#media interaction

Let me explain: sometimes a piece of media uses a common human failing. Something that happens all the time. To explore humanity within the confines of the story, as stories often do.

Sometimes, for you, that small human failing is the crux of the pain and anger you carry inside. Sometimes even the smallest and least harmful version of it, to quote RWRB, tears all the way down through the floor and into the sub-basements. Beyond where anyone would think that small human failing might go.

Because for you, it’s not what’s happening on screen but the painful things that have happened to you and you haven’t dealt with. You’ve locked them in a box or you’ve festered in them. Made it part of your personality to be against anyone or anything that carries this common human failing. Because the person that hurt you is, in your mind, a monster. You’ve divorced this action from humanity and you’ve made it that it’s only a thing that bad people or monsters do.

And the way the characters are treating this common human failing that happens every day is not how you want to handle it. Or is perhaps how you handled it and you wished you didn’t. And it makes you so incandescently angry.

When that happens, my loves, I want you to sit with it and ask yourself why you’re so incandescently angry or sad. Feel your feelings. Examine what it means when a character you love does something you equate with being monstrous. Or even more dangerous, when a character you love forgives something that you deem monstrous. Or if the failings of the characters remind you of yourself in some way. What is hiding underneath the anger and sadness? Is it shame? Is is loneliness? Is it worthlessness? Is it invalidation?

Because this is why the character who is genocidal mass murderer/serial killer is your poor little meow meow and the character with the every day failings is the worst character ever to exist. Because we look for the humanity in monsters, especially when we feel monstrous. But when a character is framed as human and shows a failing, we demonize them, because they remind us of our monsters who were also human. And I want you to think about it. Sometimes.

You have the choice at any time to stop engaging with a piece of media because it’s too painful or too raw or you’re not ready. But that doesn’t make that piece of media bad or evil (mostly there are some exceptions for the writings by the worst of humanity).

Is the reason I am concerned in the feelings and fate of background characters and nameless extras and offscreen mass death much of the time due to my autism? (Of course it generally requires a hero character to care about them as a bridge but not always if connotations are icky).

Does my difficulty at connecting with people mean I treat all characters as equally real most of the time?

...I’m now wondering how much thee ismissal of some criticisms of shows like Steven Universe is due to condescension towards some common spectrum behaviors?

All I know is: I tend to judge a work by how it treats its “lesser characters” unless its a dark comedy. 

In his first long interview since SpaceX’s IPO, Musk told The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes that views like safe cities and controlled immigration align with Western values, not extremism. He predicted civil war in Britain within 20 years due to demographic shifts and defended his DOGE role against claims of causing deaths. Musk flipped questions on media bias, accusing the interviewer of…

*A lot of people begin laughing at you while you fruitlessly attempt to shield bash an attack on the ego*

you are pitiful

*cowers over in shame and pain (rhyme)*

gah-!

how,, how could i let this happen to me.. no, my journey cant e-