Just going back to this thread for a sec, it’s reminding me of someone else I’ve noticed particularly in my own fandom experience, which is that somewhere along the way it stopped being sufficient to say “I just don’t like that”. https://twitter.com/mirainade/status/1259389688021843968

You can’t say “I just don’t like that ship”. There’s this tremendous internal and external pressure to come up with a reason *why* you don’t like the ship that doesn’t rest on your own personal preference. It has to be “I don’t like this ship because it’s BAD because X”

Personal preference must be tied to progressivism and social justice for some reason, and that strikes me as an absolutely exhausting way to live.

It’s really okay to just not like something because you just don’t like it.

The thing is, sometimes we don’t like things because they give us a visceral negative reaction that makes us want to strike out at it in some way, and we want to justify our desire to do that in a way that alows us to go ahead and do that.

Which is where “I don’t like this ship because it’s BAD” comes in, because when you don’t like something because it’s BAD, you have the right to attack that thing and anyone who likes it for being BAD.

This is a very human tendency. I’ve noticed it in myself.

We really don’t want to confront our own propensity for being petty.

So we look for things that make us not petty but instead warriors in a righteous cause.

Know what? You’re petty. You dislike things for mean, petty reasons. We all are, and we all do. And that’s fine. It really is. Just have a laugh at your own ridiculousness and go off and enjoy something you do like.

Stop trying to justify your own pettiness.

When I dislike someone or something, I’ll go looking for reasons to justify why I feel that way, and every additional reason I find gives me a nastily pleasant little neurochemical jolt.

I really do think almost all of us do this at times. It’s very, very natural.

But you need to understand that you do it, and you need to catch yourself when you’re in the middle of doing it and not allow it to affect your behavior. Sure as hell don’t allow it to create a permission structure for you to hurt people.

It is perfectly fine, perfectly sufficient, to say “I just don’t like that”. It’s perfectly fine to say “I don’t like that because it grosses me out”. It’s okay to just stop there. You don’t need to justify your dislike any further.

You also need to not hurt people.