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• people are allowed to be upset and hurt at the reminder of the fact that people they love and support have shitty beliefs and opinions. acting smug / “well you should have known” / using this as a “gotcha” for players you already didn’t like and taking glee in the pain of others is just mean. it’s mean and unhelpful and contributes nothing of value to the conversation.

• people are allowed to decide they don’t support a player or a team or the sport over this. people are allowed to decide they still support players or teams despite this. neither of those people have the moral high ground over the other.

• “my guy would never” and “your favourite player sucks too” are both unhelpful and contribute to the vibe that morality is just another tool in the fandom wars playbook and not genuine real life hurt and growth. who is safe to stan and unproblematic faves and teams someone can root for that make them a bad person are fandom issues. i personally am not upset about fandom issues. i am upset about the real world. i think whittling this stuff down to fandom wars feels safer because it feels like maybe something we can actually affect or make change in, but ultimately nobody’s minds are being changed by snarky text posts on tumblr. if you only talk about carter hart when your team loses to vgk, i don’t know that i believe you really care about the issue at hand. real life > fandom.

• we are all being parasocial. the nature of fandom of real people is going to be at least a little bit parasocial by default. we all watched the same video essays and we are all aware of what it means. the word parasocial is not a discussion-ender the way some people act like it is.