millennial safe space

It's so true that so many people in this fandom (the vampires) are miserable. And like, I kind of get it: I've had that experience with fandoms in the past, where the very act of loving something so much makes you more critical of (1) the thing and (2) other people who like the thing. And the subject matter of the show is so heavy and so serious that it's understandable emotions would get high over it. Plus the age of the fandom, the intensity people feel over the books/AR, the long hiatus to S3, etc., etc., etc.

But I just have too much else in my life and on my mind to have negative feelings about The Fun Thing, you know? That's just where I am right now. I'm not on twt, or any other social media, and I have a heavily curated tumblr dash, so it's not too hard to avoid the worst-the worst of it.

I see some opinions though and recently I've seen a few that I do disagree with and those are the ones I've been thinking about. Not the specific opinions per se, but just like... some of the overall tenors.

And it's just coming back to, like, sometimes I really feel like I fundamentally read texts differently than other people because I have a different conception of characters as not real. Sometimes I feel so pretentious, and kind of like an asshole, saying "the characters aren't real!!!111!," you know, as if other people don't know this. Plus I don't want to be a hypocrite: I have obviously gotten very attached to various Characters over the years. That's what I'm still turning around in my mind, what's different about my attachment, versus this alienating and weird thing I see in other people.

I think... I never (never?) judge stories or arcs or other characters for their 'meanness' to another character. Like, the character isn't real. The sin of a fictional person is never 'they acted badly to another fictional person.' It might be that the overall story line is something I find irresponsible or otherwise objectionable, in terms of what it says about the creator or what that creator is trying to get across. That's different. But generally the biggest thing for me is the harm that's done to ME, when I have to watch something stupid/boring/inconsistent/OOC/whatever.

I mean right now I am thinking of Gabriella. Her abuse of Lestat does a lot to explain Lestat and in that sense it's interesting as a story point and characterization point. But she's so fucking boring and that does injury to ME. I know she's not a beloved character right now (lol) and I wonder how many people are upset about her in-universe versus those who are upset about her in a more meta-way. I'm not saying it can't be both. I do find it somewhat tiring though.

Similarly, the constant litigation over who we should have "sympathy" for and which actions are "too much," that is, which actions break the ability to have sympathy. I simply do not think in these terms, I'm afraid. At least--again, hard to explain--not like this. Sure, one could be thinking about whether a character is OOC (the he wouldn't say that phenomenon) or about keeping "the audience," or oneself as a member of the audience, "with" the story, "with" the right people, which I admit is a valid critique. We should be on the 'side' of the protagonist, generally speaking. And yet... at least from where I am, and maybe I've overly curated and just don't know a lot of the context, it just feels like we're talking about the likeability of real people and quite divorced from the context of, like... the evil vampire show full of evil vampires. I don't know.