as a person who both has anxiety disorder && intrusive thoughts, i am kind of uncomfortable with how the fandom reaction to remus & portrayal of him is. while anxiety can be difficult * cause problems (believe me i would know) it is also necessary in some degree, & yes in small doses can be beneficial. janus can be a jerk but again self preservation is necessary for self care. but intrusive thoughts? there is NOTHING good about that. & we havent seen remus contribute anything else. part 1
remus so far has LITERALLY shown NO redeeming qualities. what he HAS shown is a willingness to take sadistic joy in Hurting others. i get that he cant help disrespecting boundaries if he represents intrusive thoughts but 1. sides and thomas being bothered by that is totally reasonable, not them being "mean" to remus 2. again the fact remus clearly DELIGHTS in upsetting others is. literally exactly how middle school bullies acted. fandom made me feel really unwelcome in feeling unnerved by this. (Part 2)
You make a lot of good points, yes, and as someone whose intrusive thoughts cause her nothing but pain and sleep loss and sometimes anxiety attacks, I agree with them.
Remus clearly loves violence and has so far done nothing that makes it seem like he actually WANTS to help Thomas, at least not in the way he wants to help others. Of course, Intrusive Thoughts are MEANT to disturb you and they're usually always violent and sexual or gross in nature. They're repetitive and it makes sense that Remus would be like that too. I am glad Thomas chose to make his character violent and gross because if he was just going to make a few fart jokes or "jump out of a moving car" statements, he would be excluding so many of his fanbase who suffer from much worse Intrusive thoughts.
So yeah, I think it's a good decision that Remus acts like that in canon because it's a much more accurate version of IT in my opinion (by that, I mean he acts exactly like how my own intrusive thoughts torture me). I haven't seen him contribute anything meaningful or redeemable to any of their conversations either, but again, that's my opinion and other people might interpret it a different way.
I think the main problem is that so many of the fans don't actually watch the show they're fans of, and even if they do, they don't remember shit and go with the popular fanon (and Thomas is now guilty of including fanon ideas in the actual series). I think a lot of people love Remus or relate to him, and even if they're all like "we love villains in this house, let them do evil things" they actually look SO HARD to make him seem more sympathetic. Because if they like him they HAVE to make him seem more likeable even if that doesn't make sense in canon (like all the HCs of him being upset at called the evil twin even though he has called himself "demented" in canon)
Remus gets the same treatment Virgil/Janus/Logan do where they ignore their actual characters and make them whatever they want them to be. So Remus (who canonically jokes about murdering Thomas's family, of little babies, of making Thomas hurt himself or someone who has attacked another side twice) gets turned into this quirky funny pervert guy who makes poop jokes sometimes. And again, they're free to create what they want but this fandom is incapable of seperating fanon from canon so they claim it's a fact and "he's not that bad actually!"
It's completely fine if you use Remus to cope with your intrusive thoughts but not all of us have the same coping mechanisms. So when people like us get uncomfortable with his character or when we complain about his fanon portrayal, we're somehow "close-minded" and have a black and white view of things as if they're not the ones stripping away 90% of Remus's canon personality to fit him into their fanon Funny Guy™
