Heartstopper star Kit Connor comes out as bi: “Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself”
Kit Connor, the star of Netflix’s Heartstopper, was accused of “queerbaiting” earlier this year and quit Twitter
Aux News Heartstopper
Kit Connor, the star of Netflix’s Heartstopper, came out as bisexual on Twitter nearly two months after quitting the app over accusations of “queerbaiting.” The controversy, which saw supposed fans trolls attacking Connor for teasing queer romance, he says, forced his decision.
“Back for a minute,” Connor tweeted. “I’m bi. Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye”
Since posting, other members of the Heartstopper production have sent Connor messages of support. “I truly don’t understand how people can watch Heartstopper and then gleefully spend their time speculating about sexualities and judging based on stereotypes,” tweeted Alice Oseman, who created the Heartstopper webcomic. “I hope all those people are embarrassed as FUCK. Kit you are amazing.”
Connor plays Nick Nelson in the British coming-of-age teen dramedy Heartstopper. The series follows Charlie Spring (Joe Locke), a teen outcast with a crush on Nick but unsure of Nick’s sexuality. The series, which co-stars Oscar-winner Olivia Coleman, received a two-season renewal from Netflix earlier this year.
Meanwhile, some fans of the series accused Connor and producers of queerbaiting, a term used to describe narrative works of fiction that use LGBTQIA+ signifiers but do not feature queer representation. Many have charged these works of teasing non-heteronormative sexualities to attract a queer fanbase.
Following the show’s release, Connor opted not to reveal his sexuality publicly. “Twitter is so funny man,” Connor tweeted in May. “Apparently some people on here know my sexuality better than I do.”
He elaborated in an appearance on the podcast Reign With Josh Smith. “We’re still all so young, and to start speculating about our sexualities and maybe pressuring us to come out when we’re not ready. For me, I’m perfectly confident and comfortable in my sexuality. I don’t feel the need to label myself, especially publicly.”
“It’s 2022. It feels strange to be making assumptions about someone’s sexuality based on hearing their voice or seeing their appearance.”
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“I truly don’t understand how people can watch Heartstopper and then gleefully spend their time speculating about sexualities and judging based on stereotypes,” tweeted Alice Oseman, who created the Heartstopper webcomic. Because people have become comfortable with having absolutely no lives and being incredibly aggressive about it.“I hope all those people are embarrassed as FUCK. Kit you are amazing.” They aren’t. That’d take self reflection.
It’s fucked up how people feel so invested n other people’s lives to such a weird degree.It happens inside the Queer community too which is fucked. My heart absolutely broke over what happened to Isabel Fall a year or two back.
Yep. It’s fucking pathetic. Full stop.And it’s usually always the same type of weird, loser dirtbag who does it. Just full of angst, wanting to vent it on absolutely anyone they can swing at with impunity.If you don’t care about the validation of strangers, these loser fucks will try their damnedest to MAKE you care. Because they themselves are validation-addicted fucks who should learn how to be comfortable in their own fucking skins, rather than make their insecurity the problem of others.
“It happens inside the Queer community too”
What do you mean “too”? This is ABOUT the Queer community.
It’s your last statement that’s so bewildering. In an environment where specific categorization goes against the entire prevailing concept of gender and sexuality, why are people so obsessed with pigeonholing others??Also, what if he was just an effeminate heterosexual male? It’s a TV show and he’s an actor. People are so weird.
In an environment where specific categorization goes against the entire prevailing concept of gender and sexuality, why are people so obsessed with pigeonholing others?? Because the label is the thing that matters above all else, for some. And lizard-brained, pecking order bullshit among the utterly insecure is a phenomenon that transcends politics.The stupid people who do this shit (and specifically them)? They’re obsessed with pigeonholing because they have to be.
Guess you can’t lord your superiority over someone without knowing exactly where you place them in the pecking order.
YEP. THAT.
I feel for the kid. It sort of grotesque how overly invested people are in celebrity lives. Unless someone is being racist or homophobic etc. just leave them alone. Don’t show up to their houses, don’t even ask them for a photo when they are having dinner. Just enjoy their movies or shows and just then have a life outside of that. They are making content that you enjoy and you pay for that content and that’s where the transaction should end.
If you want to play marginalized people in Hollywood you need to prove you are part of those marginalized groups. If you don’t want to out to yourself, stick to traditional roles.
He’s a celebrity?
lol
“It sort of grotesque how overly invested people are in celebrity lives.”
Sort of?
“Some fans of the series accused Connor and producers of queerbaiting, a
term used to describe narrative works of fiction that use LGBTQIA+
signifiers but do not feature queer representation.”“The series follows Charlie Spring (Joe Locke), a teen outcast with a crush on Nick but unsure of Nick’s sexuality.”I mean, that description seems like the show has a certain amount of queer representation. Unless the “fans trolls” mentioned in the first paragraph were looking for actual penetration.
“I mean, that description seems like the show has a certain amount of queer representation.”
Queer characters doesn’t equal representation, queer CASTING does. That’s what these internet ghouls were being pieces of shit about.
It’s actually even stupider than that, believe it or not. They accused Connor and the show of “queerbaiting” regarding Connor’s real-life sexuality, because they assumed he was gay but then saw photos of him holding hands with a girl.
FFS, is it too much to hope that some of them might be a *little* embarrassed?
It is too much to hope. Much like MAGAts, the people saying that shit will double down on their stupidity rather than apologize.
When these, the cretins of the world dye their hair all the colours of a shat-upon rainbow and wear unicorn onesies well into their thirties? No.
Shame for their stupidity? In Trump’s America?!
Yes, it is too much to hope. They will either just fade back into the woodwork, or claim that it was the show’s fault for not making it clearer about the actor. No one ever admits it was none of their business in the first place.
girls have cuties to be fair
So…because he acted in a way these chodes found sexually attractive but then also held hands with a girl he’s teasing them maliciously and personally?
Fucking insane, ain’t it?
There’s an understandable frustration when straight actors portray queer characters but when you combine the hyperbolic experiences of teenagers experiencing things for the first time and the hyperbolic nature of the internet both getting intensely focused on the sexuality of a teenage boy, it just gets completely blown out of proportion. I do think this will be an inflection point for a lot of people, I think most people can relate to being a little too gung-ho about certain things in early adulthood and learning to tamp that down and reframe your perspective as you have more life experience.
There are a lot of people queer, straight or bi who don’t “figure things out” until well into their twenties if not later. Maybe they need to date and experiment and experience or maybe they need find a serious relationship with a partner to really know or maybe they need to exorcise all the conservative BS they were fed growing up… Whatever but it’s criminal to put that expectation on an 18 year old.
I’ll go one further: nobody should have to “figure out” their identity and have it codified for the public in order to perform a role as an actor. Representation in art is important, but it’s not as important as respecting and enforcing the right of every LGBT+ worker in this country to their own private lives.There’s a difference between enabling queer artists to tell their own stories and preventing them from being blacklisted or ghetto-ized in exclusively “niche media” in Hollywood, and requiring actors to loudly out themselves with clearly-defined labels before taking a role. After a point this stops being about representation and just becomes a grossly entitled violation of dignity.
Absolutely. It can be a process and can definitely take time.I didn’t figure it out myself until I was 31.
I sincerely don’t understand that frustration. If sexuality is fluid, then why would anyone be upset about someone who identifies as straight portraying a queer character? Surely there are still a lot of closeted actors and actresses who are afraid to come out. Or straight actors who want to learn to be more comfortable with their own sexuality. I understand fighting for more representation, but being upset with an actor because their sexual preference doesn’t match the sexual preference of one of their acting roles is kinda silly.
I guess my point wasn’t clear but that’s what I’m basically saying, it is silly but with the addendum that it’s not difficult to see where this comes from and that this can be an opportunity for the people who drove this to grow.
That sounds very similar to, “she was wearing a short skirt, so, even though she said no, she was asking for it.”
Also how does his real life have anything to do with the show. That’s the part I don’t understand. Representative casting is cool and stuff and I’m totally game for it when it pertains to race but these waters are a murky grey when it comes to whether or not a heterosexual or homosexual can act as the opposite on stage or screen. Cuz like while it would be wonderful if he is gay and apparently he’s bi so cool that’s great and stuff. But why should it matter what type of hole I stick my penis inside when I apply for a job? His real life isn’t related to the show. This illusion people have that TV and film actors somehow are their characters in real life is fucking stupidity.
Let me rephrase that “why should it matter where I stick my penis at all if I’m sticking it somewhere legal” when I apply for a job. But apparently to a lot of people where I stick my penis is actually a job qualification. In this insane insane world.
it’s like…incel, but queer. does that exist?
whaaaaaat oh my freakin’ god
These people are truly idiots. Most of the queer characters on Orange is The New Black were straight. Are they going after Jennifer Beals for playing Bette Porter on The L Word?
If they want real queerbaiting, all they have to do is look to Xena. That show was the definition of queerbaiting. The show’s creator, writers, producers, and cast caught on to how lesbians latched onto the show and were frothing at the mouth over the perceived subtext, that wasn’t. They decided to play with them. Old interviews with Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Conner confirm this. Every time you got convinced Xena and Gabrielle were a gay couple, they’d send Xena off with some guy and Garbrielle to drool over Joxer’s son. I am a huge Xena fan and I knew the whole thing was to fuck with the lesbians. They decided to throw them a bone with the “exchange of water” at the very end of the series.
Was queerbaiting a thing in the 90s. Did anyone really care enough about the demographic to dishonestly court it, rather than saying, “take it or leave it” and making what they wanted?Seriously. Zena was syndicated, so maybe that was the plan for a niche audience.
yeh, you could always count on two straight women kissing during sweeps month. NEVER two dudes, tho, because…um, it was the 90s.
I was only 12 at the time but I still remember they even had promo for Melrose Place’s “gay male” kiss with Matt and… some random day player IIRC. And how they actually cut away during the entire kiss to show straight Billy’s shocked reaction—airing on camera not one second of any actual gay kiss. According the the internet, though there were some decent depictions of gay characters on American TV in the 90s (almost all teen coming out stories, like Ricky on My So-Called Life), you’re right, it wasn’t until 2000 and Dawson’s Creek that they American network TV aired a gay male kiss (the same year the American/Canadian remake of Queer as Folk premiered on cable…)
This is really the wrong take with Xena. They weren’t trying to fuck with the lesbians. They were giving them as much subtext as they could, because it was the 90s and that’s the best they could do. Unfortunately, yeah, that involved some “no-homo” but even still they sure got a lot of queer intimacy in that show despite the standards.
People really do forget that the 90s were positively sepia-toned in regards to this stuff.
The show is nothing but queer representation, it’s the literal point of the show, the main characters are lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and asexual, and a token straight.
“The show is nothing but queer representation, it’s the literal point of the show, the main characters are lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and asexual, and a token straight.”
Right, except that queer CHARACTERS don’t equal representation, queer ACTORS do.
Yeah so much for acceptance and support, right? “You’re queering wrong – maybe – and must answer for it!”
That’s not even a super-precise definition of queerbaiting, because it makes it sound like if you have any queer characters portrayed by non-queer actors then that’s it. Queerbaiting is the way more cynical practice of labeling a character or characters queer but then not having that be an actual part of their characterization. It’s The Lost World: Dominion having a secondary character say she likes redheads too so they can go, “Look! a gay character!” but in a way that that absolutely does not matter to the character at all and it’s super duper easy to trim that one line to avoid censorship overseascoughChina
But awesomely enough, at the same time Camp Cretaceous gave us an adorable canon lesbian couple built off multiple seasons of growing attraction. The show’s crew even said they didn’t intend at all for these two characters to become a couple at the start of the show, but upon seeing how much the fans latched onto the pairing, they decided “Why the hell not?”
It’s been a bit of a wild ride watching the fandom for this show implode over the last week.Turns out you really can’t have nice things.Plus, this will most likely stop his career in its tracks, because Hollywood does not cast queer as straight, it barely casts queer as queer.
You might want to tell Neil Patrick Harris that.
NPH, Luke Evans, and Lee Pace right?Fuck me we’re taking over Hollywood.
Oh yes their all so different.
To be fair NPH became big and was cast as Barney before he came out, and hasn’t really done anything big since (although most of the cast of HIMYM hasn’t either except for Cobie Smulders). Hopefully it’ll change but a lot of older gay actors only came out after they got really big roles or avoid talking about it (which is their right, obviously) because of how damaging being openly gay is/was to their careers.
I’d actually forgotten about HIMYM. I was thinking specifically of that awful Seth McFarlane western movie and Gone Girl.
Smurfs as well I think. At least, i’m pretty sure it involved blue people.
He does have what’s apparently a sizable role on Doctor Who coming up.
“and hasn’t really done anything big sinc”
NPH would like to have a conversation with you about the 25 TV roles and 22 film roles he’s had since coming out.
FFS.
NPH seems at a stage though where he can happily work when he wants now. Since coming out he’s headlined a (ok very queer) Broadway musical, had a few major roles (including playing the gay lead in that awful Darren Star Netflix series this year), and hosted 3 dozen major award shows, which honestly seemed to be what he was most happy doing from all he’s said. He’s one of the exceptions for sure, but I don’t think coming out did hurt his career working in high profile roles.
“To be fair NPH became big and was cast as Barney before he came out, and” has only had more than FIFTY roles since then.
More than fifty. How many people who didn’t come out in 2006 can say they’ve been cast in OVER FIFTY PROJECTS since then?
Kinda sucks that what (I think, anyway) began as legitimate discourse around casting queer people in queer roles (idk about the whole LGBTQ spectrum but I know for trans women specifically, it used to be hard to find a trans woman actually playing a trans woman role, let alone a trans woman playing a cis role), because that at least has a material basis (queer people need work as actors and need money in order to show other queer people that it’s possible to make a living that way) even if you disagree with the theory side of things… And now it seems to have turned into queer people just eating each other alive over the internet. I feel like that happens a lot in our community and I think there’s probably good reason for it (social media serving as a powder keg for traumatized ppl to enable and encourage each other’s worst impulses for one) but it’s still disheartening to see it happen over and over again.
There was never anything legitimate about the this, the show cast a non white trans girl in a leading role, the show was produced by mostly non straight people, and the cast by and large are a group of up and coming non straight actors. This was just some weird social media para-relationship nonsense gone to the extreme.
I think they were more talking about the discourse around queer characters in tv in general, not specifically heartstopper.
Yeah for sure, sorry. i didn’t mean this particular show, i just meant like the discourse in general around queer representation in film/tv and who has the power to tell queer stories, and who benefits. Seems like every time there’s a movement to confront some aspect of marginalization it winds up co-opted by the worst pieces of the community who just want any excuse to harass someone.
Sadly, that’s fandom in general – it all turns toxic in the end.
“i didn’t mean this particular show, i just meant like the discourse in general around queer representation in film/tv and who has the power to tell queer stories”
That ongoing discussion has nothing to do with these assholes bullying a child into coming out. Literally *NOTHING*.
And in at least my own experience as a gay guy (who, sadly, is pretty cis and awfully white,) a lot of these (yes, usually younger) people who see pointing things like this out as a personal mission aren’t even gay themselves. You see it from an awful lot of allies–or at least I have, ones who have felt the need to lecture me on why something I like is actually problematic towards gay men, etc, etc.
Nice work everyone.
We don’t know that Scarlett Johannson isn’t a trans man, but we certainly assume they weren’t when they were cast as one. This is a requirement to act in Hollywood now. If you aren’t willing to out yourself as a marginalized identity, don’t sign up for those roles, or find another job.
Yes another social justicey term that has been misused to the point that it’s functionally meaningless. I get being frustrated as a queer person when fictional stories walk right up to the line of queerness but refuse to show it explicitly for fear of offending the straights. But accusing someone of queerbaiting for living their actual life in a way that attracts queer people while not being openly queer is insane.
Bi-erasure is real.
Yep. Idiots fucking ruin everything.
I wonder if this is even real. I remember Lindsay Ellis was bullied off YouTube for a series of “offenses” and turned out right-wingers were digging up every little thing she ever did online and feeding it to people online. A lot of the outrage was manufactured. And like…yes she did some of those things but a lot of it was out of context or she apologized for because being online for over ten years means you probably said something stupid at one point.
*Lindsay Ellis was a YouTuber who did video essays online about pop culture.
She still is a youtuber who does video essays onlime about pop culture, it’s not in the past tense, although she doesn’t solely upload to youtube, she still has put out multiple essays on youtube since the events you mentioned.
She hasn’t released a single thing to YouTube since last December when she quit social media. She even quit her podcast.My understanding, though, is that she still occasionally releases things on Nebula.
She hasn’t posted a video on YouTube in a year. And yes, she posted a few videos after the incident but she explained on Patreon she would no longer be uploading to YouTube for the foreseeable future because of it. Maybe she will change her mind as she has posted some content on her community page but it seems like most things are being published solely on Nebula.
Luckily, she’s on Nebula now.
Lindsay Ellis WAS unfairly attacked, but it is not accurate to call it “right wingers” (although I am sure they may have contributed). The biggest onslaught came when she DARED to say that Raya the Last Dragon was too derivative of The Last Airbender (which is absolutely was) and was attacked as racist and trying to imply that all asian stories and cultures were the same. That was entirely from the left side of the house in that case. She was also targeted for saying that the changes to the live action Beauty and the Beast were trying way too hard and ham fisted to make Belle a strong feminist character (the added inventor stuff and so on) when in the original she was already portrayed as the smartest character in the village and self confident in her own right in a better written character. Any right wingers just added to the fire, but she was already well under assault.
Yep, right wingers hopped on that train but they weren’t the conductor.
and the people who attacked her ended up dolling out a bunch racism too by dismissing and attacking asian voices on the topic who, if I remember, agreed with the original take (that wasn’t shredded through the twitter-sphere for maximum damage)
Which is a pretty common thing for those types of people (I hate to use the term, but I guess social justice warriors is the best one) to do. This is not remotely the level of examples here, but I ended up leaving (quite happily) a group I belonged to at my university, because the new people in charge (who happened to be two women younger than I was) kept lecturing me about how I was a basically a bad, or at the least ignorant gay man for liking certain things that I as a gay man should have found pandering or offensive (although then one of them questioned if I actually was even gay, and maybe was just pretending because somehow that might give me more say within the group. Fuck off.)
My take is based on her own video of the situation.
Especially when that person is only 18 and may not have fully come to understand their own sexuality yet.
It ultimately comes back to the point that it’s nobody’s fucking business and nobody should be forced to come out unless they want to and are good and fucking ready.
too bad that’s the same kind of discussion this group of blogs regularly engages in. i’d never heard of the show, but if the backlash was such a big deal, honestly surprised i didn’t see an article here about it, written for clicks. shame on everyone.
You should watch it – it’s a great show.
It’s the kind of show AVClub some years back would have covered, and probably loved (I mean queer positive, YA, based on a cult comic?), but, like a lot of stuff over the past two years, they didn’t realize what a following it would get and slept on it.
It’s so funny how many people have been wringing their hands about how Elon’s gonna “ruin twitter,” like it wasn’t always this unconscionable hellsite.
This person seems fun
Yikes.
I took a scroll through, and never have I been happier to see the “log in to see more” prompt pop up to stop me. That person is fucking gone.
What the hell is wrong with these people?
No one touches grass anymore and it affects people differently. Some do this, some go shoot up grocery stores to stop the white replacement.
for people who want acceptance they sure don’t like to accept anything but what they think to be true.
That’s one fucked-up individual who clearly didn’t get enough hugs/locked in the basement with the horny spiders when it was little.
Of course she’s straight.With “allies” like these…
Why does she seem SOOOOO invested in the sexual preferences and behaviours of this guy anyway? Like much of the internet, it seems, the only reasonable response would be “Why don’t you get a life?”
She fetishizes gay dudes and is angry that the actor doesn’t match her fantasies.She’s just burying that in progressive language so it won’t sound as immediately creepy.Shit like this is why I’ve always taken complaints of queerbaiting with a gigantic grain of salt. It’s frequently straight women complaining that a performer doesn’t match the fantasy (like a gender-reversed Japanese idol situation) or personal frustration that a show isn’t “sealing the deal” rather than any legitimate complaints about homophobia, representation or tokenism.And hey, no shame for being into what you’re into! But a straight woman wanting to see two dudes get it on is not inherently progressive and is not an honorary queer. A kink may be valid, but it is not allyship.
That Twitter handle seems like it was created to make the poster think twice before posting, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Juliet, stop indeed.
HHAHA and, not that it matters, but the candid photos they use as “evidence” are hysterical.
It occurs that an issue with the philosophy / movement that LGBTQ+ characters and stories should only be performed and told by LGBTQ+ individuals, while perhaps well-meaning, is that it assumes that the sexual identities and preferences of the individuals involved should be and even must be made public knowledge, even if the individuals themselves would apparently disagree.
A parallel factor is Bi people not being counted by certain types unless they’re seen in a same-sex romantic relationship for an extended period of time.
Yep.I’ve said it elsewhere, but I find it vaguely disgusting that we expect LGBT+ actors to out themselves to get jobs and give up all semblance of privacy, when we collectively agree that these are things LGBT+ people should actively be protected from in every other profession, all for the sake of “representation.”It’s a mentality that considers actors as a collection of traits rendering certain character portrayals as “valid” or not, without ever considering them as actual human beings doing a job. Or at the very least, it prioritizes the validity of a character’s portrayal above the rights of an actor (including and especially LGBT+ actors) to keep their private life private.
I understand the mentality that lead to it, but I feel like people got lost in the woods on this topic a while ago.
“is that it assumes that the sexual identities and preferences of the individuals involved should be and even must be made public knowledge, even if the individuals themselves would apparently disagree.”
Which becomes even more of an issue when actors themselves might not know how they identify (which I’d wager is even more likely for a show like Heartstopper about teens that actually mostly tried hard to cast actors close to their characters’ ages–yeah I know that unlike my teen years in the 1990s there are more out teens now, but….
Exhibit Number 300,000,000 as to no good coming from being on Twitter, ever.
It’s pretty great that you’re amplifying this, seeing as he didn’t want to come out at all.
For sure, you twats should be broadcasting this.
But I don’t understand, me and all my straight friends love playing “guess the gay” at work! What could possibly be wrong with this thing that grown ass hetereosexual adults still seem to giggle and gossip over. Everyone knows sexuality is visible!
“…gleefully spend their time speculating about sexualities and judging based on stereotypes”- The AV Club
Isn’t “queerbaiting” a fancy term for “I believe all stereotypes about homosexuals” Like, when Supernatural was accused of it because two men COULDN’T POSSIBLY be close friends. They gotta be gay!
“Isn’t “queerbaiting” a fancy term for “I believe all stereotypes about homosexuals””
Literally no. Not at all.Why don’t you…hmmm, what’s a fancy word for it? Nah, fuck it, just fuck off, OK?
No, it’s a lazy term for the “Queer” community to screech impotently about how someone has ruined their masturbatory/fingering time by refusing to adhere to their personal fantasy of them being gay/lesbian/bisexual/whatever and using Twatter as a hellish mouthpiece to air those views.See also: pretty much every fucking Millennial “blogger”/journalist over the past five years. It’s a shit, shit term and it should be kicked into the long grass pronto (but it won’t because outrage = clicks).
That’s certainly what it’s evolved into, yes.
Sam and Cas were friends. Dean and Cas were banging. (And Dean was bi and Cas was an Angel. I don’t think he really had a sexuality.)
I have an idea who’s accusing this show of baiting…. A certain subcategory we have to deal with in the anime fandom, they’re called “fujoshi”
look it up.
The controversy, which saw supposed fans trolls attacking Connor for teasing queer romance, he says, forced his decision.
Jesus fucking christ. He’s a goddamn actor. He reads words on a page written by someone else. The fact that people are attacking him over stuff he a) didn’t create and b) is contractually obligated to perform is indicative of everything I hate about social media.
“Congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself”Good to see that the AVClub is happy to monetize both sides of the outrage cycle, and will write a series of articles accusing entertainers of queer baiting, and then also criticize people on Twitter for improperly accusing people of queer baiting. Nice work gang. Hopefully we can see this through until we have a mandatory national registry of everyone’s sexual identity, and we can better punish people who deviate from the expected behavior of their official sexual preferences, and also punish those who incorrectly assess the behavior they’re supposed to be adhering to.
“Good to see that the AVClub is happy to monetize both sides of the outrage cycle, and will write a series of articles accusing entertainers of queer baiting, and then also criticize people on Twitter for improperly accusing people of queer baiting.”
Can you please supply a link to the article that was complaining about Heartstopper queerbaiting? Please? Just one.
It’s so weird and unsettling how some of these kids in online spaces have become so “progressive” as to basically be conservatives. They’re policing people’s private lives under the banner of “social justice,” but they’re being fucking bullies. Nobody is perfect, and the quest for perfection that these people are on is scary. Adding to that the para-social effect of it all. It’s akin—if not exactly the same—as how a lot of Japanese Idols are supposed to act. A demand for purity and innocence above all else.
Yep. Now it’s just a different umbrella to be shitty to other people under. I wish more people would realize that the road traveled to where we want to go really does matter, and that gatekeeping and Puritanism are human failings, regardless of belief.