warning: blood, and Grace frying the ever-loving heck out of his arm

You might think the fandom cop's journey went like this:

They watched/read/played the canon

They came across X

They saw fans be into A/B despite it being problematic because of X

When actually the fandom cop's journey is:

They watched/read/played the canon

They really disliked A/B

They go sifting through the canon to find ways in which A/B is problematic.

This is why some fandom cops will yell about problematic age gaps in one fandom while shipping a pairing with a similar age gap in a different fandom.

The age gap was never the issue.

The dislike was the issue.

The fandom cop isn't gonna go 'oh huh, I guess age gaps aren't as big an issue as I thought!' over the pairing they dislike, because it's still a pairing they dislike.

This also applies to fandom cops who dislike a specific character rather than ship. It's same approach where everything their blorbo does is viewed as sympathetically as possible while everything their disliked character does is approached with bad faith, even when both characters do similar things

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing

That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)

That you need to kill off characters (??? what)

That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones

That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

recycle your darlings

[character a] pushes [character b] onto his back, then straddles his prone body