Ooooo number 16! Whats a thing that you just Don't get the appeal of?
Thanks a lot for the ask!
16. you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)
Idk if you're asking in general or about DE so i'm going to do both.
• Something about the DE fandom that I can't understand why anyone would like are those fanworks that characterize Harry as especially stupid compared to others. There are lots of things about Harry's characterization by the fandom that I don't really understand or like but that one is the first one I noticed when I started interacting with the fandom and it has been annoying me the longest because of that.
Canon Harry is said and shown to be really smart multiple times during the game. He's one of the best detectives in his precinct. Even without his memories he's smart enough to be able to visually calculate the angle the courpris needed to jump over the waterlock and the shoe sizes of every footprint left arround the hanged man. He's also very perceptive of other people's emotions and can usefully use that ability to get people to trust him or to get confessions out of them.
Even if those two abilities depend on the player's choices, we can assume that his skills used to be a lot more even in points before Harry lost his memory. So if he's able to succesfully solve a case with only a fraction of his prior skill and knowledge intact then making him out to be completely stupid before, during or after Martinaise is just fully misinterpreting him as a character.
It's not wrong to make him be clueless at times or to have him need explanations about some things that are considered general knowledge. He is like that in canon, he lost his memories and he needs to be reminded about things like relevant historical events, the meaning of a word or a concept, or especific details about his work and his life, but there are lots of things that are intuitive to him or that are common enough for him to remember them without needing an explanation from someone else. Encycolpedia gives him many complete explanations and information by itself and that should be enough to know that Harry doesn't need everything explained to him by another person, but i've still seen some characterizations by the fandom that make him give off the impression of an alien who just arrived on earth and can't even tell you what a door is for. I know we joke a lot about Harry being the "born sexy yesterday" trope, but we need to remember that he's still a grown man with more than 40 years of experience living as a human being.
I'm going to stop here with DE because I made myself mad and I'll start writing in circles if I don't quit now.
• A general fandom thing i really don't get the appeal of are those ship or x reader things that make any and every male character into some kind of hyper masculine alpha dom regardless of the character's actual personality.
I personally don't look for things like that but Big fandoms tend to have hundreds of fanworks like those and they're impossible to avoid. I keep seeing them even after blocking like 30 very specific tags. They're always the same 3 or 4 scenarios with a different looking guy and maybe some small changes to keep the whole thing in-universe. Those things must be as old as the concept of fandom itself but I seriously don't get why anyone who likes the characters they're about would find anything like that appealing.
Anyways, if I see another "Satoru Gojo finding out about your pregnacy" type of post I'm going to go outside and let myself get dragged away by the river of rain water that just replaced the street in front of my house.
