Do people even have the concept anymore that you can find something awful and fascinating at the same time? Like, I found Catra and Adora’s dynamic exciting, engrossing, and very, very gay. That doesn’t mean I am obliged to go around defending Catra’s every action or insisting she has to be redeemed. (I sure hope not, that would be weaksauce when she’s worked so hard to be her own person and the villain she wanted to be.) You won’t catch me going around saying that trying to kill Adora or bring about eternal winter is fine and child soldiers aren’t responsible for their actions even after they’re grown up and have been given clear chances to turn away. Adora doesn’t owe Catra a solitary shit when she’s tried for the entirety of Season 1 to get her to leave and got a nice payback in the form of attempted murder.
Do I ship it in the sense of liking the dynamic and enjoying the content? Fuck yeah! Tragedy! Villainy! Internal conflict! Bring it on! Do I ship it in the sense that I insist it must be pure and perfect because I personally like it, endlessly justify Catra’s shitty treatment of Adora and outright war crimes, and flood every tag insisting that the Rebellion are just as bad as the Horde and that Glimmer, Angella et al. are the true villains? Hell no.
(Not saying Catradora fans do this, by the way. I am referring to the behavior of a different group of annoying fans.)
If you take this as me saying you shouldn’t ship Catradora and you are a bad person if you ship it because it’s wrong and bad and impure, congratulations, you have proved you have no reading comprehension whatsofuckingever and are just putting words in my mouth, whether out of stupidity or malice.
If you think I have ever tried to dictate what other people ship beyond expressing personal distaste in the proper tags and calling for civil behavior, then congratulations, you are a liar. Fuck, I’ve even produced reylow content depicting it as the unhealthy, abusive, borderline rapey ship I see it as, and would have done more if I saw it as romantic at all (which, for the reading challenged, does not mean that you are not allowed to) and if that section of the fandom were not such a misogynistic, racist, abuse apologist nightmare.
Furthermore, if you think calling out a group or individual’s bullshit in the tags reserved for that without even interacting with them is the same thing as harassing and policing them, then CONGRATULATIONS you are a silencing piece of shit who wants to shut down opinions that differ from yours by disingenuously conflating criticism with harassment. You winner of a person you.
I think I understand where you’re coming from. This is basically how I felt when I said I wanted to analyze the relationship between Jennifer and Khalil
God I have SO MANY FEELS about Jen and Khalil (didn’t read your post past the title though because I’ve only just started Season 2). I remember the aching headcanons I had of them, an AU where Khalil does not fall into Whale’s clutches but graduates with honors though a year late, gets into wheelchair sports, and he and Jen dance at prom with him spinning in his wheelchair circles around her as she laughs and whirls in turn, and her sitting across his lap for the slow dance, forehead to forehead as they sway… and they do lose their virginity to each other, maybe not in the exact way they originally envisioned but spending the sexiest, wildest, tenderest and most caring first night they could have imagined. And it would have been awkward and hilarious too at times, and they would have laughed and cried and cuddled through it all.
I loved Khalil and Jennifer’s budding romance and I want a Khalil redemption and possible KhalJen so bad, though his actions and her own trauma probably brought them far past the possibility of my innocent AU. I just feel so desperately sorry for these kids 😭
L.J.'s Obsessions 