Problematic… I fucking hate that word, you know. It means nothing to me. It’s part of the deluge of buzzwords everyone has been abusing the shit out of and its usage has gotten so out of hand that half the usage of it is ironic, like aura, diddy, or media literacy. It’s an all encompassing term for “le bad thing”, a boogeyman for something being bad, with no further elaboration needed. And it’s a word that has damaged my fucking psyche for a few years, changed me and made paranoid. I hope to God I’m not the only one who has been through the ordeal I am about to explain, but I probably am, let’s be honest.
When did everyone start calling everything problematic I wonder? Honestly I don’t know, and you really shouldn’t quote me on this, but it seems to have started in like the early to mid 2010s. Perhaps the most prominent example of this during this time is “Your Fave Is Problematic”, some Tumblr blog which listed various celebrities’ misdeeds (and I believe the owner has since disowned it in some New York Times piece). But as that went on… you know, I was a fucking kid. Why would I care about that? Me and my classmates weren’t having elevated conversations on if the cartoons we were watching had problematic elements, we were in primary and discussing how cool af Gumball and Regular Show was, amongst other things.
Eventually however this whole problematic discussion seemed to become more prominent in my daily online life, between 2020 and 2022 but especially since late 2022… and I don’t know if it was because I was going deeper into fandoms, and servers with chronically online teenagers, or if general online discussion was being poisoned with that P word… because it feels like both are to blame, really. People say this and that is problematic media because it dares to have a certain bad theme, even if that theme is condemned, blah blah I’m sure you’ve heard it before, media literacy is dead, all that bullshit. Puriteens is a term used to describe this often, coming from the Puritans, a religious fundamentalist group that set up a republic in England that failed miserably (and thus gradually led to our miserable constitutional monarchy state), and the fact that most of these people doing these are, as I said, chronically online teenagers. They’re not the only ones engaging in this, I’m sure there’s random ass people in their 20s on this gung-ho crusade, but it tends to be teenagers… and it's almost always online, I have never seen people say “oh that shit is problematic medias!!!!!” when we’re talking about some TV show that came out or something or that we’ve both watched. Is it possibly because of the online disinhibition effect, or are the people I talk to not chronically online? Questions, questions, I swear to God.
Now we get to the juicy part, now that we’ve set everything. How did it affect me? Well, I must say, as this was around the time, late 2022 to early 2023, I started to realise the depth of social issues affecting me, especially those regarding bigotry… and especially those in my country, good old Blighty. If you couldn’t tell already. This led to me worrying what people would think if I was thinking of consuming media that had problematic elements, like let’s say this right, I am a big fan of uhhh Detective Conan right? The series does prominently feature police, so… it’s problematic! It's essentially copaganda! Time to go on a crusade against it! Doesn’t matter that they are often seen as incompetent especially when a bunch of fucking kids and shit can solve murders better than them, who cares about context???
That’s essentially the thought process I had around the time, and apply that other media but go through other fucking stupid thought processes inherent to those as series. Hell you don’t even have to take objection to the series in order to give it the label: you could just say it’s from a problematic creator or whatever, and I mean I will unfortunately say that even though I hate the creator and what he currently stands for, that I do like many of Graham Linehan’s sitcoms, primarily because they are genuinely funny and masterpieces in British/Irish comedy. And while we’re talking about old stuff, I mean you could just say that old stuff is problematic because it’s old, and represents a more bigoted time…
Perhaps the biggest jump in logic for me came when it came to… the country of origin that the work came from. For this, I’m gonna illustrate two countries, both islands with huge cultural exports: the United Kingdom and Japan! With the United Kingdom, I vividly remember asking people “is it okay to watch films from countries that have done bad things?” or whatever, I don’t remember, as the server was deleted. I was asking this question in particular because I was pondering whether to watch Withnail and I. Great film mind you, but I had a problem with it coming from the United Kingdom. Yes I live here, yes I have for years, but for some reason the whole problematic stuff had warped my mind to the point where I was worried people would think bad of me for purely watching a film from the UK, home to a dark colonial past, and modern transphobia. A such, given that, am I not implicitly supporting all thes values, I think, even if other people tell me “nah you’re deeping it”, or if this is a completely fucking stupid logic chain. Again you can apply this to Japan, who also has a history of imperialism, and has significant social issues on gender and ethnic lines,m and it being generally, like much of the Asian continent, heavily conservative. And again you can make the same arguments… Now you get me, don’t you?
And hell, it doesn’t stop there! I was constantly paranoid over how people who don’t exist see me, because yes that was the crucifix of all these arguments, how other people would see me, and I’m sure people can attain to this. But this got so bad right, around late 2023 or so, I spent less time enjoying life, and more time worrying about… not the unknowns, but the fucking nonexistant. Instead of watching a few episodes of TV coming back home on Fridays I remember just letting out stupid paranoid, unneeded worries about how I could potentially be considered an awful person from coming from a Muslm majority nation (Bangladesh). After all, religious countries (bad? idk), that has somewhat conservative values (real bad). No matter that I’m detached from Bangladesh as a whole and that I have left-leaning values, my actions don’t matter, nor do my words, but my characteristics. But even your actions can be misinterpreted and I remember during all these worries I was wondering… is Spanish problematic as it’s gendered. A long-time online friend of mine was honestly wondering (eh) and said to me directly “I’ve noticed you keep worrying over small things, why is that? And honestly, while I still kept worrying a bit about le problematique after that,I think that was a sort of wake up call for how much that damaged my psyche, and which unfortunately continues to dominate it. I constantly felt like I couldn’t enjoy shit, until well, I did something that I enjoyed. It’s only recently when I started to not care. After all, worrying and shit is not gonna get you anywhere. Eventually I got tired of my worrying of problematic and made light of it constantly, constantly randomly joking about things being problematic,and at one point on my (now deleted) Twitter I made a thread explaining why the Dreamcast is problematic (using all the fallacies I could).
In short, uhhh problematic. I hate the word. I think it is healthy and necessary to critique and discuss the problematic elements of stuff we enjoy, but those elements being there doesn't mean it’s bad or morally wrong… and more people should realise that. But I stress this: don’t let the label of problematic get to you. I know it kinda sucks to get something you cherish labelled that, and I know it's a stupid label, but I don’t want it to affect someone as much as it affected me and has for the past few years.