on eating your vegetables

There's a certain type of post you'll see a lot on Tumblr, or the fandom part of Twitter. These posts are always a variation on the same theme: "I want stories where X happens."

X, in this case, might mean:

• an unconventional setting or time period is explored.
• a boring trope is subverted.
• a marginalized character gets to do something cool.

The weird part is, whatever the post is asking for usually exists already. In a lot of cases, it's existed for years (or even decades). But if you reply to any of these posts, naively excited to introduce someone to a broad new horizon of cool shit, you'll quickly learn that the person who posted it:

• does not read books.
• or comics.
• doesn't watch movies made before 2010.
• or any show that isn't easily bingeable online.
• they don't care for anything made outside of the U.S., either.
• all they do, with their precious time on this Earth, is watch whatever the algorithm picked out for them.
• and complain online about it.

This person lives entirely in a hell of their own making. And if you suggest they might have a better time if they changed their media habits even slightly, they will call you a snob.

And then continue to complain that nobody is telling the kind of stories they want.