Okay. The thing is - we’ll never get everything from this show, we’ll never get to see everything play out. The conversations will always be fractioned and half. It’s a prime time network show that gives us 45 minutes of screen time each episode spread out between a whole cast of characters and plot lines and action sequences.
And my point with that is: Everything outside of what we see in canon is >us< filling in the blanks, interpreting and basically finishing the characters and the storylines.
If you dislike a character or storyline, a large amount of what you dislike will be of your own making. Which means that you created that negative take, only to be negative about it.
If a character isn’t giving all their background and reasons, or isn’t providing what you find to be a sufficient apology for what you believe is a ‘wrong doing’ then that’s you deciding that their reasons were bad instead of valid. You deciding to go ‘I hate this character bc they didn’t apologize’ instead of going ‘I trust that this character apologized but I hate that we didn’t get to see it’ or even ‘I hate that they wrote this character as not apologizing’.
And like. Just because I love these characters and this show or a certain storyline doesn’t mean I think we can’t be critical of it. And it doesn’t mean I expect everyone else to love anything or everything about it. And mostly with this negativity for negativity’s sake, it just makes me think ‘well people are weird’.
Because I literally don’t get watching a show you don’t like and then spending time posting about it using that show’s fandom tags, or painting a character in a bad light just so you can feel negative about it. I don’t get going for drama and negativity when you can go for joy. I get criticizing or even hating the writing, talking about writing that might be problematic, and not resonating with the way a storyline or a character is written, but I don’t get hating a Character that is, in fact, not real and can never be fully fleshed out in a show like this.
But the problem is also when these takes either:
1.) are meant for and created to deliberately reach into other people’s place of joy and create drama.
And, even more so, 2.) when they are racist, ableist, misogynistic in nature and thus are doing real harm to real people. Which, is in fact very much the case when TK is called a ‘twink’ and that term is meant as derogatory or his addiction is being used against him; when Carlos isn’t being emphasized with at all, and attempted to be understood for his reasons, feelings and actions, or isn’t allowed to have complicated, ‘negative’ emotions but is expected to be there to be TK’s ever perfect and present support rock; when Iris is being called words like crazy, or other derogatory terms and her illness or trauma isn’t acknowledged, or she’s being painted stereotypically and as an un-nuanced character bc of her mental illness.
And I don’t get it bc we literally see TK being strong for and supporting Carlos several times in canon. We see Carlos developing and working on his insecurities, educating himself on addiction to best be there for TK. We are told where those insecurities come from. We saw TK’s struggles with active addiction. We literally saw Carlos’ dad being shot in his own home wearing the tux he was supposed to wear as Carlos’ best man, just when their relationship and old wounds were on the mend, heard his mother, who watched it happen, scream down the line while on the phone with Carlos, who also heard it happen. We don’t see anybody but Carlos seeking justice, and we still see Carlos making an effort to spend quality time with TK and communicate openly with him. And we saw TK going to bed without his husband not for the first time, knowing that he’s in pain and that grief has previously let him to feel alone and to close up and end up in a dangerous and unhealthy place, where TK couldn’t reach him or help him. We know that there is past trauma and experience for TK that will make him recognize patterns and make him worry for both Carlos’ wellbeing, and for their marrriage.
And, we see them loving, caring for and forgiving each other through it all. We see a relationship with two people who are not always right, not always perfect, but who are doing the best they can and being by each other’s sides through that. We see nuanced and realistic conflicts with root in both of their trauma. [And loving one character and trusting their judgement but not trusting their love and evaluation of the other is just very difficult for me to understand.]
Everything apart from that, the thoughts, feelings and motivations we assign them, the moments, conversations and apologies we imagine or don’t imagine to have taken place, how two characters came from having a conflict to saying ‘I love you’/‘I forgive you’, or to being friends and dancing at a wedding, what lead characters to say “I’ll keep a light on”/“I feel like we’re starting to drift apart”/“we’re doing great”, what else they might have said, and what they might have felt in that situation, is stuff we make up and put into the story. And so it is up to us whether we try and understand and love these characters or whether we want to make them into bad people, and then hate them for it.
