Consumption isn’t a shortcut to character and morality goes well beyond fandom. That’s modern culture in a nutshell.
Consumption isn’t activism and we should be glad - because if consumption was activism, then your entire positive contribution to the world would be cancelled out by exactly one person having a different hobby.
This reminds me a lot of a concept I’ve seen a lot in American Christianity, especially evangelical/fundamentalist Protestantism, which is the idea that the only criteria for being “saved” is expressing belief in Jesus and God. You don’t need to do good things, you don’t need to show compassion and kindness to others, you don’t need to help the less fortunate—you just need to believe in Jesus and essentially (from an outsider perspective) perform your faith according to social expectations.
Given how culturally Protestant* (and specifically evangelical) the US is, and how American many fandom spaces can be, I have to wonder how much of this “consumes the right media = good person, consumes the wrong media = bad person” idea is just this same ugly concept repackaged and rebranded with leftist terms. I don’t think people who do this are intentionally recycling the Christian rhetoric they were raised with—I think they may not even be aware that that’s where their thinking comes from, because when the culture you’re raised with is still the dominant culture of where you live it’s hard to fully shake it off. But the point is that I absolutely think cultural Christianity has a big impact on a lot of social justice discourses even when the people discussing have actively distanced themselves from the religion.
