Important PSA: About certain fandom-behavior
Before I finish my next set of chibis, here's a bit more serious tone for a moment. I'm a bit cranky with some certain things already developing in this fandom and feel like at least on this blog here, I ought to put my foot down. Consider this a friendly, well-meant advice from your local fandom-grampa.
It is good to be critical of the media, you consume. It is good not to take everything you get fed - be it television, books, or video-games - as it is given to you, without allowing yourself the right to question some certain things. And yes, it is also good and okay to share your critical thoughts with oters to gain feedback on your own point of view in hope to gain a broader understanding of the reasons for why some things might not be as perfect, as should be.
However, when such behavior becomes an obsession, it is not good anymore. It is unhealthy for your own mental well-being, as well, as it is harmful for your own social growth. Analyzing fictional media critical should help you develop your social skills first and foremost. It should help you develop the ability to analyze the social situations, you find yourself in critically and make conscious decision about how to interact with people of various mindsets. It is not a game about who finds the most 'problematic'(tm) bullet-points in a media. If you focus solely on the things, you are critical about and keep engaging others in the fandom only about this one topic, you do yourself a major disservice.
You will soon not be able to accept criticism yourself, because you trapped yourself in the idea, that just one point of critique is reason enough for lifelong shaming and harassing, as you believe, you have to do with the media, you are critical about. Your ability to analyze situation based on their immediate context will suffer, rendering you incapable of discerning a poorly worded slip-up from an actually ill-meaning insult and worth. And above all, you will escalate yourself in your hatred. The media, or the character, you were originally just 'critical' about will become like a red flag to you, causing your anger to instantly flare up, whenever that thing is mentioned. And especially the latter thing is a painfully exhausting downwards spiral from which you will hardly manage to escape again, eventually making your own experience in the fandom, you once enjoyed shallow, exhausting and toxic.
This might sound all a bit exaggerated, but is nothing but the truth, honest to goodness. I've seen it in other fandoms before. I've seen fandoms that were open and welcoming, that had people be happy with their media, because it offered new, progressive things, that hadn't been there before, turn into toxic moshpits, where everyone was only loud, when they needed to spite others, or the media, they once enjoyed. You will literally destroy your own fun, if you walk down that path.
If you haven't gathered it by now, this is very specifically pointed at the currently ongoing discourses surrounding Joseph, Mary, Robert and the never canonically confirmed cult-ending. Although, it is an advice that you can carry into any other fandom-discourse.
It is okay, if you are critical of these characters and their decisions in-game, but when you start tagging all your vents and drags and rants about them, with their character-tags, you are basically asking for people, who enjoy these characters to confront you about it. And that, will kick loose an avalanche of emotional self-escalation. Trust me.
tl;dr: Be critical of things in media, you think are not okay, but don't dwell on them for the sake of earning woke-points. Move on, and allow yourself to enjoy the good parts of the media, while keeping in mind that not everything about this media is perfect and good.
