"I'm Not the Kind of Person Who Criticizes That Sort of Thing"

avoidance as the inescapable political meta

Last New Years Eve, Stranger Things came to an end. Netflix released the series finale of the (once) beloved series, the adventures was concluded, the story told. And that final season was… not good. There had been skeptics of the show like me all along, but the series ending was notable for how thoroughly it turned off the larger fanbase; the critics were many and loud, the defenders few and cowed. Social media marveled at the collapse of the show’s quality, various review aggregators showed widespread disdain for the finale, and the YouTube videos dissecting the show’s failures were legion. The final season’s perceived faceplant caused all kinds of gnashing of teeth, with the show’s creators the Duffer Brothers repeatedly accused of killing off every facet of the first season that so many fans had loved. Every corner of the fanbase seemed to have their own pet complaints. But the greatest consternation was not driven by plot holes, the sidelining of key relationships, the overstuffed roster of characters, or even by the truly deranged conspiracy theories about a secret final episode. No, the most anguished, angry fans in the post-finale scrum were the Bylers.

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Bylers, if you’re lucky enough to be unaware, are Stranger Things fans who “ship” the characters Will Byers and Mike Wheeler. (Byers + Wheeler = Byler, see.) These are megafans who became deeply (some would say unhealthily) emotionally invested in the idea that those two characters, two of the original core five cast members, were destined to fall in love or perhaps were already secretly in love. The thought the finale would confirm their theories, would show that Will and Mike were in love. This did not come to pass, and while there were clear attempts within the show to wave in the direction of those fans, those efforts were as clumsy as the rest of the final season and the Bylers remained unsatisfied - for some of them, to the point of derangement. This is all fairly common, now, and points to just how deeply unhealthy online “fandom” has become in general. But in addition to all of the unfortunate amplifying effects of the digital era, the Byler angst was compounded by the prominence of Stranger Things, the long wait between seasons that left fans with little to do but speculate and theorize, the aforementioned conspiracy theories about the “true” ending of the show… and, in particular, by accusations of homophobia.

You see, the Bylers do not merely passionately argue that those characters should be together, that their chemistry is clear onscreen, that the show had dropped many hints along the way to suggest that the pairing was inevitable. No, Bylers have long insisted that to suggest that Will and Mike were not destined to be together was in fact homophobic, an expression of anti-gay animus, a kind of fandom hate crime. Fans who found the pairing unrealistic or unsatisfying, fans who preferred that Mike end up with series love interest Eleven, those who merely argued that there was no textual reason to think that there was anything romantic between the two - all of them were regularly subjected to the accusation of hating LGBTQ people. The idea that someone might simply prefer a different storyline was routinely dismissed as making excuses for anti-gay feelings. There were a lot of different permutations; a common claim was that the Duffers had queerbaited fans by leaving hints that suggested that Byler was “endgame.” Others pointed out that these supposed hints seemed to largely be illusory. But it didn’t matter. In Stranger Things corners of the major online networks where Byler flourished (Tumblr, TikTok, BlueSky, Threads) the idea that fans who hoped for a different outcome hated gay people became hard to avoid.

Zoom out one level and you’ll see that this sort of thing is very common in “fandom” spaces, the weaponization of identity politics to win in the endless fan wars that consume online spaces. One of the oldest and nastiest shipping battles was fought between those fans who preferred that Harry Potter and Hermione form a romantic union and those who favored a Ron-Hermione pairing. The latter won in canon, but of course that didn’t stop the fighting. A favored claim of Harry-Hermione partisans was that the dynamic between Ron and Hermione was “toxic”; because the two characters were known to bicker, you see, the coupling would be built on abuse, or something. (Shipping wars tend to depend very heavily on extremely loose definitions of abuse.) Those who favor the Reylo pairing, which points to a romantic relationship between Star Wars sequel characters Rey and Kylo Ren, have long been accused of supporting abuse because at one point Kylo does some sort of Jedi mind probe on Rey and in the world of extremely online fandom politics that’s the same as rape. Reylos have also been accused of racism, on the logic that a Rey-Kylo pairing blocks a potential Rey-Finn pairing, and Finn is Black. Not to be outdone, those who ship Finn and Poe have accused Rey-Finn supporters as homophobic because Finn and Poe are both men. There’s accusations of bigotry to go around!

There are many of these crazy internecine battles out there. (The one surrounding the Shadow & Bone book series and its Netflix adaptation was legendarily nasty.) But the Stranger Things backlash has been particularly distressing, for me, in that it demonstrates that many people, particularly many young people, really and truly believe that it is actively homophobic not to give them what they want in their narrative media. I know some readers will immediately insist that they mean homophobic in a figurative or metaphorical way, but I assure you, if you look around social media you will be disabused of that notion. These kids genuinely think that a beloved show or book series going in romantic directions they don’t like belongs in the same category as gay bashing or workplace discrimination. I do blame them to some degree - it’s a stupid, destructive thing to believe, after all - but I also recognize that they’re impressionable. At their age, they’ve long been marinating in a media environment where some publications and voices seems hellbent on convincing young queer kids that they are entitled to, well, whatever they want. (The media environment where pointing out that LGBTQ representation in media has dramatically improved in the past decade is treated as some sort of reactionary move instead of a celebration of progress.) Whoever is to blame, it’s wrongheaded and destructive to act as though not getting Byler or any other gay pairing is homophobic; those things are not the same. Homophobia is real and sometimes deadly and this sort of thing just makes it harder to fight.

Now, here’s where a large segment of my readership waves their hand, says “this is all internet nonsense!,” and insists that none of it matters - and that is in fact what I really want to talk about today, the weaponization of avoidance.

Yes, it’s tempting to laugh all of this off as angsty teenagers yelling at each other about television, and many do. But that instinct, to me, is exactly the problem. For a lot of impressionable young people, fandom is not some sort of sideshow to political culture; for a great many of them, in fact, the world of fandom is the first place they ever conduct an argument with strangers about anything that feels like it matters. And my experience and my hunch is that the habits they form there are habits they keep. As I won’t stop saying, politics is ambient now. You can’t keep acting like only people who write for the NYT Opinion page matter; social media is a massive influence on how people form their political identities. And when a fifteen-year-old discovers that she can win a dispute about whether two cartoon boys should kiss by announcing that her opponents are homophobes, or that a shipping preference can be defeated by declaring it racist, she has learned something genuinely useful and genuinely corrosive: that this kind of behavior is a move, a tool, available on demand. She’s learned that a particular kind of accusation short-circuits debate and that the reward for using it isn’t just winning an argument but status. It’s a transferable skill; it transfers into workplaces, into campus politics, into nonprofits and newsrooms and political campaigns….

We can acknowledge that young people learn to weaponize identity politics and bigotry accusations early in their online lives and then take those tactics into adult politics and maybe try to improve things. We can teach them that accusations of bigotry are powerful and fraught and should never be used frivolously, that to do so risks the progress we’ve achieved. Or we can do what so many people do these days and say “Hey, they’re just stupid kids, this is just online stuff, it doesn’t matter….” But those aren’t the real reasons they practice avoidance. No, they practice avoidance because here in 2026 the game is never to appear to say the sort of thing our opponents say. It’s associative politics at its purest and most corrosive. I suspect most left-of-center people agree with me that it’s absurd that fandom types so often suggest that not getting what they want in their stories is a species of interpersonal bigotry, a kind of identity crime. But saying so would bring the risk of looking like a Republican, so they don’t say so. And that’s the real condition I’m interested in today: the sheer number of left-leaning people who consistently refuse to express their opinion on topics of controversy because they don’t want to appear to be the wrong sort of person.

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This is not new. I’m constantly telling and retelling this history, but only because it continues to have obvious relevance for how modern progressive culture goes. Despite what you would have thought if you started a Twitter account in 2018, media liberals were not carrying the same political torch as college social justice activists in 2010, around when those activists began making a lot of noise. By the late 2010s media’s weird hivemind political consciousness had more or less adopted academic social justice politics wholesale, but that hadn’t always been the case. Indeed, when I started writing for a public audience in 2008 the average media liberal was a wonkish center-left Ezra Klein type, not someone yelling about intersectionality and calling to dismantle the criminal justice system. No, in the early woke period, your average journalist did not profess to be woke but was also not willing to join in a critique of campus excess that they saw as conservative. So they gravitated towards the simplest form of avoidance: “that doesn’t matter.” It wasn’t that media professionals thought it was good that campus activists were screaming at professors and trying to get their institutions to fire conservative professors and punish conservative students. They just insisted that it didn’t matter, college wasn’t real life, who cares, etc etc etc.

No one who lived through the ensuing decade and a half could have failed to notice what happened: the politics embraced by those students not only mattered, in time they became the dominant progressive idiom in the United States. Social justice politics colonized academia, the progressive nonprofit sector, any non-right-wing media, and gradually more and more institutions, first slowly, then all at once. This culminated in the summer of 2020, when you had, like, Geico publishing pamphlets that said time zones are white supremacy or whatever. Everybody was woke, all of a sudden. And notably, this included most of the people who had a few years earlier insisted that campus social justice activists weren’t worth taking seriously! By the late 2010s your average employee at Gawker Media or the New York Times or New York magazine was advocating for a form of social justice politics that was more or less indistinguishable from that of the loudest campus radicals, and so unsurprisingly our media spent a ton of time defending said campus radicals - and, funnily enough, most of them pretended that they had been Kimberlé Crenshaw devotees all along. But early on, before the social requirement in media dictated a performed interest in intersectionality? Pure avoidance. Because they didn’t agree with the campus activists, but they really didn’t want to look like Republicans.

There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon.

• Perhaps the purest expression of this tendency lies in the “snowflake” discourse and the idea that young people need to be taught resilience. It’s my observation that, in our zeal to protect young people from any kind of psychic pain, our culture has prevented them from developing the skills and mindset necessary to handle adversity and disappointment, which will inevitably come because that is what it means to be alive. Of course there are real forms of harm we should try to prevent, but that harm prevention has become so central to social life that we have generations of people who have no capacity to navigate loss, failure, and injury. I suspect many, many progressive people quietly agree with me. But because this position can be caricatured as the witless right-wing “You want a safe space, snowflake?” argument, a lot of them refuse to engage with the conversation at all.

• This Jason Arday controversy is an unusually direct example - the fact that his work has plagiarized passages is incontrovertible, while many of his stories about his life are individually suspect and, taken as a whole, present a life that would be wildly statistically unlikely. But because the first wave of criticism came from conservatives, and because he occupies both a Black and an autistic identity, the academic community has largely dug in and supported him. The fear of looking like the wrong kind of person is more powerful than the easily-discarded principles of academic integrity.

• Disability issues are stuffed with this tendency. I’ve long nominated the case of the TikTok dissociative identity disorder epidemic as an expression of liberal avoidance. The skeptical case is so overwhelming that almost no one affirmatively maintains that thousands of adolescent women suddenly came down with one of the rarest and most debilitating of all psychiatric illnesses, but complaining about teenagers online behavior is a form of Old Man Yells at Cloud, which all aging people are desperate to avoid. So instead of either rejecting or affirming the utterly implausible story the TikTok teens tell, many liberals practice avoidance: why are we talking about this, they’re just stupid teenagers, it doesn’t matter! This piece from Devon Price is a particularly direct expression - Price doesn’t really believe the teens, but thinks it’s more important to reaffirm that ableism is bad than to reject their narrative. More broadly, many people seem to be aware that the self-diagnosis era is bad for society and bad for the disabled, that the skyrocketing number of disability accommodations on the LSAT is a record of deception rather than of epidemiology, that public schools simply cannot continue to bear the immense and ever-growing costs of limitless special education accommodations…. But, again, disability activists are left-coded, critics of activists are right-coded, QED. A representative artifact can be found in this New York Times story on the TikTok Tourette’s wave; the author concedes that the whole thing was ultimately a matter of factitious illness, but her attitude is excruciatingly sensitive and deferential to the feelings of the girls in question. Wouldn’t want to look like a Republican, after all!

• The never-ending prosecution of poptimism, a critical movement that won an unconditional victory 20 years ago but which insists on pretending otherwise, is motivated in part by the desire to avoid looking like the wrong kind of person. The early poptimists expertly played on the anxieties of white male critics who had found themselves in an industry and field that was increasingly skeptical of their point of view. A lot of those white male critics became the most aggressive poptimists and produced the most rote poptimist screeds; they were terrified of being accused of being the out-of-touch, probably-racist old guys, so they built their whole aesthetic identities around being the opposite. (The idea that poptimism is a movement of women and people of color is objectively and obviously false.) So you have things like the NYT’s Popcast show, where a couple of middle aged white men obsess over adolescent women and their tastes, for fear that they might appear to be some sort of indie rock dinosaurs. Always, behaviors motivated by the fear of appearing to hold an identity that’s disfavored.

• Privately, many people will agree with me that the absolutely ceaseless online obsession with age gap relationships is bizarre and dysfunctional - but only privately. Of course we need to have an age of consent and vigorously enforce those laws, and it can certainly be the case that a legal relationship can nevertheless be exploitative or unhealthy, and sometimes people in such relationships need to be told that. But fundamentally adults have the right to pursue legal and consensual relationships if they choose to, and we all need to make good decisions about who to date; nobody can make good decisions for us. If there’s any opinion that the internet is passionate about, though, it’s the idea that any meaningful gap in ages between two people in a relationship is inherently wicked - and what “meaningful” means changes over time, such that there are many who will now tell you that a 22-year-old who dates a 19-year-old is functionally a rapist. (Again, if you doubt me, go look.) That’s all crazy and not conducive to basic human freedom and will probably spark a backlash someday. But because anyone who critiques this lunacy is accused of harboring sexually deviant views, most people just stay away.

I don’t doubt that there are some political debates and controversies that are not worth joining. But as time goes on, avoidance has become perhaps the dominant political tactic of our era. I cannot tell you how many times I have identified what I think is a political problem and made a detailed and specific argument as to why, only to find the most common response “Why does this matter?” - including from my commenters. That tendency only grows over time. And I really do think it’s destructive. I have all the time in the world to argue about issues that other people see as minor, and I’m deeply convinced that tendencies and arguments and habits in smaller discursive spaces bubble up and become unavoidable - just like when the social justice movement went from a campus curiosity that the media insisted was not worth engaging with to a political force that took over the entire progressive world. You can’t just ignore things forever. If you read something I write or hear someone make an argument you think is bad or wrong, then argue. Argue! But I cannot stand the relentless, recursive embrace of “Oh, I don’t think that’s important.” Because what’s trivial today is imperative tomorrow. History keeps teaching us that. Maybe it’s time to learn.