#i'm not good at stuff & because of that i wouldnt act like an authority figure on like. idfk. painting

[pa-pa-plasma]

has anyone else noticed that people who aren't writers & know nothing about writing are acting like an authority on storytelling or is it just me

[a-lukewarm-take]

buddy, i understand why youre so confused. cause i am too.

i understand the whole things yeah, the 'harassing people is bad', 'mind your business', etc etc. but other than that im lost on whatever the hell this 'pro' and 'anti' stuff is. ive just been not interacting with that, i think those pro anti people call it being 'neutral' im pretty sure. anyway i think the whole concept is pretty dumb, but its the internet. i wouldnt be surprised if someone doxed someone else over ice cream flavors

what ive for the whole thing is this: pro in proship stands for 'pro' as in 'for' for shipping/ship and let ship, anti is the opposite of that. antis believe that fiction can influence people, pros dont. pros believe what you like in fiction does not dictate your morals, antis dont. etc etc

my tip is this: keep far far away and ignore everything about those two things. if you dont wanna do that, well, try not to get too lost in the sauce while listening to both sides and keep your mind open

sorry if you already knew half of this and this is just kinda null, have a nice day

I'm not big on lables. I think theres a pretty reasonable middle ground to be had but I doubt either side is going to actually listen for long enough to figure this out. It would be nice if they did but, this is the internet.

"Pedophilia is bad" 

can coexist with

 "Fictional characters aren't real and doing reprehensible things to them has no real life victims"

 aswell as

"Fiction and the way objectionable content in fiction is framed has historically been used as propaganda to enable or encourage harmful behavior irl." 

They're not contradictory unless deliberately misinterpreted and exaggerated via a bad faith rube-goldberg of causality.

Books like Lolita play with framing in a way that a lot of mainstream readers miss the point of, especially readers that expect Lolita to spoon feed them the morals as many other books would have. Whether or not a reader is aroused or horrified by Lolita has nothing to do with their own morals and everything to do with whether or not they picked up on the fact that the narrator is an unreliable monster justifying and lying to himself when it comes to the girl in the novel. 

Art is complicated and some audiences, no matter how hard the author tries, are going to interpret that art in a way the author did not intend or even pervert the meaning to support whatever worldview they had before encountering the work.

Sometimes stories show you an oversexualized and glorified depiction of a repugnant act, explicitly because they trust that this framing would make the audience uncomfortable. The titillation is intended only as a gateway to vomiting or a profound sense of horror as it highlights that not all bad things are prevented and that this world will not punish the unjust inherently. It's asking you to wallow in the tragedy. 

There are surely stories that have no such deeper meaning and are quite simply porn. The line is thin and blurry. When you censor one you run the risk of censoring them all because someone unprepared to think critically about what the media they consume is trying to say, is going to miss the point.

Censorship is a difficult thing to manage and everyone has a right to distrust the powers enforcing it. 

You can believe strongly that there is media that does more harm than good whilst also understanding that very rarely is this the direct or intentional fault of the creator or consumers of the work on an individual level. But rather cogs in a larger system to which individuals can participate much in the same way we don't blame the butterfly for the hurricane. You can fight for censorship without shaming or harassing the people who don't want it.

I'm sure someone else could explain this better than I could and I'm open to being wrong about this. I certainly don't have all the answers, that's a part of being human.

-Luke