Recently a lot of discourse has been popping up around me and I’d like to throw in my two cents.
Maybe I’m dumb for pointing out the obvious and everybody has already clicked this together in their heads, but here I go anyway.
I feel like the way people treat Billy Hargrove in fandom space is because of Dacre. Nothing’s wrong with him, but Dacre is 26! Billy is ten years younger. We see a 24-26 year old man on screen, and it makes people a lot less sympathetic to him because of it. (To clarify, I think the casting was good for this series for a multitude of reasons, but it backfires in this case scenario) This isn’t to say that what Billy did wasn’t fucked up, but… people don’t really see a 16 year old.
I don’t think that we, as a fandom should overlook the shit Billy did (pretty sure Billy was written in s2 to be VERY disliked so duh) but it’s important to acknowledge that yes, 16 year olds can and will grow up one day. Maybe they won’t; maybe they will. It’s still not ok to attack people for writing/creating fiction in which Billy is interpreted to grow up and change himself. It’s not impossible.
It’s fine to not like Billy. He’s awful in canon, yeah. He’s also fake. Stop aligning the way we interact with media identically with reality. We know the difference.