I just want to add, while I am in agreement, it's not untrue to say that how you treat or talk about a character can be a signifier of character, like I think people use this liberally and are perhaps too glib about it overall, but for example, maybe the most common use of this is talking about adults who might like characters who are not, or the enjoyment of a character who is not exactly morally upright being a signifier of your own morals. This is... false. Generally. There are outliers, of course, like Patrick Bateman sycophants. But I'm not talking about that. It's more like... concepts and ideas are real, and there are people out there who will see what you think.
I'm talking about when people malign a disabled character for their disability when this is antithetical to the point. I feel like when people say this, they tend to think of the characters as real, but they're not. The people around you, though?— they are real. This argument should always mean being conscious of the space you hold, honestly.
Off the top of my head, I've seen characters called "ugly" and "worthless" post disabling event(s), or compared to an old, pitable dog that's kept around because people are sad and don't want to put it down. There's this narrative that says "nothing matters because it's fake", and conversely the one that says "everything matters because it's real", and it's just like. I think it depends. I think it varies based on what you're talking about and how you are talking about it, and that "nothing matters" is as conservative of a stance as "everything does". Unfortunately, though, the people who are saying "everything matters", especially publicly, often only mean it in the silliest of ways. Fiction and reality are not 1:1.
Fiction is built from reality, though, and we can sometimes reinforce things by treating them so carelessly. A character would not be evil because of their psychopathy, for instance, but could be considered as such for their actions and beliefs, especially if those beliefs are abusive. How you talk about these things does matter, but again, these statements are used to purity spiral, not to talk about our relationships with mental health, misogyny and other social structures. They're incredibly simplified to mean that liking something "bad" makes you a "bad person" by a bunch of incurious jerks.
Which sucks, really, because it's like. Well there is a conversation to be had here, but it's never the conversation anyone is having!
Like it isn't a moral discussion! It's "how do we feed into the structures around us by how we frame our media", and "how does this medias framing feed into the structures around us?", etc., like when people look past a narrative and make jokes about a character being "evil" when that character has a deeply stigmatized disorder, or how this visibly disabled guy is ugly and worthless and no one cares about him now because he isn't attractive when the media wants you to dissect these attitudes yourself (!), like at the very least this is an incredibly lame, boring way for you to engage with complex themes.
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