I honestly had a bit of a culture shock yesterday.
I've been debating since yesterday whether I should even post this lol. I've been following DetCo for over 10 years now, but I'm not really active in the fandom, especially on twitter. I barely use social media these days. I occasionally read discussions, and that's about it. Even when I do open twitter, it's usually for completely different interests, so I genuinely have no idea what the fandom over there is like.
Yesterday I came across a post of this manga panel (this is my first post so idk how to put an image in this section but I hope you know what panel I'm talking about). The caption was in arabic, but twitter translated it automatically and it was just talking about how beautiful the panel was. I was like, "aw, that's nice." Then I refreshed my timeline and suddenly it was just post after post about the latest chapter leaks. They were all in arabic, so I was relying on twitter's automatic translations. I know they're not always accurate, but you could still tell what people were trying to say.
And ngl... I was genuinely sitting there like, "am I reading this right??"
Like yeah, I expected some people to disagree with the chapter. I expected criticism. That's normal. But I was not expecting to see people throwing that much hate at haibara. People were mocking her suicidal thoughts, calling her an ungrateful suicidal b*tch, saying she should just k*ll herself already... and I was literally just sitting there staring at my phone like ??? 😭 I actually had to stop scrolling because I was genuinely so dumbfounded.
Idk maybe it's just me, but I've always treated fiction as...well..fiction. Don't get me wrong I've also cried over books before, got frustrated with the characters characters, and all that. But at the end of the day, I always remind myself that they're still fictional characters. So seeing people react with that much hostility honestly left me more confused than anything else.
And it's not even because they hate Haibara. People are allowed to dislike characters. That's completely fine. It was just... the sheer amount of anger behind those posts. It felt so personal. I genuinely can't wrap my head around how a fictional story can make someone feel that much hatred. Even if it's directed at a fictional character, I just can't imagine getting to that point. To me, the line between fiction and reality has always been pretty clear. Stories are meant to entertain us, even when they make us angry or frustrated. If they ever stopped being enjoyable and started bringing out that kind of hostility in me, I'd probably take it as a sign to step away for a while.
Anyway, maybe I just happened to stumble across the worst side of the fandom, but it honestly caught me so off guard. Has anyone else noticed this too, or did I just get insanely unlucky with my timeline?
That's all, take care y'all!