#in my house we're just kinda chill about SZ lol

[starrbar]

Same tbh? Like one of the other rebloggers said as well, the question of how fiction affects reality is genuinely so fascinating and interesting, but it's ruined by this discourse.

The anti vs. pro thing goes far deeper than that question. If anything, the question is merely used as a pretense for the true stances being pushed. And I'll admit my bias right off the bat:

Despite the sympathy I have for some of the people who get genuinely upset that their experiences with trauma and fiction are being ignored and mocked (which is absolutely bad—you don't have to downplay someone's real trauma to say that fiction is more complicated than they say), that sympathy is severely limited by the fact that the majority of the people on the "yes, fiction DOES affect reality" side of this "debate" are just using this topic as a means of subjugating other people.

They don't actually care about the nuanced answers to these questions. They want to weaponize their pain against strangers instead of confronting their own demons and learning how to function in a world that isn't always soft and cozy for them.

On the other end of that, there are proshippers who take any and all criticism of media as a personal attack or an attempt to "censor" them, and who can't read the room and realize that maaaybe the time and place to argue that their favorite kink isn't inherently harmful is absolutely NOT right after someone just said that their abuser used that kink specifically to prey on them.

Like—it's true that predators will use anything, and that them choosing dark fiction as their weapon doesn't make the fiction inherently at fault, but that doesn't take away the horrible things that a survivor had to go through, it doesn't remove the connotations and associations they will forever have with that content, and they are ALLOWED to fucking hate the content and avoid people who like it.

Anyone who glances at any of my profiles will know how hard I go to bat for the "proship" side because I fully and completely understand that many of them have been backed into a corner and made to feel extremely defensive (including myself), but sometimes you need to back up and realize you're literally just berating a random person for having real, understandable disgust for the very thing that was used against them, and it's not your place to try and "facts and logic" at them about it. Let them hate it. It's literally not hurting you if they do.

It's only hurting you when they start turning their pain into a bludgeoning device against other strangers who have had different experiences with that fiction than they have. Whether you're pro or anti or a Tax Paying Adult Woman™, you have no right to diminish someone else's experience just because you don't like their opinion on fan fiction. :/

everyone in the "fiction does/doesn't affect reality" debate is frankly very annoying and treat it like this all or nothing thing and misappropriate the language of media studies to win the stupidest flame war on this website. I don't even want to engage with the question because I find it that pointless and anti intellectual.