I love his comics, but am I the only one who thinks his writing in context like this is not easy to read? Just, stylistically?
He takes a long time and weirdly trails off while trying to make his point.
In short it sounds like he’s just talking about the toxicity of having a “team” and ignoring discussion/critiques of your “team”.
To use Pokemon, since it’s referenced in the article, but oddly without a good example. If you like Pokemon media, great.
If you argue that the games YOU grew up with are better than the NEW games, or that new Pokemon suck, you’re just being unnecessarily toxic.
Now if you want to have a discussion about Pokemon games, addition if running shoes helped speed the game up, forced tutorials slowed the game down, the addition of special Pokemon to replace HMs gives more team variety, but at the cost of not having as strong of a connection with your team. Conversations like that great for communities.
Now change the fandom from Pokemon to comic books to TV shows to films to politics.
The article also talks about raising individuals up like “deities”. If you like Stephen King, and he writes a new book, and it’s a bad book, you don’t have to love it. Similarly if you don’t like Stephen King, and he writes a new book, and it’s a good book, you don’t have to hate it. You can be a fan of specific work and dislike others. You’re not a hypocrite, it’s fine.
Looping back to politics specifically. If you liked Trump on The Apprentice, that’s fine. However you can’t just carry that forward for everything. You can’t, or rather shouldn’t, watch Trump on the Apprentice, decide “I like him” , and then like him in everything he does. You should look at policy, look at actions, have a discussion. Realize that your initial evaluation was based on a reality TV host. Even if you liked that, you can’t just assume everything after that you also like.
Which part did you struggle with?
