at the end of the day, it is just a character, and i like focusing on what i like rather than what i don’t. continuing a conversation about something i don’t like in a public space is going to cause issues, which is why i stopped it before it could go any further
just because a take on a character makes me uncomfortable doesn’t mean i’m trying to drag anyone in particular and i hate that it was taken that way. i’m sorry if i hurt anyone’s feelings because it was completely unintentional.
a lot of folk in fandoms need to learn that someone saying “i personally didn’t like this” isn’t a targeted insult to the people who did like the thing. unless they’re actively saying things like “i am objectively correct and anyone who likes this is bad”, in which case, fire on.
In Fahrenheit 451, the chief book-burner, Captain Beatty, describes how reading became obsolete because the public demanded increasingly fast-paced entertainments, and those entertainments slowly corroded their ability to think. “Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column … Many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed, ‘Now at last you can read all the classics.’ … School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches?”
In this passage Ray Bradbury foretells the intellectual hollowing out of the working class, the advent of AI-generated “summaries” of classic novels, the attention-frying culture of short-form video, the relaxation of educational standards into non-existence. All of this in a book published in 1953.
i was a selfshipper way back when i was really little. i was sooo serious about dipper pines. i would like, write my first name with pines as the last name. i wrote so many fics. this continued into other yumeships as i got older. we’ve always existed lol