i've had multiple people ask me "why would you rec something with distasteful elements (implicit ableism or racism or similar, character bashing, etc)? wouldn't you only rec things you wholeheartedly like?" at this point, and it's... interesting!
i don't think anyone's wrong for having that point of view. like. enjoy what you enjoy, for any reasons you enjoy it, who gives a shrimp. it's just not how i operate, and it's interesting to me that how i operate is so... removed from that perspective, because i thought that the way i engage with art is pretty obvious from the outside!
basically, there are two important pieces here:
- i am pretty uncommonly aware of social hegemonies (systems of power and control, ways members of society are marginalized)--which isn't a brag, it's just something i've latched onto autistically and have an inclination toward granularly analyzing to a degree most people do not and would not enjoy
- i love art. i'm insane for art. art is, quite genuinely, my greatest passion in life and one of the only things that i can say truly and uncomplicatedly makes me happy.
so, i love art, and all art is made in a society (joker voice), and society is full of hegemonies that are enforced from birth, at every turn, usually through violence (whether physical or social). all art is made by people, and all people were raised in this society, and therefore all people have been affected by these hegemonies.
and the hegemonies that affect me and are particularly important to me are not ones that most people question. i'm insane--like, literally psychotic, low-empathy, narcissistic, multiple personalities, you name a violently stigmatized entry in the DSM and i've got it. i'm disabled to the point that i can't perform labor, i can't work, and the vast majority of society believes this genuinely makes my life less worthwhile.
i am autistic. every single manifestation of these hegemonies is equally important to me. i get just as fixated on a single-minute interlude with a side character that's ableist as i do a ten-episode plotline featuring a central ship that's ableist as i do a fundamental conceit of the worldbuilding that's ableist. i might critique those things differently in public, but seeing them is the same to me. i notice all of them just as much.
so i love art. and art is made in a society that enforces these ideas. and art is made by people who genuinely believe these ideas. and i'm going to notice and engage with these ideas in art regardless of how minorly they feature in a piece. so it's like... i can stop loving art, or i can treat them as objective pieces of the art.
sometimes they make the art worse. sometimes there are multiple lenses you can read their inclusion through (like, revolutionary girl utena is racist toward anthy! and also that racism says something about racist hegemonies! both can be simultaneously true). sometimes their inclusion outright makes a piece better (the locked tomb would be a vastly different series if john was not a man with deeply internalized white colonialist ideologies, which are expressed via fundamental aspects of worldbuilding due to john's place in the world). but either way, i've gotta be willing to deal with them in the way i do any other aspect of art, personally, because otherwise i'd never be able to enjoy anything.
