i have issues with the conclusion of this post and i continue to have issues with fandom. (the tag ‘fandom is for yt women’ applies here.)
it’s one thing to want to project your emotional issues on someone vastly different and more privileged that you for personal comfort/catharsis reasons
but your personal, cathartic reasons for focusing on the angsty white male character don’t make fandom or media consumption any more welcoming for the people who are hungry for and deprived of direct and actual representation but receive little, and it’s worse when the little that they receive is completely overshadowed in fandom by the yt male characters to the point that these more marginalized (read: nonwhite and often non-male) characters may as well not be there.
it’s not about ‘you are not allowed to id with yt male characters because it feels safer.’
id with whoever you happen to. i can’t control that. it’s about ‘how are you conducting your fandom business so as to protect the most marginalized in your fandom?’ ‘what gross erasure/avoidance/stereotypes are you perpetuating by focusing all your attention on some overrated yt dude character?’
fandom, especially transformative fandom, should welcome the chance to pull in these marginalized characters (read: characters of color, esp. women and nb of color) to the center, give them the lead roles, give them struggles to overcome or successes and fun to explore in a narrative that is weighted in their favor. whether in a safe environment where these weighty issues of autonomy or bodily integrity or whatever can be carefully explored or just ignored for more lighthearted material.
transformative fandom, which could be termed ‘cathartic fandom’ without losing much accuracy, does not have to be centered on the yt male experience, and i don’t trust people who insist that their favoring of these yt male characters is not their own choice—that it’s the ‘best source material’ and if only better, more empowering stuff was out there being written for white women and people of color of all genders, that they’d pay attention, or that they’d feel safer to project onto them.
the media creators and the media consumers all have the same biases that feed into each other in a spiraling effect. media creators check what gets consumed and talked about and try to feed the demand (to an extent). media consumers are greatly informed by the media they’ve grown up seeing and their choices are not made in a vacuum. your catharsis is not innocent or uncontaminated by these things. you were trained to project things onto yt men, you were trained to believe that they are the only ones worthy of having stories about them. and so many people ignore or flatten or villainize the characters of color EVEN IF THEY ARE CENTERED IN THE NARRATIVE and then go around talking up the yt dudes whether or not they are the mains, that it’s patently ridiculous to make these sorts of claims about how fandom and fandom foci for (yt) marginalized people just so happens to be or should be invulnerable to criticism.
“make your peace” with how you’re focusing on the top of the pyramid to the neglect of everyone below, esp. on the bottom. i can’t stop you. but i am asking you not to try to excuse fandom-wide behaviors like that as ‘just a personal choice.’ it’s not. it’s systematic and oppressive, and it’s rude.
not everyone has that privilege of being able to id with yt dudes so easily. please don’t trample us out of these so-called ‘cathartic’ or ‘transformative’ spaces.
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