Comfort movie this comfort character that, what are you doing to make yourself profoundly uncomfortable, what are you watching that’s so disgusting you can’t take your eyes off it, what scares you so much it makes you intensely aware of what you take for granted, if you don’t have stuff like this in your regimen then you are operating on a serious nutritional deficit and also your opinions on media are worthless.
But seriously folks! I get why people would build their whole personal culture around comfort-seeking in this cold dark world of ours, but…well, I guess you have as much a right to do it as I have to make fun of it.
There’s one thing about the fandom output that I’ve been trying to articulate, and I’m probably just overthinking it, but it’s about how characters, if not the specific idea of the OC, has taken over as the main impetus for making anything. Like, to the exclusion of wanting to tell a story or explore a style or experiment with allegory or like, anything else people normally do with narrative media. That is definitely tied in to the fact that a lot of fan content appears to have pornographic motivations–that it’s all kind of romance novel adjacent, whether or not it is sexually explicit it’s all about pleasurable interpersonal situations the writer and/or reader wishes they were in. But I was really struck when I started to see a shift in the meaning of the term OC; like it seems that it used to be about inserting your own original character into the existing world of Doctor Who or whatever, which makes sense. But now I feel like people are using it to just mean…a character, that they created, just for them to draw or be in their own stories. And like in the rest of the world that’s just called a character. You know, Dostoevsky had no need to be like “Check out my OC’s the brothers Karamazov, I came up with a whole story for them!”, because what he was doing is just called writing, you know, narrative fiction with people in it. When I see somebody posting a character they made up that’s pretty clearly for their own creative purposes and calling it “my new OC,” I always get this urge to say, like, you don’t have to say it that way. You know. In China they just call it “food”.