#anyway Ava Reid has skyrocketed up on my to-read list | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mumblingsage · 1 month ago

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I just want to briefly circle back to the initial misunderstanding where, like, including violence is somehow interpreted to be a pro-violence message. Maybe people want to write horror fiction about violence because violence horrifies them and they want space to process these feelings. (Or maybe not, sometimes it's just fun to watch a corpse chase a woman in a nightgown around a rickety old mansion and the murders are an excuse! Still a reasonable thing reasonable people have done with storytelling for thousands of years!)

when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”

#this is so grim #also unless you are avoiding a difficult topic because it's actually detrimental to your mental health (you know this and can self-regulate #maybe you SHOULD read about awful shit sometimes? so you understand what's going on in the world around you?#not that gothic horror is the same as actual nonfiction reporting but all fiction can be a way to exercise empathy #and something about 'this topic is UNSPEAKABLE I couldn't even handle it IN FICTION'#is just more of the silencing many of these topics have undergone for far too long!#grown-up SFF used to be better at this (I just talked about reading Tehanu whose titular character is a CSA survivor)#(though not the POV character. so we can acknowledge it happens but we can't read/write about what it's like to experience?)#CSA mention #I hope your blacklist caught any other terms in the body of the post #anyway Ava Reid has skyrocketed up on my to-read list

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