I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about the “dangers of fiction influencing reality” with linked scientific findings and stuff and I appreciate the effort to back things up with psychological studies rather than, like, memes, but I’m just letting y’all know… that was literally the argument Tipper Gore used when she went after Prince music for fear it would turn her daughter into a stripper. That’s the exact argument that was used against Rockstar when they were accused of ‘making’ kids shoot up schools. These crusades against media have time and time again failed with their only positive results usually just being more prevalently available warnings for mature content. And their negative repurcussions have been far greater, such as an increased stigma against black music and parents banning their children from playing any video games. (Blocking people off from experiencing multiple genres based on racial bias and excluding access to an entire artform.) I’m not saying that there’s not stuff to be concerned about/critique. I’m just saying that if you’re going the “fiction is dangerous!” route it has historically been proven to be a lost cause.
Tag: media consumption
You: BUT A CHILD MIGHT SEE IT!!!
Me: Not my problem.
You: BUT A TRAUMA VICTIM MIGHT SEE IT!!!
Me: Not my problem.
You: BUT–
Me: WHAT MEDIA YOU WILLINGLY OR EVEN ACCIDENTALLY CONSUME IS NOT MY PROBLEM. YOU ARE NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY, I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU, I OWE YOU N O T H I N G.
this just in: basic levels of caring for other people no longer a thing
media doesnt exist in a vaccum, take proper measures to ensure your work doesmt harm people (tagging it, flagging nsfw blogs as such, etc). if your work is going to be harming people regardless of any cautionary steps, maybe you should take a long hard look at what youre creating and why
I tag all of my works and encourage others to do so as well, because that’s proper Internet etiquette, but, also, it’s still not my responsibility to look after someone else’s kids or to take care of someone else’s mental health issues.
I’m a mentally ill CSA survivor, and I do what I must to take care of myself. I know my limits, I know my triggers, and I’ve even taken the time to think of things that I haven’t been triggered by yet, but that might trigger me, so that I can proceed with caution.
It isn’t a content creator’s job or responsibility to worry about how their fanart or fanfiction might impact EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING ON PLANET EARTH. It’s the job of Internet browsers to browse responsibly.
This isn’t about “not caring for people,” I care quite a lot for people. It’s about content creators being harassed by people who think it’s their responsibility to see to the needs of every individual on the Internet.
I’m going to post my nasty guro porn all I want, and I’ll tag it, but if someone sees it regardless, that’s not my issue. I’m sorry if it triggers them, I’m sorry if it upsets them, but all they can do is unfollow me or blacklist my trigger tags. I’m not going to stop posting my artwork and stories just because a handful of people managed to stumble upon it (or willingly subjected themselves to it) and were upset by it.
It’s my fucking blog, Karen.
THIS. i’m too damn busy living my life to live somebody else’s. i’ll be ethical and give people fair warning where appropriate as often as i can, but i won’t even attempt to anticipate and tailor myself to a random hypothetical stranger’s media needs. go read a pet blog instead. i promise it’ll be ok.
What if your work’s absence will be harming people?
Or do we no longer care about the people who needed to see a thing?
You know what saves lives? Art that some people really, really, need to never see. Because other people really, really, need to see it. Representation matters. The biggest driver of suicidal despair in abuse survivors is the feeling that they’re alone, no one will understand, what happened to them is unique and probably their fault. Finding out that it’s a thing that people are familiar with and write about and make art about saves lives. Lots and lots of lives.
You can’t prevent anyone from getting hurt ever. You can try to minimize the harm while maximizing the benefits.
hey, random perspective injection here. i’m in a super delicate place right now mentally. like at the moment i can’t take ANY fictional suffering or conflict.
usually, i write adventure fiction involving hails of bullets.
my current state is temporary, thank god. but due to life trauma, i’ve become the emotional equivalent of a raw burn. and being introduced to media – or even offhand jokes – involving suffering or animal cruelty or violence, right now, genuinely triggers me in a bad way.
so i’ve got kind of a weird perspective on this. on the one hand, my actual livelihood is producing violent media. on the other hand, violent media triggers and hurts me.
what i can provide from this viewpoint is the fact that ‘is this media allowed’ is the absolutely wrong question. it’s inside-out and backwards. the reason people can’t get any closure on the topic is because we’re coming at it from the wrong end.
what we need to focus on is, how do we make it easier for people to avoid what they need to avoid, and find what they need to find?
for instance, tagging is currently all about warnings, and usually based on parental moral guardianship issues traumatic events. but what if there were positive tags that sorted fics into a similarly few-and-simple categories of tone? like ‘gentle’ and ‘dramatic’ and ‘sad’ and so forth. idk, questions like that.
this isn’t a moral question here, my loves. we actually agree on the moral question. we want people to feel safe but we don’t want to sacrifice freedom of speech. we’ve answered that one! now it’s an engineering question.
just moving along like everyone else 