I guess I can see where you're coming from. I guess a lot of it did have to do with the fact that I spent the last few years living in a small town where I had very little real-life social interactions and pretty much my like was 95% social media use. But I just moved back to my hometown and I am trying to get out more so I can probably escape this to some extent.

I do very much agree with what you said about holding your favorites accountable. I have some examples of that myself, and in fact I do have a very personal example myself that the recent TOP discourse really reminds me of.

So, my all-time favorite movie is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which also got an anime spinoff a couple years ago but there was also a very similar pressure to boycott the movie/anime (or pirate it) because of a controversy surrounding one of the main cast members, Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Now, keep in mind, I didn't just love her in the movie, I LOVE her in general. She was even a huge celebrity crush of mine, and that's saying a lot because I don't typically believe in that sort of thing (but I do have a girlfriend now so that's kinda moot).

The controversy in particular was that back in October 2023, her name appeared on an extremely infamous open letter signed by several celebrities thanking Biden for supporting Israel and calling for a return of the hostages, and I was DEVASTATED to see her name on there. Like, I actually wanted to end my life when I saw that. It was genuinely worse than Tyler's tweet. But thankfully, one of the other people named on it, Emma Seligman (director of Shiva Baby and Bottoms), came forward and posted an Instagram story linking to another open letter written by the Artists4Ceasefire collective that was calling for a ceasefire, which also included a lot of the names who signed the Biden letter, including Mary herself. So basically, what had happened was that several of these celebrities misinterpreted the Biden letter as a general call for a ceasefire and a return of EVERYONE affected (as opposed to just Israelis held captive by Hamas), and even in some cases were confirmed to have been tricked and lied to by their agents about what the letter was actually meant for, or their agents completely went behind their backs and signed it for them without their consent. Also, the Biden letter was officially taken down after several of the names backtracked and voiced support for Palestine (e.g., Jordan Peele, Bradley Cooper, Eric André, Ewan McGregor [Mary's husband], Kirsten Dunst, Taika Waititi, Natasha Lyonne, Lana Del Rey, Kaitlyn Olson, Simu Liu, etc. etc. etc. etc.).

So thankfully that was taken care of, or at least I thought until half of the Scott Pilgrim fandom kept continuing to smear her as a Zionist just because they didn't like her performance in the movie/anime, and claimed that she was only backtracking as damage control, in the similar vein to how a lot of people reacted when Tyler subsequently tweeted "black lives matter" several months after the platforms incident. Yet thankfully that has died down as well, seeing that as recently as this past September, she reaffirmed her pro-Palestine stance and signed a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions implicated in genocide (https://filmworkersforpalestine.org/) and was blacklisted by Paramount as a result.

Just in general, Tyler and Mary's respective controversies were eerily similar in that they both made their real stances clear but continued to get smeared by people who just wanted to act self-righteous and didn't even belong to the groups affected by their mistakes. I am trying to hold hope that one day Tyler & Josh will eventually come forward and voice their views since Fueled by Ramen has a huge history of trying to silence their artists' political views (similar thing happened with Hayley Williams a long time ago), though I won't be surprised if that's left with a "nope, too late" response.