#also please don't bring up h*rringrove i especially don't want to think or talk about that

[buck-yyyy]

alright, i've got a really hot take and not everyone is going to agree with me on it (actually i have a sinking feeling that not many people are going to), but that's perfectly okay- just please hear me out.

someone liking billy hargrove as a character does not mean that they're racist, homophobic, or a bad person in any way.

alright, let me explain.

first and foremost, a disclaimer:

BILLY WAS RACIST. THIS IS A REOCCURRING MOTIF IN SEASON TWO. TO IGNORE THAT IS TO DIMINISH WHAT LUCAS WENT THROUGH AT BILLY'S HANDS.

BILLY CONTINUED THE CYCLE OF ABUSE TOWARDS MAX. THIS IS A REOCCURRING THEME IN SEASONS TWO AND ESPECIALLY FOUR. TO IGNORE THAT IS TO DIMINISH THE TRAUMA MAX EXPERIENCED FROM HIM.

now, here are my thoughts.

i think that a lot of us have had rather... unpleasant, lets say, interactions with billy stans, and that's led us to be very against anyone appreciating his character.

a big problem in this fandom is the amount of people who excuse racism, homophobia, sexism, etc etc simply because the actor playing the character who said it is attractive- and that is definitely a big problem with steve fans, which is a whole other post in of itself, but it's an even BIGGER issue with billy fans.

we've all seen someone who uses the billy's father's abuse to say that nothing he did was bad and that he was just in pain- i'm not saying that that's okay.

but i think that we tend to come down too hard on the people who appreciate billy's place in the story simply because of his backstory.

there are a lot of people out there, most notably abuse survivors, who see themselves in the fact that billy's response to trauma is to lash out with anger, and there are a lot of us out there who are quick to invalidate those people by saying 'what's wrong with you, why do you sympathize with a racist wtf'- which i don't think is fair.

billy is an incredibly nuanced character, and we don't get to see very much of him. we see very little of who he was back in california, and when he has the most screen time, he's literally possessed- leading to us only being able to deduce a couple main character traits.

because of that, it's easy to reduce his character to simply his racism, which, again, should not be ignored.

but as a community, we often look down at the people who do what we do with byler that decide to look deeper into billy's character rather than simply leaving him flat, 2-D, and unexplored.

i don't think that's fair.

it's an incredibly fine line between enjoying analyzing his character and/or seeing yourself in his trauma responses versus glorifying his character and excusing his bigotry- however, plenty of people are doing perfectly fine with that line and still get lumped in with the apologists.

let's not be the people policing other people's interests, shall we?

tldr; billy apologists leave, billy appreciators you keep doing what you're doing and i'm sorry that you're getting harassed for finding representation or expressing interest in a complex character.