Curry Zawa Kaoru's Creative Counseling - “I can’t ignore creators who look down on my favorite characters.” Stop hating the person; hate their work instead.

First of all, it’s hard to comment because I don’t know to what extent the creator you dislike is belittling the characters. Recently, whether or not terms like trash and scum count as belittling has become a bit of a gray area―it’s not even frowned upon to tell characters you like to go die anymore. But if the creator is hurling insults that lack any underlying love, I think that’s unacceptable. If that kind of tone is gaining popularity, I suspect the fandom itself has turned into a Midsommar-like state where there are more crazy people than sane ones.

It’s hard to stay sane in that kind of environment, and you might start wondering if you’re the crazy one. But no matter how you look at it, I think the people who excessively bash characters are in the wrong, so first and foremost, stay strong. It’s actually a common occurrence for religious groups to be full of believers with a few screws loose, no matter how righteous the deity they worship is.

Even if the majority of the fandom has become toxic, it’s not the fault of the original work itself, so there’s no need to let your love for those games waver. To keep your own convictions strong, it’s best to keep those people’s dark rituals out of your field of vision.

However, given the current climate, it seems strange that this kind of attitude is being accepted without backlash. Perhaps this creator you hate is good at walking a pretty fine line.

I enjoy watching videos of people playing video games, and most popular commentators don’t speak ill of anything more than necessary. That said, they don’t just try to look at everything from an overly positive angle. Instead, they excel at striking a balance. They openly express anger toward unscrupulous characters, call out what needs to be called out, and even say creepy things to their favorite characters—but they never cross that line.

Even with streamers like that, though, there are times when I feel a sense of unease—thinking, “Aren’t they being unnecessarily harsh on this character?”—and end up stopping halfway through the video. Yet those videos don’t spark any major backlash and plenty of people still enjoy them.

One time I wondered if I was just feeling a bit Midsommar-ish was when I was watching a streamer play an otome game. I’m an otome gamer myself—to the point where I even joke that otome games changed my life.

The mere fact that it was an otome game made me more sensitive to the commentary, even more so when it came to characters I liked. I couldn’t even handle a comment like someone simply saying ew, which I usually wouldn’t mind. I started thinking seriously—maybe too seriously—about whether it’s ever really acceptable to call someone gross.

Perhaps in the same way, it's possible that you’re so invested in your fandom and love these characters so much that your standards have become stricter, and even remarks that others might see as harmless jokes feel like nothing but insults to you.

However, there’s no need to beat yourself up or assume that you’re a crazy, troublesome otaku. If you really think about it, no one who engages in fandom is completely sane in the first place.

It’s fine to keep hating what you can’t forgive, but when you start feeling this level of hatred towards a single creator, it might be best to stop directing that hatred toward the creator as a person. After all, hatred toward another person tends to linger the longest. If you want to let it go, it’s better to keep your thoughts limited to hating their artistic sense.

It might be hard to think that way in regards to social media posts, but think of it this way: on social media, everyone puts on a persona to some extent. Even I’m not this self-deprecating in real life. If you hate this person’s work—including their social media persona—just think of it as a matter of you both having wildly different tastes. No one is at fault, so of course, it’s not your fault for disliking it.

To put it another way, the reason it’s so hard to just let it slide might be that your anger is directed at the person who finds it acceptable to talk about characters like that.

There’s nothing more of a bottomless quagmire than a personal attack on someone you’ve never met or interacted with. While the question of whether a work and its author are one and the same is an interesting philosophical conundrum, try to separate the two for your own sake and direct all your anger toward their works and posts rather than the person themselves.

From your perspective, that person might seem like a malicious individual who takes pleasure in belittling characters they don’t like, but they probably didn’t intend to do that—they most likely simply made their works (and social media posts) hoping that people would enjoy them.

Just as it’s impossible to write a work that everyone will enjoy, it’s also difficult to create a work that doesn’t hurt anyone. Even if the author didn’t intend to, they can still deeply hurt people like you. Unfortunately, it’s inevitable that people will get hurt when you put something out into the world to entertain people.

In other words, you’ve been caught up in the natural consequences of the maelstrom that is public creativity—so let’s stop resenting the person directly.