2014-03-17 2:15:52 ¶ ● ⬈

jaceyjace:

> ok like yeah john is a little asswipe sometimes

> but its relatively harmless and he has never actually hurt someone or crossed any moral boundaries with his behavior

> comparing that to characters like cronus or vriska just seems like whoever is doing the comparison hasn’t you know

> actually read homestuck or even understands how personalities work.

I have found that this fandom sees a weird need to exaggerate the negative traits of just about every character, but especially the ones they see as unfairly popular. Hence we get all this ranting about how John is actually a HUGE ASSHOLE!!! when most of John’s jerkiness is teasing and good-spirited, or stuff about how Dave is actually a huge misogynist, or Karkat is abusive, or what have you.

And while it’s all right to read certain behaviors in these characters as damaging and talk about them, it just seems a little bit, I don’t know, spiteful, to insist in defiance of the story itself that Karkat’s behavior is damaging to his friends (all of them seem to find it mostly enderaring) or that John really doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings (when he’s gone to efforts specifically not to most of the time, even whilst being jerkish).

I mean I know I can’t go a week on my personal dash without seeing some sort of passive-aggressive ~friendly reminder~ post that exaggerates all the kids’ bad traits to prove the point that they are a smarter, wiser, more observant fan than all those silly fans who think John is well-intentioned or Karkat has a big gooey center or whatever. It’s just all tied in to needing to feel like a “better” fan by acting like you’ve found some aspect of the character other people ignore.