A rant I never posted.

Those systematic problems I mentioned are something that needs to be called attention to if we want the peace that's proposed in this thread's OP. We're not toxic because we're obsessed with the strength of fictional characters, or because we're mad about current events and taking it out on each other all of a sudden. We're toxic because we keep cultivating that toxicity with many of the behaviors and conventions we perpetuate every day we're here. Every time we scheme behind each other's backs, act passive-aggressively towards anyone who disagrees with us, use Discord as a staging point for organized actions against verses, characters and even other users, deliberately stall CRTs we don't want passed, try to downgrade whole verses whenever they beat one of the ones we like more, and so on and so forth (because I could be here all week listing off the things we do to each other and the entirely selfish reasons behind them), we steer ourselves further and further in that direction.

And until the vast majority of us sit down and acknowledge that, we're going to keep going in that direction until we end up hitting a proverbial glacier.

I want peace in this community as much as anyone else should. But I'm not going to sit here and act like this is a new issue resulting from something extraneous like the stresses of current events or some widespread VS-centric fanaticism. I'm also not going to pretend that this problem is going to solve itself if we just gather together in a thread for a few weeks and say 'we want things to improve' without actually addressing what needs improvement to begin with. This is something that we as a community have turned a blind eye to for as long as I've been here, and it's reaching the point that it is now because we've been letting it reach that point for several years.