenly came to me in a painkiller-induced nap

there are different levels of bad.

there is truly awful and problematic media, like h*rry p*tter for example. or awful people like pewdiepie. or greg ellis (for those unaware, he's a film and voice actor who claims he's a libertarian but his stances have become more aggressively and openly fascist over the past few years). these properties and people don't deserve a platform, money or attention.

but... not every piece of media or every person with problematic elements is as bad as those examples.

like. it just really bugs me when people see something like say, the umbrella academy season two, and see someone talking about the antisemitism in it. and then the immediate response is BOYCOTT THE SHOW NEVER WATCH IT, EVERYTHING ABOUT IT IS BAD. and like. it's exhausting. it's false equivalency.

everyone will, of course have different lines about what is okay and what isn't. im jewish. i watched tua. sure, there were moments that made me uncomfortable, but it didn't ruin the show for me personally. i also know a lot of jews that said "it was too antisemitic for me so i didn't watch." both of these opinions are okay.

im also a rape survivor. black sails is incredibly violent, and has a particularly high incidence of sexual violence in season one. it also has issues with racism at times, and i know people who didn't watch it for either or both of these reasons. i still firmly maintain it's one of the greatest pieces of media made in the last 20 years. outlander, on the other hand, had too much sexual violence for me to handle, and the show framed it in a way that made me uncomfortable. but i don't believe that consuming outlander makes you a morally deplorable individual, nor do i believe that it should be banned or cancelled or removed from the social consciousness.

brennan lee mulligan, who runs dimension 20 - my all time favourite actual play RPG show - has views on religion that i think come from a very narrow mindset, and it's very obvious what helped formed those views, and i often get uncomfortable when he speaks about religion as a monolith. but having a questionable opinion on religion doesn't make him the same as someone like jkr.

it's crucial that you're critical of the media you consume, and the celebrities you are fans of. but finding a single flaw, or even two or three, or reading about a single shitty thing a person did, doesn't make them equivalent to fascists. it doesn't mean the media is irredeemable.

it also doesn't mean you should ignore those shitty things either. you should absolutely acknowledge when stuff you like has issues, and listen to people that they affect talking about them. and again, i will reiterate: there are people and pieces of media that are problematic in so many ways that it is universally reprehensible to try and continue to consume them. but not everything that has a flaw is automatically the highest possible tier of awful, and i'm kind of tired of everyone treating personal boundaries or lines w media/public figures as a moral litmus test that has a right and wrong answer. you can acknowledge something has flaws and still enjoy it.