i keep seeing posts from people about ‘ohh, the media you consume doesn’t say who you are uwu’ and ‘stop judging people for their interests, they have no say in who that person issss’... and i shake my head and breathe out a tired sigh.
they do though. what you choose to consume and integrate into yourself, where your interests lie, is dependent on who you are, and as such also reflects who you might be to others. and that’s a neutral statement with layers and layers of situations, connotations, and complexities to it.
it’s obvious, of course who you are as a person is going to determine what you like and dislike. big fat duh. you can always tell something about where a person stands on any given issue or interest. that’s how humans and identities work. It’s ridiculous and unfair to get mad at someone who sees what you are engaging with and by association wants nothing to do with you. It does not matter if they avoid subject x for more political systemic serious reasons, or if it’s personal taste. Expecting everyone to drop their biases and standards and boundaries just because you don’t want to be ‘judged’ for thinking about insert-media-here is childish, ridiculous, and delusional.
a good chunk of the people on this website are adults: why haven’t you learned nuance and situational dependence in your judgements? What prevented you from learning that comparing ‘person a thinks ___ was lazily written, so doesn’t really interact with person b who lauds it’, with ‘person a avoids ___ because of its toxic messages, thus avoiding person b who exclaims nothing wrong with said messages’ is ridiculous, they’re not even on the same playing field.
i wish there was less obsession over appearing to be a ‘good person’ and more focus on genuine compassion and actually helping people who need it.
tl,dr: people don’t know what’s going on in your head (and vice versa), and will take whatever information they can to get a picture of you. that’s how humans work. your interests do speak to who you are and potential choices you may or may not have made. That’s how humans interact with the world outside our own minds.
(ps: read/skim/listen to hamlet because all the problems in that play have to do with the separation of the inner world of the mind {intention} vs the outer world we all have to live in together {action}). (pps: don’t read hamlet. i mean. if you like shakespeare or really want to read it, sure. i’m just tired and it’s something that popped into my head at the last second. and i like it. and it deals with this division.)