How frequently do we see media wherein a teenager agonizes over something small and dumb they did, but nobody else cares? How frequently does it happen in real life?
Social pressure can be exerted even without it being conscious.
The thing is, at some point the amount of social pressure being exerted is indistinguishable from background radiation. If some tiny iota of an action that nobody else cares about causes a teenager to mentally torture themselves,
is the person who performed the action to blame for the torture? Should people be expected abstain from all actions that could theoretically cause a teenager to freak out over nothing when nobody actually cares or blames them for their response to the action?
Because let me tell you, that would leave us with a
really freaking short list of actions that can be taken anywhere within line of sight of a teenager. If that's the required standard of due diligence for adolescent males... Well, a boy who followed such a rule would be so paralyzed around girls as to be socially dysfunctional in mixed company. Indeed, borderline catatonic in mixed company...
Now, there's something to be said about criticizing a work of literature (even one as loosely defined as a quest) when you and several others get a particular type of vibe from said work. Like, even if you don't intend for X to come across and even if you don't agree with X on principle, that doesn't mean that it isn't there for someone else. And if more than a couple of people see it, it's worth actually addressing and acknowledging. Otherwise it's a clear display of an author who isn't looking for ways to improve, not if they (let alone the toxic voterbase here) can't acknowledge that things can look completely different than you intended it.
The flip side is that there has to be a limit to the amount of criticism people will take; you can't reasonably ask someone to sit there and just take infinity criticism. Including criticisms they think are severely unfair and/or a distraction or disruption of shared space.
People have a right to say "okay, I think this criticism of me is unwarranted, and it's becoming disruptive of a shared activity, please stop." Otherwise criticism crosses the line into bullying, without even
