𝐀 𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐈𝐬: 𝐏𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐠𝐧𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐀𝐎𝟑 𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐬
Aka me once again asking people to stop treating personal preferences as political manifestos. CRITICISM AND CENSORSHIP ARE DIFFERENT WORDS, PLEASE USE THEM CORRECTLY-
Maybe this is a lukewarm take, but I think fandom conversations would be a lot healthier if we stopped treating every preference as a moral stance.
You are allowed to have icks. You are allowed to have kinks.
You are allowed to adore a trope, avoid a trope, mute a tag, block a tag, roll your eyes at a tag, or click on it so fast your mouse catches fire.
None of that automatically makes you an anti, a puritan, a hater or whatever other label people are handing out this week.
Sometimes people just... don't like things. That could be because of one reason or multiple and that is FINE.
I've noticed that fandom discussions increasingly flatten everything into extremes. If you dislike a particular trope, ship, kink, or theme, some people assume you're advocating censorship/being puritanical. If you enjoy something dark or taboo in fiction, others assume you're endorsing it in real life.
Amost 98% of the time, neither assumption is true.
A lot of people are simply curating their own experience.
They know what they enjoy, what they find upsetting, what bores them, what hits too close to home, and what they'd rather spend their free time reading instead. This is just being a person.
I also think we've become weirdly bad at distinguishing criticism from hostility.
Talking about why a work didn't land for you, why a trope makes you uncomfortable, or why you disagree with a portrayal is not the same thing as attacking the people who enjoy it.
Maybe this is the art student in me talking, but criticism has always been part of engaging with art. Books, films, paintings, sculptures, photography, theatre, fanfiction, poetry etc, people have been analyzing, debating, praising, criticizing, and arguing about creative works for centuries.
If you put something out into the world, people are going to have opinions about it. Some of those opinions will be positive. Some will be negative. Some will be thoughtful, insightful, completely wrong, frustrating, fascinating, or all of the above at once.
That's just part of making art.
I've sat through critiques. I've had people point out weaknesses in things I spent dozens of hours working on. I've also learned an incredible amount from discussions with people who interpreted my work differently than I intended.
Criticism isn't automatically an attack. It isn't inherently censorship. It isn't some modern fandom invention. It's one of the ways people interact with art.
That doesn't mean every critique is good, fair, informed, or useful. Plenty aren't. But I don't think the existence of criticism is a problem in itself.
There is a huge difference between discussing a work and targeting the person who created it. The former is a normal part of artistic culture. The latter is where things start becoming hostile.
You don't have to agree with every interpretation of your work. You don't have to accept every criticism. You don't even have to think a particular critique is remotely accurate. But once art leaves your hands and enters the world, people are going to react to it. That's not a failure of the audience or of the artist. That's what art has always done.
I think these conversations often become muddled is when criticism, harassment, and censorship get treated as though they're interchangeable.... And they're not.
Calling something poorly written, discussing its themes, questioning its message, analyzing its portrayal of a subject, or explaining why it made you uncomfortable is not censorship.
At the same time, "I'm just criticizing it" is not a free pass to harass creators, start dogpiles, send abuse, or treat real people with contempt.
Both words end up getting stretched so far that they lose all meaning.
Not every critique is censorship. Not every rude comment is thoughtful criticism. And not every negative reaction is an attempt to erase a work from existence.
I think it's perfectly possible to defend someone's right to create something while having absolutely no desire to read it yourself. It's also possible to dislike something intensely without demanding it vanish from existence.
Those ideas have never seemed incompatible to me. Art invites discussion. People will disagree. People will love things, hate things, misunderstand things, and argue about them. That's been true for as long as humans have been making stories.
The important part is remembering that engaging with a work and attacking a person are not the same thing, and neither are criticism and censorship.
Anyway, long story short: don't be an a$$, don't harass people over fiction, and don't act like muting a tag is the first step toward a fascist regime. You are allowed to dislike things without becoming the CEO of censorship. Likewise, you are allowed to enjoy things without becoming the patron saint of artistic freedom.
