sawasawako:
findingfeather:
doomhamster:
star-anise:
dankou:
liliemsharpe:
riptidemonzarc:
star-anise:
captainlordauditor:
star-anise:
“I just want us to have a conversation about why people find problematic fic appealing!” says someone who will definitely shut that conversation down the MOMENT anyone says anything they disagree with.
“I just want you to think through the implications!” says the person who flips the fuck out the moment you bring scientific research on what the implications are to the table.
I’m so sick of people going “waaaaaaah we just want to have a conversaaaaaation” when they don’t want to have a conversation, they just want a bigger soapbox to shout their ideas and denounce all others from.
So much of my LIFE is seriously examining the effect narratives and art have on people but fucking nobody who says “well can’t we talk about how fiction affects reality” cares about what I have to say.
“I just think you should consider the implications,” says the person not considering the implications of their own words
“You are responsible for the consequences of your fiction,” says someone who absolutely does not care about the consequences of their real-life behaviour.
You are free to stop reading, to stop watching, to stop listening. You’re free to stop the *instant* something makes you uncomfortable, or when you get bored, or when you get scared, or when you get turned on, or when you get seized by awkwardness so hard it makes you fold over and groan in pain, or just because you don’t feel like consuming a given piece of media any longer.
You are free, in short, to keep yourself from consuming anything at all, for any reason, You’re not free to keep other people from consuming their own media. You’re not free to save someone else from consuming media that upsets *them*, much less from media that upsets *you*.
It’s not rocket science.
⬆️
tbh I think you completely missed the point, lmao.
Both the writer and the consumer have to take responsibility.
Consumers need to take responsibility of the media they intake and not interact with things that have warnings for things they don’t like. That much is true.
But the writer also needs to take responsibility in their writing, too. Writing sensitive themes aren’t inherently bad, but how the writer portrays and uses those themes is what’s important, not just the mere existence of those themes in literature.
The entire argument is about whether those themes are romanticised/handled insensitively and how they have very real effects in real life. Writing sensitive themes isn’t inherently the writer condoning those themes, but you’d be surprised how many writers do condone those themes or take an unhealthy amount of joy in depicting those themes.
Literature isn’t suddenly exempt from all consequence when we hold every other form of media to a moral standard.
It’s not a call for censorship and no one’s allowed to explore dark themes in their writing, but a call for people who write those themes in an offensive way to take responsibility and deal with the consequences.
Content creators need to take responsibility for the content they produce just as much as the consumer needs to take responsibility for what they choose to consume. It’s not a one-sided thing. Fiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Please tell me
- What are the appropriate consequences for artists who offensively depict sensitive themes? What appropriate consequences are visited on the creators of popular works that glamorize violence, like Joker, or eroticize sexual violence, like Game of Thrones?
- What are the consequences of insensitive depiction? What provable harms come from fiction that insensitively depicts such things?
- How do you tell which works are “romanticized” and “glamorized” and which are “sensitive” depictions? What are your criteria? Is it a test many different people could apply to a work of art and all come to the same conclusion on? Is it a test you could program a computer to apply?
- If the focus is on how these themes are portrayed–that is, the approach each individual artist takes when portraying them–why are entire swathes of subject matter, like ships, condemned, and not the individual fanworks that take particular approaches to them?
Citing your sources would be appreciated.
“Oh but you don’t understand, we only want to make sure things are portrayed PROPERLY” says the person who has no standards for what “properly” is because we all know a Bad Exploitative Romanticizing Harmful Version when we see it, RIGHT?!
Also:
- What effect on whether or not a portrayal is viewed as “sensitive” or “acceptable” vs “harmful” and “glamorized” will the identity and experiences of the creator have?
- How will you determine this relationship?
- How will you account for the harm of coercive disclosure and/or erasure of those unwilling to publicly disclose sensitive areas of their lives and experiences, or unable to do so without significant personal harm?
- Do you think you would be able to determine who does and does not have the “right”, based on personal experience/ownership of events/identity/etc to create a particular portrayal without such disclosure? How will you be determining/testing this ability?
- What does this determination do to the concept of “Death of the Author” and how it is applied to authorial intent vs results and outcomes?
- How will you keep the concepts of “sensitive/appropriate” vs “romanticized/glamourized” from being used by those in social, cultural and/or political power to silence content that they do not like?
- Have you researched how these concepts have been used to do exact that in the past? What cases can you give as examples? What measures will be taken in order to prevent the same thing from happening?
- If you are relying on the difference between formal state sponsored censorship and mere social shunning/opprobrium, what research have you done into the effects of these forces on minority groups, particularly sexual and religious minority groups, and their artistic expressions? What measures will be taken to be certain that this case is different? How will those be implemented?
Citations still appreciated.
people’s inability to distinguish between what is harmful, gratuitous, and exploitative and what isn’t and their attempts to undermine/dimiss the legitimacy of this distinction is precisely the fucking problem lmao. nobody should have to lay out for you why and how something has & could have a negative impact on certain sections of the audience, as well as on the people outside these circles + the culture at large—the onus is on the writer and subsequently the reader/audience to parse this out for themselves because that’s what taking responsibility for the things that you create / engage with means. it’s not nearly as hard as you people make it out to be lmfao. this isn’t some thought experiment or Concept thrown around in a classroom debate session, this is the organic, messy, real-life dynamic that arises from the interactions of author, text, and reader and it is our collective responsibility to contend with it as such instead of obsessively pontificating about it in our silos on tumblr.com (which i am very well aware i am doing right now lmao).
let’s not pretend like we don’t currently live in a culture where there is little to no accountability taken by or imposed on authors, screenwriters, directors, etc. let alone fanfic writers for the content that they produce, both on the scale of (seemingly) innocuous textual details and on the scale of the overarching ideas / themes / sentiments their work expresses. let’s not pretend like there isn’t a specific political dimension to this phenomenon, where it has been predominantly white (and male) writers, creators, etc. who have received such criticisms precisely because of their hegemonic presence in these fields. let’s not pretend like the discourse surrounding things being labelled “problematic” and “gatekeeping” and the idea that people aren’t allowed to “just enjoy things” anymore isn’t in part a retaliatory, reactionary response to those in positions of power and/or influence (this, of course, includes artists) finally being held—at a somewhat systematic level—accountable for their choices and their behaviour, whether formally or informally. let’s not act like the pendulum has already swung in the other direction, wherein people are somehow reliably launching criticisms against the media that they consume in any meaningful capacity and turning into a real threat, or exerting any kind of legitimate force in these parts.
@findingfeather historically, the literary/artistic exploitation of peoples, events, qualities, and ideas has in fact been an expression of social, cultural, and political power. it is the way in which harmful cultural narratives & social scripts are inadvertently reinforced and legitimised. the people who are predominantly writing these exploitative, ill-informed, and self-indulgent portrayals are people who tend to hold a lot of social & cultural power (see: the examples that have been cited—Joker, GoT. also see j. k. rowling, cassandra clare, stephenie meyer, stephen king, any number of white authors in the fantasy & sci-fi genre, certain white youtubers, celebrities & influencers who are content creators and who will remain unnamed). idk who you think you’re kidding when you say marginalised communities are victimised by the weaponisation of these illegitimate / unwarranted “labels” on art & media when it is people’s inability to characterise & differentiate art & media based on these frameworks that’s precisely the problem.
Hi! I’m a fucking queer disabled librarian, and we literally continue to deal with this shit all the time.
You know what my favourite example is? In 2014 there was a petition to remove the Governor General’s Award from the book When Everything Feels Like The Movies because of its sexual content and the unabashedly sexual nature of its 15yo protagonist.
It was a story about a really fucked up 15yo queer teen who ended tragically and it is one of the most brutally uncomfortably honest and fucking accurate stories I’ve ever read, written by an author who shared every applicable oppression with his protagonist, who was writing from experience, and who wrote the book in response to the murder of a queer teen. The book was and is also subject to wide attempts to remove it from circulation in libraries.
That’s literally just one example.
“Sexuality” and “glorifying unhealthy sexuality” and “glorifying sexual abuse” and “glorifying drug use” and “glorifying youth violence” and all that fucking shit is used regularly and consistently to attempt to suppress the voices of queer authors, especially those speaking to or of adolescents and especially those from multiple axes of marginalization (particularly if those are backgrounds that mean their lives and the lives of their protagonists involve realities with which the middle-class norm is uncomfortable, like violence, abuse, prevalence of narcotics and substance use disorders, mental illness and the realities of dealing with those, living through those, and surviving those.
They are subject to the most active attempts to censor, and they are subject to the most extensive networks of passive censorship, to the point that many such works of art just die or fizzle out because it’s really fucking effective.
You may not hear of these fights, either through literal naïveté and sheltered innocence or through wilful obliviousness but I fucking live here, thank you. And that’s here and now; I’m tired, I need coffee and frankly this isn’t worth more time than this, but I suggest you start looking at how pornography laws were used against fucking reproductive freedom education and sometimes still are, and maybe you’ll learn something.
