#anyway. i followed up the gorey litrpg series with a nonfiction book by a james c scott student who worked at slaughterhouses | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

etirabys · 2 days ago

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a frustrating thing about battle royale stories is that they take place in a world where there's a massive popular appetite to see torture and death, the existence of this appetite is the main moral evil of the story (so far so fine), and the author tends to pretend this is also a huge problem in our world so that their work can stand as a Commentary On Real Evil. when the world their actual readership lives in has the opposite problem – too squeamish about seeing torture and death and coercion and collectively agrees to sequester it out of view so that nice things can keep being available for under five dollars at the grocery store

#rambl #i did it! i put a 5 paragraph essay in drafts and boiled it down into 1 paragraph on my second try!#anyway. i followed up the gorey litrpg series with a nonfiction book by a james c scott student who worked at slaughterhouses #and man did that book help immediately crystallize my vague moral discomfort with the litrpg series.#I love fictional gore and torture. I *do not love* real life gore and torture. that the latter preference is widely shared is evident #in how hard the meat industry tries to abstract it out of view & make filming illegal & hide the killing *even from slaughterhouse workers*#(it's divided up so people have minimal visibility/responsibility)#imo this is not a feature of our moral universe you should ignore or signflip if you want to write about good and evil and capitalism!

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