This whole thing feels so disingenuous to me. Like people are defending it just to stick it to the alt-right, but on any normal day some of those same people would have been talking about how cringy it is. Not about how it keeps them going and puts wind beneath their wings or whatever.
Well, yeah. The context changes when a bunch of conservative assholes start to harass someone - at that point, the imperative becomes less to express your relative taste for the content itself, and more to call out the harassment.
There's nothing disingenuous about that. "I think this is cringy" is an innocuous enough opinion, but once it becomes targeted harassment and an excuse to launch unnecessary and ridiculous insults (e.g., "soyboy"), a line has clearly been crossed and the room for fun ribbing has been lessened.
All that said, I genuinely don't think the video should need "defending." If anything, I feel some people need to examine their reflex to view a strong expression of emotion as cringeworthy or whatever, as if you need a particularly good reason to get excited, to cry, to be loud.
It's fun seeing people have a strong subjective experience in which they allow something to really, really move them. It requires a bizarre cynicism to approach the reaction video genre from the perspective of "but is it not
antisocial to be this emotional????????" as if that isn't very much, very specifically, a space where people are allowed and even asked to just express every ounce of themselves.
