This older man moved my skirt aside and I absent-mindedly said “oh sorry” for being partially in his seat and he said “dont be sorry, this is new york” and then showed me all his poetry about observing the world and living as a restaurant worker during the pandemic and we talked about how i worked in a grocery store and as a bartender so i resonated with his work and he told me “i may never meet you again but it’s nice to meet someone worth talking to. I might sound like a world class idiot sage, but you can’t be afraid. That’s no way to live. You have to trust your humanity.” Then he shook my hand and got off the stop before me. Hello. Hello . Hello.
i think popular media culture is poisoned in the following ways:
if you like something, people will make fun of you because you have admitted to experiencing a sincere emotion. this makes people defensive about what they like.
if you don’t like something, people will take your opinion personally and attack you. this makes people feel like they have to have a very good reason to dislike something.
people reach for reasons to like vs dislike things that are serious and often politically relevant so they can defend themselves from other opinion-havers.
these positions mutually reinforce each other until it is assumed that any declaration of liking or disliking something is both personally and politically relevant by default.
i am forced to look at this every time one of my fandom posts blows up.
maybe this is a hot take but i think people’s obsession with the found family dynamic and the need to call every friendship a “sibling dynamic” or something in that vein is not actually moving towards a better appreciation for platonic relationships as people like to claim that it is because people have just moved from framing everything as romantic because it fits into a nuclear family structure to framing everything as family-oriented because it fits a nuclear family structure as if friendship alone isn’t enough. which is exactly the opposite of the point that people claim to be making. i have nothing against the found family trope inherently and i am never looking to police the way people enjoy media but i think the reason found family has latched on to the collective fandom consciousness so much is because it fits easily into the structure of relationships that we have been taught to see as the model just as with romantic pairings and i wish people would be happy to just call characters friends and understand that that is a meaningful and profound relationship in and of itself.
