#Watching c2 devoid of a living fandom is freeing in many ways

[stardustedknuckles]

The beauyasha fandom in its heyday was a wonderful place to be and I'm forever grateful I got to be part of the phenomenon in a real way but my god I do not miss the routine of unfollowing a new round of wlw every time Caleb said more than twenty words in a row.

Like folks were straight up like "we don't dislike him because he's autistic, it's that-" and they proceed to list off a list of autistic traits. Of which he had many, largely why so many identified with him. And when folks pointed that out they got hostile about how neurodivergence doesn't mean they have to like him and those of us who weren't crypto radfems were like. Nobody said you had to like him. They're seven flavors of dickhead, you're bound to not mesh with one. But you keep describing his traits using words like white male and male privilege and misogyny and lesbophobia and I really don't think the problem you have is the one you think you have. Do you hear yourself.

Every fucking time.

My favorite thing (extremely derogatory) about it was like so many of them were ostensibly Beau stans? Like most of them would fistfight about how well they apparently knew and related to Beau and I'm sitting over here going "Beau would fucking take your kneecaps for implying she can't check him herself when necessary AND for talking shit about Caleb. In that order of priority." especially that one time everyone insisted Travis/Fjord had stepped in to make him stop because Beau/marisha needed that for some reason. The slashes are because people lost the ability to separate character from player and it was bowlgate all over again. (I don't want anons asking about that so just in case, that refers to the fight they had about the bowl and calianna way early in the series. Like in the teens/20s. I wasn't back on Tumblr or in the fandom until episode 110 and I was still hearing about it. It was bad.)

They're all assholes. Beau isn't magically a better, more permissible asshole because she's a girl. She's the asshole I'm attracted to, but that is not at all an observation that imparts objectivity and Caleb was never ever an edgelord kylo ren character like I kept seeing. He was critical to Beau becoming who she was. She loved him and he loved her.

There's a reason I follow like 10 critical role blogs at this point and like 8 of them are artists and not commentators. Absolutely abysmal how much of being a fan of a wlw ship permitted and encouraged the ideology of terves even among people who overall meant well.

I miss a lot about the b/y heyday but not that. Not even a little.