u/samwie205

I know saying “allowed” is dumb, because nothing is forbidding it except for a negative social reaction, but I couldn’t come up with better phrasing.

If I made a movie about a character who has some mildly annoying traits but is kind and good-hearted, and then everyone else rejected that character and they were miserable and alone, the message would be interpreted as “society will never love you if you have minor flaws” and the internet might come for my head.

I don’t think that people should be treated that way in real life at all, but it would be so cathartic to see that in a movie. It’s taboo in real life, which is exactly why fiction is the best place to represent it.

Essentially, things like social rejection or total unfair treatment or any number of bad things like having to change yourself or being hated for no good reason or dying alone or doing everything right and still being miserable are someone’s worst fear, which should be acceptable to depict without a hamfisted magical fix to the situation that removes any vestiges of realism.

Some people are terrified of a stranger breaking into their home and stabbing them to death, which can and does happen (albeit much more rarely), but that’s not a fear where its fulfillment is oddly taboo to show. I’ve never seen anybody get mad at slasher films for teaching a bad lesson by showing that innocent people can die at the hands of depraved serial killers.

Edit: Comments are letting me know this may actually just be a function of my environment