A lot of you weren't here for it when I made the post but late last year I noted that you should never let who you are become so entwined with a piece of media that critique of it becomes a critique of you personally. And I feel like it needs reiterating. https://twitter.com/RosieeThor/status/1305594494646018048

I'm a Black fantasy fan. I couldn't really deal with the genre at all if I only read things that weren't problematic. The genre has a lot of negative aspects baked into it's foundational DNA. People like Dunsaney and Tolkein who helped pioneer the genre were racist AF...

and many of the tropes they codified are informed by those things. It's why I don't believe in shutting your brain off when engaging with media of any sort. Some of my favorite books growing up were the Dragonriders of Pern and the Belgariad. But that's with serious caveats...

Because both have some VERY unsavory things in them. But we should be able to constructively critique the things we love and keep a certain amount of emotional distance from them that we can set them aside when the people involved in them use those things to cause harm.

Humans learn to conceptualize the world through stories. It's part of why having marginalized groups in charge of their own stories is important. But looking at stories uncritically can teach us poor lessons about how to conceptualize things we have no or limited experience for..

and we need our brains engaged to be on guard for stuff like that. So it doesn't inherently make you a bad person if you like or got something positive out of a problematic piece of media or one created by a toxic person. BUT you can't run from the toxicity that made the thing...

because then you can be blindsided by the other things you may have internalized from said toxicity.

Additionally, your faves don't need defending from critique. When they keep stepping in shit over and over again defending them isn't fandom, it's enabling.