Into the Ocean Deep

From my particular experiences as a Problematic Blorbo Lover I think there's also a specific element of... been there, done that, don't want to rehash it endlessly, when it comes to fandom conversations about The Villain. Cause as a general rule, the villain lover is the first in line to come to grips with the character's bad actions -- those are what first brought them to the character, yanno? A lot of times that is what's most interesting and the meat of most conversations, meta, fic, etc for the first pass.

In my case, I was a Loki fan back in early MCU. And I wrote a lot of meta and a lot of fic about Loki's headspace, motivations, and character development through his first few canon appearances, as well as speculating or writing out hypotheticals about how his future development might go -- either towards a redemption or further along into villainy, or other more nuanced possibilities.

A lot. I wrote 90,000 words of fic about this. It took me a year and a half.

And then I was done talking about that aspect of him.

So having fans come along after that, when I was speculating other possibilities for the character -- what about Loki in his childhood? what about Loki as a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy? what about this or that or something else? -- having other fans, fans who didn't spend a year enmeshed in these kind of deep dives, come along and say "umm, but what about all his PROBLEMATIC ACTIONS?"

...my first response would be to say: I've already done that. It took me a year and a half and a hundred thousand words. I'm not going to do it again. I'm especially not going to do it again every time anyone starts a conversation about this topic.

Simone de Beauvoir, from Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27