Consuming dark fiction, though it allows the audience to empathise with morally dubious or outright evil characters, nonetheless increases their overall amount of internal empathy towards other people. Not just bad people benefit from an overall increase in empathy.

Consuming exclusively sanitised, fluffy feel-good fiction with no counterbalancing dark sides does not increase the audience's empathy, because anyone who cannot empathise with The Littlest Cinnamon Roll, who has adventures dealing with happiness and friendship and harmony, is already a lost cause. Rather, such fiction, when all other kinds are excluded, normalises the idea that the only people worth empathising with are the morally pure cinnamon rolls who have never done anything wrong in their entire lives. The normalisation, and reinforcement of same through the standard life cycle of a fandom, reaches such a point that as soon as the characters in question step outside the boundaries of that bubble of innocence by doing (1) problematic thing, they are cancelled for crimes against humanity and the fandom tears itself apart.

- amount of people, who actually believed in ultimate tumblr-bingo fake indentity without any proofs