Old woman (29) yelling at cloud here, but I think a lot of the problems with current fandom behavior can be traced to a severe lack of interest to empathize with the characters.
When Pluribus was airing, a very vocal part of the audience complained about Carol Sturka being unreasonable and abrasive and "annoying", entirely sidestepping how the first episode is dedicated to showing us WHY Carol would be far too traumatized to react rationally to the new status quo.
When Sinners came out, people were tripping over themselves to call Grace Chow stupid for letting the vampires into the juke joint, conveniently leaving out that Remmick is threatening to hurt her daughter if she doesn't come out, and that even if the survivors made it till morning, they would still have to face the Klans coming to kill them.
Very recently, as the new episodes of Witch Hat Atelier are coming out, people are quick to hurl slurs at Agott, a child character barely in her teens, for being antagonistic towards the main character, when the anime shows us that there are huge cultural gaps between the two characters, and that Agott's crueler outbursts occur she and her friends are stuck in a life or death situation that they are woefully unprepared for.
"But Alina, these are all examples of people not looking at the screen! What's that got to do with empathy and relating to characters?" See, while some people make these complaints bc they aren't paying attention, there are others who follow up their complaints with "Well why didn't she just react normally/do this perfectly rational thing/come up with a complex plan while under immense physical or psychological stress?"
I've been seeing this trend of refusing to engage emotionally with characters' predicament in fandoms. People seem to recoil at the thought of putting themselves in characters' shoes and understanding why characters react to highly stressful situations in imperfect or outright Bad ways. And so, when characters don't behave in ways that audience think they SHOULD (ie: with total awareness of every legal/moral/logical rule), audience immediately cry out "that's a badly written character!" or "that's a calculated malicious move!" or "I can't believe the writers would justify X/Y/Z action with this character!"
This is not to say that people can't criticize characters, or that any action a character takes in a stressful situation is automatically above criticism, but rather to say that if the modern audience want to have a good time with their choice of media, they need to be willing to look at a character and think "I see where they're coming from" instead of "I wouldn't have done that".
