i do not care if someone learned compassion from a cartoon or a comic or an anime im just glad they’re here with us now a better person fighting the good fight. should it have taken something so trivial? maybe not- but it’s in the past! and this is the now! and if they’re objectively better for it who cares
“it took gay shipping for this adult to stop being homophobic 😬” ok but they stopped being actively homophobic. that’s what you just said. that’s literally the only important part you understand that right? this is a win for everyone you get that?
we all start somewhere and im going to be real buddy i only care about the harm you did or didn’t cause on your journey and where you ended up. whatever set it off only matters as much as you want it too
Surely that is a major part of why we want more representation in mainstream media in the first place. It’s very weird to campaign for good portrayals and then get mad when they work.
A friend of mine wrote, some years back, about her 85-year-old grandmother who was sort of vaguely homophobic until a nice gay couple moved in and she saw them gardening and they were social and friendly and good neighbors, and then she declared that obviously they were fine, and if God had a problem with them, she would give God a good talking-to.
The confidence of an 85-year-old woman can be an amazing thing to behold from a safe distance.
This is literally how humans work.
It’s how it worked on all of us. Some of us don’t remember the moment we internalized this, the moment of “ah, yes, humans-like-me, good” for whatever group you want to think of that usually has their humanity denied, but it still happened and if it happened early enough it was probably even more trivial than the above. But it still happened. It happened to you, and it happened to me, and none of it was instilled from Purest Wisdom and Virtue, it came from small social acts and moments of realization stacked together and worked into our nervous systems.
We are scared primates attempting to live with more than seven billion other scared primates with brains that just keep getting more complicated on us but are built on foundations of scared fish eons ago. Thank fucking gods we also packbond with anything or we really would be hopelessly doomed, so also let’s fucking find a way to make that work for us.
Stop fucking complaining when something helpful and small and trivial helps another scared primate go “oh shit wait, that primate isn’t a threat to me, we can be friends”. Be fucking grateful that all it took was some free socially-engaged-with fiction on the internet that took us one step further towards not tearing each other to shit; that it just took a cartoon, or some gardening. Given the history of humanity that’s kind of a fucking miracle! Let’s make some more cartoons and write some more slash and do some more gardening!