shinelikethunder:

nonbinarypastels:

so, thinking about the discourse regarding romanticizing Problematic things in fic—

when i read darkfic, i do not interpret the things happening in those stories as being romantic. i do not find these things appealing in the sense that they are things i would want to do in my life or have happen to me. no matter how explicitly detailed those stories are, i still do not find those stories to be an idealized version of life i want to strive towards having. i do not look at the things that happen in those stories and think “i want that, that’s something good to have” or at the characters and think “i want to be like that, that’s a good kind of person to be”.  

there is appeal to them as stories and they appeal to me in the sense that i find them entertaining and stimulating, but i do not at any point look at those works of fiction and find my perception at the idea of the same things happening in reality warped by that. i do not enjoy a graphic murder scene in a fic and then leave that story under the impression that murder is a good thing in real life. i do not get off to stories of bad things happening to people and then leave that story thinking it would be good for someone to do those things to me.

this is true even when the dark content in that fic is not condemned within the text. if there is no author’s note stating at the beginning of the story “the things that happen in this fic are bad”, no narrator coming in at the end to give a TED talk about morality, and no point in the middle where a character breaks down the wall, looks into the camera lens and explicity says “my behavior is bad and no one else should copy it” — if none of that happens, i still am able to understand that the content of that fic is not something i want to emulate, i still do not idealize it, i still do not want it to happen to me or to do it to anyone else.

if we define romanticization as “making something look more appealing than it actually is, making something be seen as an ideal” then i have never read a single darkfic — dead dove: do not eat or otherwise — that has romanticized a damn thing because

• can the content of those fics be considered romanticized if i don’t consider the content to be an ideal to strive toward?
• can it be considered romanticized if i don’t see the murder, the torture, the abuse as something that’s appealing outside of harmless titillating entertainment had in a safe environment?
• can it be considered romanticized if my perception of things in fiction does not affect my perception of those things in reality, if it does not make me thing those things are appealing in reality?
• can it be considered romanticized if the author does not consider it an ideal that’s appealing in real life and explicitly tags those fics with things like abuse, rape, etc, making it clear they’re aware of what is happening in the story?

in romanticization discourse, a lot of people are defining romanticization by fiction that features Bad Horrible No Good Things happening but not being explicitly condemned as being bad in the text.

there are two problems with this:

one is that something not being explicitly stated as being bad is not the same thing as that something being portrayed as being good or ideal

and two is that i don’t think the content of a fic has to be condemned within the text in order for us to realize that it’s not an ideal to aspire to because most of us already have a sense of ethics and morality which allow us to hold separate how we feel about things in fiction vs. how we feel about them in real life

• when bad things happen in fiction, do we really NEED to be told that they’re bad in explicit terms?
• when villains exist in fiction, do we really need for the hero to always win and for the villain to always be explicitly punished in the text in order to recognize that they are in fact a villain?
• when fics are tagged as containing abuse or rape or torture, do we really need an additional note that says “not only does this contain abuse, but abuse is bad in case you didn’t already know”?
• when we read these fictions which are rated explicit and marked as being for adults only, do we really need to be treated like children who need to have our hands held throughout the story, reminded at every opportunity that what we’re reading is wrong and nasty and not to be emulated in real life?
• do we not have brains and the ability to think for ourselves? do we not have our own ethics? do we not have our own morality? are we not capable of understanding that just because a fictional character is harmed in a fictional story that it does not mean that harming people in real life and being harmed in return are good things without being reminded of it at every single turn?

i think that MUCH of what makes something romanticized in fiction is not actually the content itself but the perception of readers towards that content. it’s in whether or not they find the content of that fiction to be more appealing than it actually is – to be an ideal they want to have or to be in real lie – and whether they can tell that the content of the fiction contains bad or unhealthy or harmful behavior, whether they can make that judgment, whether the behavior is explicitly stated as being so or not. 

it’s in whether or not a reader has critical thinking skills, media literacy, education about what healthy (and unhealthy) relationships look like, education about what abuse looks like, an ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and an ability to know what stories are for them and what stories are not for them and a willingness to avoid the ones that aren’t. 

You know it’s interesting, my knee-jerk reflex was to go “but this is all casually conflating how something is depicted with the hypothetical effects it’s assumed to have on the audience.” Which, yes, technically, to some extent… but only because it’s grappling with the massive equivocation the Fandom Police have silently gotten away with on the level of language itself. The extent of it didn’t come into sharp focus until I found myself frustrated by this post, then realized the roots of the frustration lay much deeper down, not in the post itself but in the problems it’s tackling.

Because IDK about anyone else, but to my ear “this work is romanticizes XYZ” is mostly about the work itself. The attitude it takes towards its subject matter. The way it chooses to present XYZ. As a sentence, it functions the same as “this work bungles the science its plot is based on” or “this work fixates on X to the point of downplaying Y”–it’s a description of how the story’s constructed, not an action the story’s performing on its audience. That’s in contrast to a word like “normalizes,” which means much more than “this work treats XYZ as normal”–it’s a claim of harmful action, an accusation of pressuring and bamboozling people into accepting XYZ as normal, or contributing to wider societal processes that do the same.

No matter how enthusiastically a story presents murder as normal, it can’t be accurately described as “normalizing murder” if not a single person walks away from it with their attitude towards murder the slightest bit changed. OTOH, I don’t think it’d be controversial to describe a show like Hannibal as (deliberately, gleefully) romanticizing murder and cannibalism. And that’s a description that applies totally independently of whether it gave any of its viewers an IRL hankering for human liver to go with their fava beans and Chianti. In fact, Hannibal is a classic counterexample in these arguments because its treatment of horror and taboo is so glammed-up, so unapologetically romantic, without any perceptible effect on audiences’ disapproval of real-life serial killers who gruesomely mutilate and then eat their victims.

But of course that’s the exact distinction antis want to obliterate. And even though I’ve been salty for ages about how indiscriminately they fling around “romanticizes,” “normalizes,” “trivializes,” “fetishizes,” “condones,” “promotes,” “perpetuates,” etc, as though they’re just interchangeable buzzwords that all mean “gotcha,” I hadn’t really contemplated whether that tactic might start obliterating the distinctions between those words for their audience as well. But of course it does. Even for those attuned to the shades of meaning, because after a certain threshold of well-poisoning it’s hard to be sure what anyone else is talking about when they use them.

Incidentally, my reference point for a fandom plagued with ludicrously romanticized, apparently genuine misconceptions about stalking and abuse has always been Phantom of the Opera. Not the fact that people ship the thing–I also see the appeal of shipping the thing! But the fact that traditionally, the mainstream position has been to furiously defend it as Super Duper Great, Happily Ever After, Passionate True Love, against anyone who dares allude to the trainwreck potential of all that murder, deception, controlling behavior, obsession, extortion, emotional terrorism, etc. IDK what the place is like these days, but at the point I was there, it had never not been a cesspit of apologism that extended well into distorted IRL beliefs. In other words, the exact bogeyman antis point at to scare us all into submission.

The thing is… looking back on it, what made it so horrifying wasn’t the worry that it would actively teach that stuff to impressionable teenagers. It was what it revealed about the views a staggeringly huge number of people already held about stalking and romance. Color me dubious about one schlocky Andrew Lloyd Webber musical’s ability to insert those views fully formed into a teenage girl’s head and persuade her of their legitimacy. The musical activated them, sure, and the fandom validated them to a truly disturbing degree, but there’s not exactly a shortage of other places for impressionable young’uns to pick that stuff up. Nuking the entire fandom and the source material from the face of the earth wouldn’t have done a solitary scrap of good for anyone’s understanding of abusive relationships. Just left a lot of teenagers stuck learning the same tripe from romcoms and bodice-rippers, minus the thought-provoking darkfic and the forums where they’d be exposed to counterarguments every time the same old ship wank started up again.