It continually baffles and frustrates me that so many people (people who ostensibly love and enjoy a piece of media and doing critical analysis!) only want to look at the shallowest, surface-level facts of a character's actions, rather than passing them through a thought process of reflection on the characters and their actions as ALLEGORY.
The basic cognitive ability to parse and process allegory is how people end up loving and feeling empathy for characters who have done terrible things. Nobody is looking at a serial killer and going "Wow, I wish I could do that specific atrocity. I really identify with this character who got to do that."
For example, IWTV & TVL fans: Gabriella de Lioncourt. She's abusing and grooming her son into an incestuous relationship. This has made a lot of people very upset and grossed-out, and that's fine -- your reactions are your own. But when someone likes Gabriella, all of these horrified people come out of the woodwork to say, "EW, that's disgusting, she's an abuser! So you're okay with incest?"
It's a very stupid thing to say, because it reveals the person's own intellectual laziness and self-absorption: They cannot comprehend liking a character without personally identifying with them and finding them aspirational and #goals. If you take them at face value, it appears as though it's literally never occurred to them that there is any other experience a person could have in interfacing with a character. Except it HAS occurred to them, and I can almost guarantee you that they have DONE IT SUCCESSFULLY in other contexts.
Have you ever had a friend tell you about a sad or frustrating thing that happened to them, and you responded with something like, "Oh man, that sucks! :( That reminds me of the time that [a completely different thing] happened to me. So I've felt similarly to what you're feeling, I have felt the degree of this suckitude :("? I'm almost 100% positive you have, because everyone does it even if they don't always say it out loud. That's what your brain is for: Making connections, identifying patterns, and being a member of a highly social species. Finding commonalities between your friend's experience and something totally-different-but-with-similar-results or something that made you FEEL the way that you imagine they must be feeling... That is part of how we relate to each other.
That is what is happening when people feel empathy and love for a character who has done terrible things. They probably haven't committed incest with their son like Gabriella, but they very well might have gotten trapped in a relationship (and I am using "relationship" in its broadest sense to mean any kind of connection between two people, whether that be romantic partners, friends, family members, coworkers, etc) where they were toxically entangled with someone and desperately wanted their own autonomy. They might have experienced generational trauma. They might have experienced one relationship or friendship where they were the victim of someone else's shitty behavior, and then another relationship or friendship where they were cold and shutdown and treated the other person with less care and warmth than they should have.
It's not the literal surface-level incest that Gabriella fans are resonating with, it's the deeper allegory beyond that. There isn't an objective answer about what that allegory is, because it's gonna be slightly different for everyone, but one example of an allegory in Gabriella someone might resonate with is, "Being in a situation that you know is wrong and unhealthy, but for some reason you can't or won't fully break free." For that person, maybe their literal surface-level circumstances are "grew up in a shitty small town with a family that sucked and their soul was slowly dying, and they were desperate and ravenous for their own autonomy and freedom; they escaped to the big city, but someone they loved very much is still back there, and every time they think about that person or go home to visit them, they're right back in that terrible place they needed so badly to escape from."
That's how people look at Gabriella and say, "Man, I get it." That's how people look at Armand and say, "Man, I get it." Or Louis. Or Claudia. Or Lestat. Or Marius. Or Daniel. The people who are able to say "Man, I get it" are the people who have done the hard work to face themselves and their own flaws and inner demons -- they are sadder-but-wiser, they have learned something about themselves, they have accepted the reality that they are a person who makes mistakes and takes up space and sometimes fucks up in a big way, whether against other people or against themselves.
And you know what? That's the person I want to hang out with, because it means that if (WHEN) *I* eventually make a mistake -- and I will, because I'm a human being -- it won't be the end of the world or the end of our friendship. The people I DON'T want to hang out with are the people who claim to be perfect, the people who are eager to immediately and reflexively assume the worst of others, the people who truly believe they've never made a mistake that hurt or upset someone else, the people who are chokingly suffocatingly DESPERATELY clinging onto the fantasy of 'being a good person' as a personal identity rather than a continual series of sad, unfun, tedious choices in difficult situations, and the people who haven't taken a hard look at themselves enough to realize how DEEPLY and FRIGHTENINGLY capable they are of potentially causing harm to others.
Being able to look at a character who has done fucked up things and whisper with soft sorrow, "There but for the grace of god go I" -- these are the words of a person who has begun to achieve wisdom. These are the only people I want to hang out with. There but for the grace of god go I.
theartofmadeline
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