long, ranty opinion that people hate stolas as a character because they can’t deal with several facts under the cut
1. you can do bad things and not be a “bad person”; you can make choices that ultimately fuck over other people without you having any intention to hurt them. you might not even have considered that it might due to the intensity of the situation or being caught up in your own feelings. this can happen to anyone, and these instances can be hard to own up to. we haven’t had the chance to see him take ownership of anything yet bc he’s literally just found out how bad he fucked up
2. sometimes overwhelming emotions and new situations can cloud your judgment or make you act differently than you otherwise might. Fear, anxiety and infatuation are hells of a drug respectively; combine them and yeesh what a time
3. you can sometimes say things or do things that can be manipulative or offensive and not know for a variety of reasons, be that inexperience, naïveté, or misunderstanding people’s feelings/intentions/backgrounds. but you do have to try to correct it once you realize what you’ve done, and stolas tries in his own way to correct where he went wrong
4. yes, people do sometimes cheat on partners because they feel unloved and unsupported in relationships but don’t believe they have the agency to leave (be that from fear, concerns for children, etc.). is it the right decision? nope, not at all, please just break up with your partners if you don’t like them. but it does happen and i think it at the very least makes for an interesting starting point for a character whose developmental arc includes learning how to make his own choices and how to have a healthy relationship
ULTIMATELY, i dislike all the arguments about anti-stolas stuff because we don’t even have all the information about this character! i hold the same idea for stella. we literally don’t know all the intricacies of their relationship yet: we’re not even most of the way through an intended to be 50 episode series. are all of their choices the right ones? of course not, that’s what makes them interesting. but such intense hate for a character based on half information and discomfort with the above points is just wild to me. stolas is a character that has severely fucked up several things in his life and hurt several people along the way (blitz included). but he is facing the consequences for some of those things (looking at you, sinsmas) and learning to be better. just insane to me that everyone who hates him has apparently always made the right choices always and has never once created terrible situation without intending to. i think he’s a very interesting character who has a lot of growing to do, and that seems to be a lot of the problem.
