I was translating back to him what he actually said, in the hope that he’d realize he’d fucked up fairly badly, and maybe learn something.

It’s clear he didn’t understand that he made a comparison between gamergate and some Steven Universe fan being a bit of a douche.

The mere inclusion of both in to one comment episode embodies the comparison – the comparison is factual.

And of the two, the only one with an overt marker of disapproval was the Steven Universe fan being a bit of a douche.

It matters.

He isn’t saying that there is some sort of moral equivalency between the words one douche said to the violent acts performed by a different, ideologically opposed group. He’s saying that you don’t get a pass for being a douche just because you are part of a sub-group that is institutionally oppressed. He is in no way saying someone being a douche is somehow morally equivalent to people performing IRL violent acts.

How would you justify mentioning a single pro-trans douche saying something somewhat absurd in the same context as literally thousands of people comitting criminal acts?

That’s not fair in any moral calculus I am aware of.
It (at least symbolically) equates these two things, by placing them in the same context.

I hate to say it, but compare to Previous Dude saying “there are fine people on both sides”.
Hopefully you can appreciate how absurd and revealing that was.
Instead you’re saying “there are terrible people on both sides”, which is a gross distortion in all but the most anally-retentive over-literal “logical” sense of “There is at least one terrible person in each of these groups”.

But if you look at it with any other glasses than those particularly useless ones, you’ll see that one group is 100% terrible people, and that even the most terrible outlier of the other group isn’t terrible by comparison to the least terrible person in the first group.

If something pales in comparison to another thing, you will come across as dishonest if you compare them without reaching the conclusion that the something isn’t all that bad.

And what you did instead was compare them and saying “ugh” about the thing that arguably isn’t at all comparable to gamergate.

It happened in the so-called Gold and Silver ages of comics, it happened with Saturday morning cartoons, movies, soap operas, reality shows, and it happens with video games and YouTube personalities, too.

It’s something in the neighborhood of parasocial relationships, I think – but on the scale of engaging with an entire cast or body of fiction, rather than just a single public personality or character, and not necessarily in the creepy stalker way so much as tending towards moral emulation of and magical thinking about the subject of the fandom.

I would assert, actually, that having “heroes” or “role models” you’ve never met in person lives in the borderline between normal fandom and fan cultism, often leaning towards the latter, the more such an obsession or idealization displaces the rest of a fan’s persona.

The reason I mention this is because personality cults are a documented phenomenon, and frankly… it’s harder to classify or square off with if there’s not some willful, actively-involved scam artist puppeting a victim of fan cultism. Which there rarely is, if it’s not a likeminded friends group, because rabidly consuming media is at minimum a one-person task and it’s actually easier to do it alone.

I may come back to these thoughts later, because they’re not well-formed, but I think I may be on to something. Guess I’ll read some clinical research and see if anyone has made similar guesses, or something.

I’ve already said most of what I care to say about the larger context of my work. I could spend more time, maybe, calling out anti-trans messaging and saying it’s bad, but I feel like… most of the people who read my work don’t need me to? I mean, we didn’t get any negative pushback when we brought in Chrissie. There’s always gonna be some “telling people what they already believe” in writing, but I feel like my time’s better spent trying to develop trans characters and other representatives of the broad scope of humanity… and trying to walk a balancing line between doing that and “writing what you know,” so there’s at least some authenticity to it.

Still, if I had this to write over again, I’d probably go with the Captain America example in the name of clearer communication of the main point. The only reason I’m not changing it now is that it’d feel dishonest to decontextualize this thread after the fact and deny the issues it raises. I hope that, at least, can be a source of some satisfaction.