Ahhhh, so happy to see some nuanced thoughts. I don't have anything to add, except that I see this kind of behaviour in Bungou Stray Dogs a bit, where people like to practice apologia (yay word I can use!) for Akutagawa while simultaneously hating on Dazai (who is admittedly often The Worst (TM) and has certainly been awful to Akutagawa). Except...Akutagawa cold-bloodedly kills civilians *on a fairly regular basis* and is not by any objective terms like...a nice decent human being. (I love Akutagawa, I just get very tired of the 'these people did nothing wrong' because tbh in BSD it's true for zero characters. Zero).

It's interesting how this really kicks up in some fandoms and not so much in others. I mean being someone who has unabashedly loved Severus Snape, Loki, Hisoka and Illumi and plenty of other villains, I'm used to sort of being around and seeing a lot of these sorts of arguments, and...they are complex and there are complex layers to it all. Anyway:

But the subtext here is that fic which focusses on how sad X is and doesn't focus on the puppy kicking is equivalent to bullying people for writing that fic.

This is a really disturbing false equivalence, honestly. :/