bogleech:

I know I’ve talked about this before but when I was younger, and for some time before i was born, almost anything you might call a “fandom” – be it for movies, or games, or even music – seemed fairly united in their dislike of “the offendable.”

What we MEANT by that, though, or so most of us thought, were the rampant right-wing religious groups and traditionalists who complained about interracial couples in children’s films, accused Pokemon of being a Satanic conspiracy and boycotted Teletubbies because they thought it might make children gay. Nobody talked like criticism itself was the problem or the enemy. People just agreed that prejudice and old fashioned views were the enemy.

It’s baffling, alarming, sad and weird as shit to grow up and watch this warp and mutate like it has. Today, we suddenly have tons of people who think they’re still fighting that same war to “defend creativity” without even realizing they’ve perfectly switched sides.

Now people will rush to defend the free speech of a homophobic or racist creator while calling the detractors of that behavior the “sensitive pearl clutchers,” as if there was somehow never any difference between “I don’t like gay people” and “I don’t like gay jokes.”