Rooting for the villain doesn’t make you a bad person, Hal Sparks is just an idiot.
Hal Sparks, a distinctly unfunny and shit-stirring “comedian” that nobody has thought about since 2002, started a very strange and problematic conversation about fandom, in which he claims if you’ve ever enjoyed, liked, or rooted for the “bad guy” in a movie, book or TV show you’re an immoral and stupid person.
He even went as far as saying that fans of the NBC drama Hannibal shouldn’t be allowed around children because apparently they will no doubt eventually kill and eat someone, blamed school shooting on bad guy’s redemption arcs, mocked mental illness, and flung cheap, immature insults at everyone who disagreed with him successfully proving his immaturity and lack of intelligence, and demonstrating why his career is circling the drain.
There’s been debate for many years in fandom about whether or not it’s OK to love the villain, some of which have resulted in some angry dudebros sending death threats to 16-year-old fanfiction writers from their mother’s basements in between wiping the hot pocket grease off their keyboards. Said dudebro is not usually an actor with a verified checkmark on Twitter but I digress.
So does loving to hate the bad guy on your favorite tv show, or just loving them period make you some kind of degenerate?
Only if you’re an extremely confused and delusional person who doesn’t understand the difference between fiction and reality. Thinking Hannibal Lecter is a fascinating character, or laughing at Negan’s one-liners on The Walking Dead does not mean that you condone eating people or beating people to death with barbed wire wrapped baseball bats named after your dead spouse.
Its ridiculous to even suggest that the real-life morality of a person can be determined by what fictional characters they enjoy, you can’t just boil a human being down to something so trivial and unimportant as this.
Fictional characters are obviously… Well, fictional. Nothing they do affects reality, none of the people they hurt are real people, and as involved as we may feel in our favorite fictional worlds they are still not real. The argument Hal is trying to make is essentially the same one angry old people make when they claim that violent video games are responsible for gun violence, or the one the jackass governor of Kentucky made when he claimed that The Walking Dead and its creator Robert Kirkman is responsible for school shootings, which is an argument that has been disproven time and time again, several scientific studies have even disproven that there are any valid connections between violent media like TV shows and video games and real-life violence. The violent media creates violent people argument is largely just an excuse used by the right-wing to blame anything but the presence and availability of guns in America for gun violence. It’s nothing but a sad excuse to subvert blame off their refusal to actually do their jobs and protect America by implementing gun control. There’s no real basis for it at all let alone a scientific one.
Maybe it’s just because I consider myself to be a mature, fairly rational-minded adult that I just can’t understand why anyone would choose to care so deeply about what fictional character someone else enjoys that they would ever even think to attack someone over it, let alone insult their intelligence and morality over it but I have always felt this whole debate was rather strange and immature, and I just can’t understand why it’s so important to some people. I have never seen a celebrity get involved with it until now though.
However, I do feel Hal only got involved for the attention and not because he actually cares about the debate. Like, be honest, if you even knew who Hal Sparks was to begin with when was the last time you thought about him? This was totally a stunt to get his name on people’s minds and it worked, people lashed out at him on twitter including me, because what he was saying was insulting and just… stupid.
It’s clear that Hal still finds the variety of comedy that is really just bullying and insulting people and calling it comedy funny. He took his insults so far he mocked mental illness in several of his replies, and cracked jokes about the “loony bin” and locking people in mental institutions several times. And that is when I decided to write this. Making fun of people’s favorite fictional characters is one thing, making fun of mental illness is another. Using “get help” as an insult as if there is something shameful about things like going to therapy or checking yourself into a mental health facility if you need to is not funny, Hal, it’s just disgusting and yes, makes you a bad person. Because despite the fact that you put yourself on a moral high horse because you hate Thanos and the Joker you are clearly not a good person if the things you were saying to people in this thread of tweets is your idea of comedy.
It also begs the question of what Hal thinks of the actors who portray these characters? Does he think that Mads Mikkelsen condones cannibalism because he played Hannibal Lecter on tv? Does he think Jared Leto is actually a psychotic clown in real life? Does he think Jeffrey Dean Morgan goes around burning the faces off people who piss him off because Negan did it on screen? Because if so that is a whole other can of worms.
Hal then a few hours later tried to claim that all along this was all about making the point that people care more about fictional characters than climate change
Which yeah, I’m sure some people do, but saying that everyone who felt his tweet was offensive or distasteful and left him a comment letting him know that doesn’t care about climate change because they weren’t engaging enough with his tweets about the issue specifically is as poorly thought out as blaming real-life violence on fictional characters. When you offend someone they are more likely to respond to your tweet then they are to engage with something about climate change that you retweeted from someone else. It’s just how human beings react to being offended. Especially when you offend them over one of their beloved fictional characters. The mocking of mental illness, illogical arguments, and childish insults added a whole other layer of problems.
In conclusion, enjoy whatever fictional worlds you want, and love whatever fictional characters you want even if they are evil because fiction is escapism for many of us, fictional worlds are where we go to escape our real world and all things that trouble or sadden us in it and as long as you’re still a functioning member of society there isn’t anything wrong with that. You’re not a bad person for your crush on the Joker or your fascination with Hannibal Lecter or your sexual fantasy about Negan or that little voice that whispers maybe Thanos had a point in the darkest part of your mind. At the end of the day, it’s all fiction, it’s all escapism, and it’s all a perfectly safe and sane way to explore the darker parts of our own nature through these characters. Besides how boring would media be if there were not antagonists?
And you shouldn’t let an angry basement-dwelling, keyboard crusading edgelord, or a forgotten early 2000s comedian ruin the enjoyment for you.
After all, that’s why the block feature exists.
