#problematic fiction

[theproshipboy]

Remember to write whatever the hell you want. No matter how grotesque or weird it is, write it. You'll regret not writing it.

[moonpool-system]

I love you fictives with problematic or hated sources. I love you fictives that're terrified of showing up and existing around others because of terrible things that your sourceselves, source content, or creators have done. I love you whether or not the hate toward that fiction is justified because you're not your exact fictional source. You're real. I love you fictives that desperately try to explain yourselves and your situation because it was so different from the inside and you're trying so hard to be better. I love you fictives whose identity and experiences still mean a lot to you, and you're working every single day to balance that with the reality of media either harmful or perceived as harmful.

You're real. You're people. Your existence is not inherently terrible or amoral- only you decide your impact on this world.

[All plurals can interact, singlets can too if you don't clown]

[preakr]

Prompts for Femslash Fuckery 2024 are now live! (Apologies for the delay!)

Femslash Fuckery is a month long fest run during the month of February to celebrate dark and/or problematic femslash. Tag your fills with #femslashfuckery for visibility and optionally upload them to the AO3 collection here! Fills of any medium, rating, and level of fuckery are welcome. Original fic/art is welcome as well as fanfic/art.

[belle-keys]

it's like, yes, i do read a lot of books that are inherently about social and political issues. books that respond to the questions that identity politics raise. didactic books that make a point about #diversity and #representation. this is important. but i don't want that to be mistaken for the idea that "all books have to be moral or didactic". i believe novels are primarily meant to, as ottessa moshfegh puts it, "expand consciousness" and teach us as individuals about the best and worst of ourselves. critical readings of novels will of course consider the social and political context and ramifications of a work and its ultimate reception by readers. but to limit a work to only its potential real life implications is in itself a sign of a lack of media literacy. it's not some "superior critical reading skills" bro. some novels are simply meant to reveal, not to teach or to respond, and that's not in the least a critical shortcoming.

[rocksalt-and-pie]

Please reblog for a bigger sample size and feel free to put your vote in the tags and/or elaborate! (But please be nice to each other!)

[underleveledjosh]

Right wingers will think that all queer people are degenerate pedo/zoophiles no matter if the fiction we create is vanilla and entirely sfw or the most depraved and problematic smut ever. They don't care what fiction we make or consume when they consider our existence itself problematic. The only thing that censoring "problematic" fiction will do is empower them even more. If we give them a single inch, they will take a mile. We shouldn't give them any of what they want. We shouldn't give them any inch.

A queer person writing about fictional characters in an incestuous or other problematic relationship won't matter to right wingers. What matters to them is that the person writing it is queer and that the characters are queer. That's it. That's all they care for.

[kasumingo]

If someone has wrote or drawn a piece of fiction and tagged it properly, put on warnings or hid it in a way that has to gain your consent in order to view it, it means:

They're aware of what they're actually representing

They know it needs tagging or warning against

They're considerate towards your needs and let you get accustomed towards the contents of their work before you proceed

The rest of the responsibility falls on you, always and if you cannot handle this responsibility, you should not be on sites that allow hosting that kind of content. In fact, you should ask someone more responsible in your environment to filter the content out for you and monitor your consumption and explain to you morality of every work you encounter. And it’s not going to be the author.

[minyicho]

all without supporting terfs too :o

[vivi-ships]

It is not that complicated.

[muchymozzarella]

Trying to wipe out "degenerates" and "degenerate art" is all well and good until you realise while you mean "problematic content", the people you're empowering mean "trans people existing"

[xisrei]

bullying minors for liking problematic fiction NEEDS more publicity and attention. Antis is NOT a victim. They expose the children they "protect" to emotional pressure and violence, harass them on the Internet and in real life, deanonize them and literally spam them with REAL cp. I know of a case where a teenager committed suicide because the antis harassed them. It just shouldn't go unnoticed, it's just inhumane.

[rogueonions]

I am late to this commentary, but I keep seeing it cycling around in fanfic and writing communities regarding the concept of "problematic fiction", and I keep hitting the same thoughts over and over again. Sorry if this is long, but I have to get the thoughts out of my head.

Themes like abuse, SA, murder, stalking, torture, and such, are problematic. And that's not to say they shouldn't be written. They are themes that have real world impact on readers. Which is why you should always tag your work appropriately.

But, on top of writing for yourself, there's the consideration of who your audience is. Not everyone is going to read for the same escapism, the same catharsis of chaos that horror genres offer. (And yes, I consider a story with heavy focus on abuse, SA, stalking, torture, or murder themes as "horror", this is not a moral judgement, only a simple classification).

Fiction is often a place to explore things that are not safely explored in reality. A chance to turn a lens on a society or community, a problem, or a trend, and examine it. It is also a place to go to escape reality.

Some people seek out or write horror because they like the fright, some because they like the chance to see a world that is more jacked up than the real world (an increasingly high bar for some populations lately). Some people seek out horror because it is absurd, otherworldly, or pure, unbridled insanity.

The call I see most often is to not call these themes problematic, as if fiction is immune from moral judgement. It isn't. It never has been. There is a reason there are people out there calling for books to be banned, there's a reason "Catcher in the Rye" was one of the most banned books. Since the invention of writing for pleasure, no writing has never been above moral judgement. Not even the many sacred texts from religions the world over.

But that's not the point I want to make. I do not condone banning books because they have troubling themes. I don't condone freezing out writers who focus on horror themes.

The point I make here is that horror stories can have, (and have had) real world impact on real world people. To the extreme cases: Stephen King pulled a book after someone used the themes and rhetoric of his fiction in a shooting. Other very fictional stories have inspired very real, very terrible events. And to the milder cases: triggering a trauma survivor because you left off a tag. (Please note, "triggering" is a gross oversimplification that fails to convey the real impact).

So you have to be aware of your audience, how you help them find you, and be aware of who you might be inspiring. If you didn't tag SA and someone reads the story and is hurt by this, you do have to shoulder some of the fault.

How can your audience find your work, and how can others safely avoid your work with this content, if you do not flag it appropriately?

I write fiction and fantasy. I bring in themes that can be problematic, but I do so for a purpose. It is part of the narrative, not the point of the narrative. I seek to inspire people to be themselves, to heal, to know they are not alone in their pain, in their healing journey. I write, in part, to heal myself, to allow myself to process my own struggles. But if someone read one of my stories and thought the scene involving torture or murder was inspiration, I would be horrified. If someone read my work, and came away with the mere notion that I condoned racism, sexism, fascism, etc, I'd be tripping over myself to make clear that was not the intent behind my words.

When it comes to knowing your audience, and your intended audience, it is important to also be aware of when or if you need to clarify messaging (even if you didn't think there was a message). Did you write it for escapism, because you cannot express that level of rage in reality without consequences? Did you write it because it was so absurd as to be nearly Lovecraftian in it's construction? Did you write it because you wanted to highlight the wrongs being done in a certain area? Or did you write it just because you could?

There's nothing wrong here, no moral judgement in the content you create. This is meant as caution, not chastisement.

Writing horror doesn't mean you are a monster. Writing about Nazis doesn't make you a Nazi. Enjoying murder stories doesn't make you a murderer in waiting. I love true crime documentaries (I'm listening to one right now), but I'd never intentionally hurt another human being.

However, if I wrote something that a bunch of fascists loved? I'd rip that content down and apologize to anyone who thought I condoned fascism. Because I owe it to my intended audience to curate my content, too. To make sure that, if I want to be a safe space for people, I curate my space for them.

As a writer, my greatest ambition is to write something my reader returns to again, and again. Something they can enjoy a little differently every time they read it. Can that be done in horror? Absolutely. There can be catharsis in these themes. There can be healing in found there. But it is up to the writer to make sure they safely steer away readers who know they don't want to be faced with that content.

On a final note regarding tags, and this is a peeve of mine in general: Stop inventing new tags for the same problematic themes. You cannot demand that people filter out tags if they don't want to see the tagged content, and then find new ways to tag it. Manipulating tags like that just makes it feel like an arms race, or a battle just to keep up.

[preakr]

Prompts for Femslash Fuckery 2023 are now live! Femslash Fuckery is a month long fest run during the month of February to celebrate dark and/or problematic femslash. Tag your fills with #femslashfuckery and optionally upload them to the AO3 collection here! Fills of any medium are welcome.

[buncoreclown]

Plz I love them so much 😭😭

Cottagecore picnic

Being so cute and cozy in Hanabishi's room 🥺

The closest we've gotten to Hanabishi being shirtless and it's because of Mariha and she holds so much love in her eyes 🥺

They're holding hands I love them 😭😭

[two-hearts-beat]

I know literally nobody will see this but a type of post that I see come up on my dash again and again makes me want to remind everyone of or introduce y'all to the Slippery Slope Fallacy

tl;dr this faulty type of reasoning claims that any step in a certain direction unavoidably equals a complete loss of control and a swift, ceaseless rush to the worst extreme that could be imagined down that road

in some cases this worry is actually reasonable! but only if there is evidence that the deciding party is indeed likely to have less control over the situation in the future/in case this decision is made compared to the present/if they decide against it

for example: "in very conservative regions agreeing to a ban of books that portray sexual violence in schools may normalize the perspective of ultra-conservatives and give them precedent to argue for a ban of all books with sexual content" — here it's conceivably reasonable to oppose any step in that direction

on the other hand: "inviting a discussion about the potentially harmful and problematic nature of p*dophilic (fan-)fiction in a mostly liberal and fan-occupied space like tumblr has the inevitable consequence of creating a censorship of queer writing or all writing with sexual themes on the internet" — this claim does not explain how allowing a conversation about a complex topic would change the amount of power that the community currently has or how one step would lead to the other (and feasibly in itself has a prohibiting influence on the voicing of nuanced perspectives on the topic)

[chazakiel-doremi]

I've been told the 'Question Game' segment of the latest chapter of Far Off Unhappy Things is one of the best things I've written so- consider reading it here: https://faroffunhappythings.com/?p=344