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lehhoh7822 · 3 years

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I was going to do some more Sides appreciation, but then I got distracted and started looking at u!sides pages and now I feel like shite so I’ll just talk about Virgil for now. I’ll do the appreciation posts later.

Well. I mean. See above. Rant/actual discussion below the cut.

Everyone loves the villain. That was why people fell in love with Virgil from the start of S1.

All of the characters were liked, they were all loveable, but Virgil was very popular because he was sassy, snarky, and a bit of an enigma.

Then of course, you had the people who never liked Virgil. Who recognised him as bad* from the start and took a dislike to him. That’s alright.

People make more content (generally, unless they’re, say, unnecessarily anxious about people judging them because admitting they liked or making content of x character) about characters they like or popular characters.

And then here’s the thing. We have this thing called character development. Which makes sense. Virgil may be a portrayal of anxiety, but overall, I think it’s best for everyone if they think of Virgil as a character first.

If you think of Virgil as anxiety first you open up the can of worms with how anxiety should be portrayed, how anxiety should be experienced- and that doesn’t go anywhere good unless you want to start trying rewire bits of your ideals.

So as a character Virgil is interesting.

Firstly, we get to see the character arc from S1. Which I feel like you understand by now. You see the trust and etc forming. You get a nice moment.

Then shit hits the fan pretty damn fast.

You have the fact that Virgil is mean. And Virgil is also a dork. Just to dramatically oversimplify it. And please, people, can you read my long post about one of the issues with SaSi? Please?

Here’s the thing though. You can’t have Virgil be nice. Or else you would get people coming with the “He’s not being anxiety” or “He’s being a suck-up” or just anything we can think of. But if he’s mean, if he’s says cruel shit then... just go look at Virgil negativity or u!Virgil. Because, right now, in canon, he is a bit of a dick. But he isn’t completely cruel or manipulative. At least not from my perspective. He’s just mean and a bit of a dick. And someone should call him out. But-

But then we have the issue of “Canon only focuses on Virgil” thing that people hate. People would jump on it and say that canon was focusing on Virgil again when it should focus on x character. And I think, I think personally that Thomas wanted to make Virgil less of a focus. But in order to do that he had to try to maintain a level of continuity with him in order for the content to seem like it makes sense. And the way they chose to do that was to try to maintain the growth him had in S1 and to factor in a bit of casual cruelty so it would seem like he was still fufilling his role as anxiety.

But I really don’t think they did it well.

Thomas and Joan stated that once anxiety’s acceptance arc was done they had plans for the future, new sides to introduce, etc.

They didn’t, unlike some posts claim, mean to continue making Virgil the main character (as far as I can tell), they wanted to on on from it. All of it.

So after his arc, canon was supposed to take a new route, a new path.

So why does it seem like it didn’t?

I think- I think I might have the answer.

It’s us. We fell in love with a character, and we continued to make fics and animatics and art works about said character, because he was really well-written in most of the fandom’s eyes.

Canon might have stuff to do with Virgil, but, again, in my useless opinion, that’s only because they’re trying to ensure continuity. They also know that people still do like Virgil and try to use him as a safe-guard (that’s how I’m explaining his grand reveal in DWIT) against losing more fans, considering how many they’ve already lost to the mcyt (Nothing against those guys, or anyone who’s packed up and left) and other fandoms with the wait period and all.

But- This isn’t working.

Because Virgil fans continue to make content with him and it’s so easy to write angst or hurt-comfort with him. And then, this content amasses with the content made previously for Virgil. And then people see it and say that.. anything about the content instead of the character on the u!Virgil or virgil negativity page.

And then we also make content that demonises medication (Wow fandom, I’m so proud of you. You’re so mature.) which is just fucking great.

And then we also make stuff that makes Virgil a soft uwu boi and people who disagree with that go (look, can you guys tell that I feel sad from going through so much u!sides shit and I know I can back out at any time, but my wish to understand is more powerful- so, now I want you guys to feel crummy with me and that’s why I keep telling you to look at it.) literally a lot of posts on the u!Virgil page.

And then when people react poorly to either content (if you react poorly to the soft content then you will lose a lot of followers and if you react poorly to the u! content then you’re a toxic Virgil simp) it doesn’t end well.

I feel like, if we face canon Virgil, sure, he might suck a little bit, but he’s okay. He might need a bit of a “Hey. Shut up. And put in an effort to be nicer. We value you, but we also do need you to try to be nice to us.” And it doesn’t have to be much. All you have to do is have him apologise and accept it and come back with slightly less jabs, or nicer jabs.

The creators had a really hard job to do with moving the plot forward. As a series that couldn’t rush it too much in terms of ideas because (please just go read my long post on the flaw) of the issues the series has in displaying the issues it attempts to cover. They couldn’t overwhelm their audience, move on too quickly or anything. No matter what they did, I can’t think of a way to plausibly end it in a clean, satisfying swipe.

So. Overall, our issue is we make content and then we make canon Virgil the bad guy. And I’m not saying he hasn’t ever done anything, but from my (obscured and weird) vantage point, that what it looks like.

I love Virgil. As a character I found him awesome. And I could see that, yes, he wasn’t great, but I also did enough deep looking to see why.

We are the issue. We make up scenarios and we twist canon to fit what we like. Which is fine and great, I’m not saying that people should stop, but, it means that there cannot be a Virgil that is likeable.

This doesn’t make sense.

Whatever.

(Hey @imma-potatoo I hope you wanted me to tag you on my Headcannon series where I do this sorta stuff because that’s what I’m doing.

(*: Well, technically for the people who have been anti-virgil since the beginning of time I assume they thought/think he is bad or at least some form of bad.)

#sanders sides #virgil sanders #criticism #fandom critical??#does this make sense #no #i tried

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