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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Sunday, July 27, 2025

entry arrow9:00 AM | In Defense of Fictional Mess



Some time ago, it was Rory Gilmore. For the past three years or so, it has been Carrie Bradshaw. The cycle goes on, and there are fresh targets now and then being pilloried in the dark recessed of TikTok, X, and YouTube: Meredith Grey, or Olivia Pope, or—let’s be honest—any woman in fiction who dared to be messy, to be layered, to be human.

I think we have reached the era of the Digital Inquisition, where every fictional woman is put on trial, their sins collected like receipts and tallied on social media, their worthiness as characters weighed against an impossible moral scale.

Exhibit A: Rory slept with a married man.

Exhibit B: Carrie was selfish and inconsiderate to her friends.

And on and on.

The tone is always gleeful, smug, as though someone has finally solved the puzzle of why this character is problematic—and therefore must be thrown into the pit.

What is this need to reduce women characters to lists of their failures, stripped of context and complexity? It’s like watching someone read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and saying, “Well, she shouldn’t have had an affair then.” You’d be laughed out of any serious literature class. And yet this same behavior is considered incisive cultural criticism on the internet.

I’ve seen this happen over and over again, and it feels eerily familiar. It’s not that different from the small-town tsismis we all know: the kind of gossip that isn’t content with shades of grey but demands black and white, saints and sinners. That neighbor who used to be so polite? Oh, didn’t you hear? She once left her child alone in the car for five minutes to run into Mercury Drug. Terrible mother. Cancelled. This is the same energy, just with a glossier filter and a wider audience.

I often wonder what we want when we consume fiction these days. We say we want complex characters—flawed, human, real—but the moment they exhibit the very messiness that makes them interesting, we slap a label on them and throw them away.

“Toxic.”

“Narcissist.”

“Red flag.”

Words that once had precise meanings now just serve as aesthetic judgments in character assassination posts.

And I can’t help but notice that this happens disproportionately to women characters. When Walter White spirals into murder and meth and monstrosity, we call him a tragic antihero. When Don Draper sleeps his way through Manhattan with the emotional intelligence of a bar of soap, we study him. We analyze. We marvel at the storytelling. But when Carrie Bradshaw does something dumb—like, say, leave Aidan for Mr. Big—we call her irredeemable. Not misguided. Not emotionally stunted. Just irredeemable.

What is that if not misogyny dressed up as media literacy?

There’s an emptiness in this impulse. A refusal to sit with discomfort. Maybe we’re so used to curating perfection online—every tweet polished, every selfie filtered—that we can no longer tolerate messiness in others, even fictional ones. It’s a kind of hyper-morality that isn’t interested in redemption, or growth, or contradiction. It just wants to assign blame and move on. Like a moral accountant tallying sins in a spreadsheet.

But where’s the pleasure in perfection?

Honestly, what is the point of watching a character who does everything right? Who never slips up, never makes a bad decision, never says something selfish, never hurts someone by accident or on purpose? That’s not a character. That’s a cardboard cutout in a Sunday School pamphlet.

Real stories live in the mess. In the contradictions. In the quiet failures and loud mistakes. In the long arc of someone who doesn’t get it right the first time, or even the fifth. This is where we see ourselves. Because let’s be honest: no one on this planet fits the checklist of moral purity. You? Me? That girl from Gen Z with the infographic on “Why Rory Gilmore is Actually a Monster”? None of us. And yet we demand from our fiction what we cannot live up to in our own lives.

I think often about what it means to be a reader, a viewer, an audience in this moment. And maybe it means learning to sit with the uncomfortable. To look at Carrie Bradshaw and say, “God, she’s insufferable,” but also, “Wow, she’s real.” To recognize in Rory Gilmore the fragile dreams of girlhood curdling into something selfish and still feel a pang of heartbreak, not righteousness.

Stories are meant to disturb us sometimes. Characters are meant to disappoint us. That’s the contract. That’s what makes them stay with us long after the screen fades to black or the book closes.

So no, I will not hate these characters because a Twitter thread told me to. I will not participate in this flattening of fiction into a moral binary where we root for saints and burn the rest. I will, instead, keep loving the difficult women [and men] of the screen and page, because they are reflections of our most human selves.

And if that makes me a bad feminist, then so be it. At least I still know how to read.

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