Basically ideological purity is fake and if you only engage with things that are 100% pure and impossible to corrupt and also perfectly align with your political views, you're gonna sit in a room alone forever
Also, I would hope it would go without saying but I can't ignore what web site I'm posting on SO:
Ideological purity being fake does NOT give you carte blanche to engage with whatever you want with no critical thought whatsoever
In fact, the opposite is true: there exists a moral obligation to engage critically with those things you enjoy so that you can identify those elements which are corruptible and learn to actively recognize them when they appear
I love high fantasy, it makes up the majority of what I read
This means I must be keenly aware of the racist, colonialist, and imperialist underpinnings of the genre so that I can recognize them when they creep into a story
@witchfynder_finder There was so much toxicity in my life before I realized this. Someone would tell me "but this thing you love has [problems]" and, being the angy teen that I was, I thought that the only responses were to either stop enjoying the thing or double down and pretend that the problems don't matter.
@witchfynder_finder related statement: there's a lot of overlap between the idea of "I'm not allowed to enjoy things with flaws because then I'm not being critical" and cringe culture. It's the same sickly feeling of enjoying something that you're "not supposed to"
@RowanBerry Yeah we have this tendency to internalize "Thing you like has Problem" as "YOU has Problem" as well which also wraps up into this whole thing
It turns out some things are complicated =P