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.
i know my experiences are not even a little bit universal, even among other arabs, but just in case it changes someone’s perspective a little bit: i grew up a queer kid in saudi arabia, and i was not by any means the only one.
when the wrong person finding out you’re gay could be a literal death sentence sanctioned by the state, you kinda have to be Very Careful navigating the world. and the number one most reliable way to get a sense of “How Safe Am I Here?” was shipping. most of the people i came out to, i was able to come out to because we happened to like a similar show, and one or the other of us said that we ship some gay pairing. some of those people i quickly learned were also queer. some of them weren’t. but all of them were equally a safe space for me when literally the entire country including the government Wanted Us Dead. for all of us, queer shipping was literally the only exposure we had to the queer community and queerness as a concept. it was a huge protective force against the messaging of literally every other part of our culture, including the laws we lived under, which told us Gay People Must Die.
i literally could not care less what led to them being accepting of queer people. they saved my life and that’s not any less meaningful if yuri on ice was a contributing factor.
Art is well known for increasing compassion in people for the “other”. When white people watch a show or play a game with a Black main character, their acceptance for Black people in real life goes up, because your brain doesn’t really know the difference between being friends with a real person and feeling empathy for a fictional character.
(this is part of why we critique bigotry in mainstream media meant for mass consumption and demand inclusiveness and representation in that media! it truly does have the ability to influence culture on a large scale!)