I genuinely think that "you just wanted a different show" and "you have to have your hand held" have become the anti-criticism phrases that I hate more than anything.
Every now and again, these sentiments are true, and there are people that literally just don't pay attention and then blame a show for not out and out saying things bluntly and repeatedly, or for just not being the type of show they want. That's true, I'm not saying that never happens.
But most of what I've seen is people saying incredibly valid things about how characters are underdeveloped to the point of feeling badly done, useless, or two dimensional. Or that a show had really interesting concepts that never came to fruition, or felt like it was going one way and then randomly seemed to turn on a dime. Or that a show didn't have characters interact enough to feel like they're close or that they're close enough for the emotional moments that the show is trying to get the audience to engage in. Or that something that was done was either badly set up, or written in a way that made it feel shallow or flat or emotionless. But all of that gets dismissed every time, waved away with a "you just wanted your hand held."
Like, I feel like I'm actively not supposed to care about or engage with media anymore, because every time I do, people get angry that I "need my hand held" or "wanted a different show" if I ever express dissatisfaction with the media I watch. If there's a friendship between two characters and the show never actually really seemed to have them connect and yet randomly decides that they've become best friends off screen, people just say "well, the writer wasn't going to hold your hand" and act like you're the idiot for wanting to see the friendship develop. If there's an interesting setting or world with interesting rules or monsters or things that would naturally happen, and then the show just kind of acts like those features don't even exist, people just say "sorry you wanted to watch a different show, but that isn't the creators' fault" and acting like you're the idiot for expecting anything to matter.
The worst thing is that it feels like a lot of media creators write their stories just assuming that fandom will carry them, that they don't need to write good characters or good relationships or good stories, because hey, there are hundreds of people on AO3 already doing that for them that just need enough juice to keep going! And then those hundreds of people on AO3 doing all the heavy lifting of making a show make sense, be interesting, and have good characters all then turn around and get mad that not everyone is pretending that the show they like is something that it isn't. The amount of shows that I think turned out mid-tier at best and actively terrible at worst that wind up getting compared to Avatar The Last Airbender because the fans did a bunch of work to fill in the gaps is crazy. A redemption arc will get hyped up as just as good as Zuko because a bunch of fans looked at a character with bad motivations or a rushed past two-episode emotional journey and say "well I don't need to have my hand held" and then act like everyone needs to see it as deep and well done and meaningful because you can just assume it is off screen.
People always will tell you why on paper, everything in a bad story technically could be good. But the thing is that you need more than good elements that can be well done in order to write things well, you actually have to write them well. "This character is obviously deep, here are all of the elements that this character has that people could connect to that would make a well done character more deep" well, sure, but they aren't well written, so the character feels shallow. "Some stories don't have to have deep lore, you don't always need that for a good show" okay yeah, but the fact that some shows don't need lore isn't a good pushback on a criticism of a show with badly done lore that the show would have benefited from. "Stop complaining that the dynamic between these characters was badly done, anyone in this situation would naturally develop a relationship like this," yeah good point, too bad we didn't see that, so it still feels sloppy! "You wanted an ensemble show, this show didn't have to be that" okay but that doesn't change a criticism about being expected as audience members to care about characters that are shallow or irrelevant.
I just think these type of complaints nine times out of ten feel incredibly ungenerous and ridiculous. Most of the time, it feels like an anti-criticism tactic designed to make other people feel like idiots for actually trying to engage with the media that we watch. People seriously act like the only way that you're supposed to watch media is to go "cool fun ideas and bright colors" and then engaging in fanworks. And to be clear I don't even think that that's too bad of a way to watch things, I have seen plenty of mediocre or bad media that had really interesting concepts that I've then devoted way too much time to re-writing for my own personal tastes (RWBY comes to mind lol.) But I just don't think we should then pretend that's what the media actually is, and I don't think that we should then get mad at other people for actually caring about and trying to engage with the media that they watch.
