#like it’s not Killing Stalking but I can say that genuinely enjoying media with problematic themes and characters doesn’t make you a demon

[shadowsnowdapple]

OP: enjoying media that involves content that can be disturbing, troubling, or made by someone who is not a good person can create healthy understanding that fiction and reality are very different and to separate enjoying something from morality.

Tumblr: yeah, but if you like Steven Universe you are irredeemable.

i recommend being a fan of 1 problematic piece of media at least once in your life

[sableaire]

I know KS is well you already know but I actually want to continue it just cause I'm curious on how it'll end /or who will end up dead first/ but the thing is... we are allowed to like what we like right? As long you know what's real and what isn't it?

I’m of the opinion that people simplify this issue too much. Consuming problematic media is not inherently wrong, but it’s not just enough to know “what’s real and what isn’t”.

Now, this is one particular issue in which I use my own behavior as a model, but note that I am not going to try and claim that my views are the ‘correct one’ or that my approach is better than others. However, I would just like to offer to everyone who worries about this some insight into a philosophy that isn’t quite so black-and-white as others I have seen.  

Basically, like every ask I ever receive, the answer’s going to be long, so hang on, Anon. Please note that Google Chrome ‘ran out of memory’ while I was writing this post, so if anything cuts off at a weird point, I just lost that portion and didn’t notice…

 More below the cut:

First thing’s first: I consume problematic media. As an aspiring writer, I enjoy experiencing stories that make me feel things, even if that feeling might be “dear god, this is what it feels like to watch a train wreck”, and as someone who thrives on new experiences, I enjoy being able to feel a broad range of emotions in a safe and controlled medium - either dreams or fiction. If there was a way to try psychedelic drugs and or ‘bad trips’ without risk of physical or psychological damage, I would try it. 

Heck, I’m the kind of person who tries to induce sleep paralysis and nightmares for fun because I get a kick out of the sheer terror. It’s inevitable that I sometimes like to read about the visceral horror and sickening dread that comes from highly dangerous and awful situations. (Of course, I also have my limits, but that’s not the point of this post)

That being said, I try to be mindful about my enjoyment of such content in many ways, and I’m of the opinion that everyone else should as well. Something I always say is that “people can’t help how they feel, but they can help how they behave,” and through that behavior the feelings might change over time. However, you can’t blame someone for a reactive emotion, be it positive or negative. Humans don’t have control over their emotions.

As such, of course we’re all allowed to like what you like, but ‘liking’ something is not your ‘behavior’. Liking something is a feeling. Everything else you choose to do are actions, and you need to think them through because every action has a consequence, either on you or the environment around you.

Since you mentioned Killing Stalking, we’ll use it as an example. Although you’re allowed to like what you like, do you also know the reasons why some people are so vehemently against it? It’s not just the murder and it’s not just the depiction of abuse, and it’s not okay just to handwave it all under “haters will be haters”. These are people genuinely upset about this comic’s contents and consumption, and as someone who is choosing to enjoy it, I personally feel as though fans have a responsibility to first understand what these people are so upset about, and then make an informed decision whether or not to read it.

Once I learned that Killing Stalking was so negatively received by some individuals, I did my research. I read reasons why people dislike it. I specifically searched for primary sources, reactions of gay men and reactions of individuals with BPD. I went in with a neutral mindset - I had only just started reading the comic and I wouldn’t have minded giving it up at that point - and then decided what points I could empathize with and thought about how these viewpoints - different from my own - would affect my actions. Typically, there are three questions:

1) Will I continue reading/watching?

2) Will I financially support this content?

3) Will I socially support this content?

Question 1:In my opinion, only the first question depends on your personal likes/dislikes. Yes, you can like what you like. You can consume questionable content. However, if your answer to that is ‘yes’ or even a ‘maybe’, you absolutely have to ask yourself the next two questions.

Question 2:We live in an era of rampant digital pirating, and though yes, it is a crime and people are always encouraged not to, I’ve never personally met someone of my generation who hasn’t pirated a movie if they missed it in theaters and then couldn’t find it on Netflix and or Amazon Video. Popular books can be downloaded as PDFs or epubs. Foreign comic translation is a veritable unpaid industry of its own, on the internet (which is its own bucket of problems, but that’s not what this post is about).

So, ultimately, though the economic and moral implications are a bit hazy, you get to decide whether or not you financially support anything you watch or read. You can decide whether or not something that you find enjoyable is also something you think there should be more of in the world. In the modern capitalistic era, you as a consumer have the power to vote with your wallet, in a sense. I’m going to give an example of how this might work after this section.

I will say, however, if you plan to indirectly profit off your interaction with certain media, no matter how problematic, you have an obligation to support the author for their work. If you are going to write a movie review as an official film critic, you have to watch it in theaters. If you are going to write a book review in an official capacity, buy the book. This is partially because I believe that if you’re profiting off someone else’s work in any way, that someone should be compensated even if you hated it, and mostly because I believe that reviewers will be more accurate if they actually pay the money to see if something was “worth their money”.

This is also the reason why I bought Killing Stalking through its official channels. I had built up a surprising following for my lost-in-translation posts and even received a small sum of donations for my write-ups. As such, as an aspiring content creator myself, I could not in good conscience not pay for the webcomic when the official version was so easily accessible to me. This is also why once I felt too uncomfortable with the content and author’s comments that I stopped my lost-in-translation posts as well. I didn’t feel comfortable financially supporting her, and I didn’t feel comfortable profiting off someone else’s content for free.

Also I just didn’t want to read anymore, ahaha.

An example of something I would watch if I didn’t have to financially support it, though, is the new Ghost in the Shell movie. Even though I have pretty much vocalized everything I dislike about it, I am curious to see it for myself. If I really, really wanted to, I could easily watch the movie without providing financial support or official viewership. However, in exchange, I wouldn’t feel right writing a review about it, especially not a monetized one, due to my personal stance on creative content and also because a low-quality laptop-screen experience would greatly differ from a cinema-quality experience.

Question 3:And lastly, separate from the financial question, you have to ask whether or not you will socially support something. Word-of-mouth and fandom content are powerful, powerful forms of marketing, especially on Tumblr.

I read Killing Stalking and actively contributed to the fandom with my cultural / language translation posts. However, followers of mine might have noticed that aside from the first week or so, I never reblogged any fanart or other such content. This was because, although I personally was reading the comic with some interest, it was not content I wanted to actively encourage others to read. For the same reason, I assured all my followers that every post of mine with Killing Stalking content would be appropriately tagged so that they can blacklist it, should they feel it necessary.

There are some things that I read and enjoy that I choose not to support publicly or enthuse about. Some might call it disingenuous and others might tell me not to let others censor my behavior, but it is an intentional decision on my part. In the case of Killing Stalking, I had several reasons.

Firstly, I knew not all my followers were comfortable with it, and I want my blog to be a comfortable and accessible place for most people. This was especially true because I knew for a fact that I had some younger followers age 14 and 15 and so, and let me tell you, I remember being that age and feeling like I knew enough to make informed choices. I have learned more with age, enough to recognize that rather than controlling the media I consumed, the media I consumed was controlling me. I was young and impressionable, and I made some mistakes I’m not proud of.

I was especially careful after the first week or so to not post fanart, no matter how nice, because as a teenager, I was so, so, so easily influenced by good fanart. In fact, I am still so easily won over by good fanart and funny content, and this is a problem for me as a person, and it’s dragged me down some pretty questionable rabbit holes in the past.

Secondly, another reason I limited fandom participation outside of my lost-in-translation posts was because sure, Killing Stalking is an interesting story in some capacity, but it isn’t a story I would outright recommend to the general masses, like I would some other media. Killing Stalking is more of a story that people will end up finding if they’re interested in such content in the first place.

In fact, it’s something that I would have found worrying if it had become widely popular, because then it truly would become a social influence and start affecting people’s views of the world.

As an additional note, some people would argue that the ‘lost-in-translation’ posts that I made might have been a form of promotion for this comic. Perhaps that is true, I don’t know. However, the way I see it, the people who would have seen those posts were individuals already in the fandom, and how I saw it, the fandom needed something more than just the fanart and the fanfics. There were a lot of people explaining why fans of Killing Stalking shouldn’t support the comic, but the problem is - and I know this from experience - the vast majority of fans, especially younger fans, won’t read about people hating what they like.

More often than not, a diehard Harry Potter fan won’t read an article about how much the original Harry Potter books suck, except to judge the person who wrote it. Sure, Killing Stalking isn’t Harry Potter and honestly it’s laughable that I even made that comparison at all, but the nature of fans don’t change from story to story. Fans are fans. Killing Stalking fans either wouldn’t have read or wouldn’t have taken to heart some pretty harsh, legitimate criticisms of the comic, especially when they’re really into it.

If someone is already a fan of something and someone comes up to them telling them (often aggressively) that they are wrong to be a fan, those two individuals are already established as enemies. Heck, we see how heated sports fans get about their teams. It’s also pretty much proven human nature, especially in individualistic societies, that if someone tells you not to do something, you feel the need to continue in order to re-establish your autonomy.

So a large part of why I made those lost-in-translation posts was so that people already in the fandom had someone within the fandom they could engage with who could offer some perspective on some of the more dangerous elements within the story. And people have come to ask me for advice about it, you included, Anon! And I’m genuinely grateful that you value and trust my opinion on topics such as these.

Reasons why “I know it’s not real” is not an adequate excuse for unchecked fandom behavior:

This is a metaphor I spent some time developing, but I think it fits. Though, I did come up with the metaphor thinking of a gun-free area, so it might not apply to all parts of America, aha, but let’s just roll with it:

Say, for instance, you have a model gun. Anyone can tell that it’s fake if they take the time to look at it, but it’s still a pretty accurate depiction of a gun. You know it’s not real, and most adults can tell it’s not real. Saying “the content’s not real, so let people reblog whatever they want” is akin to saying “it’s not a real gun, so let people carry it wherever they want.” Sure, that may be a fair point… except, long-term, carrying realistic model guns wherever you want leads to two distinct but significant problems:

1) Children grow desensitized to the sight of guns.

2) It becomes harder to tell the difference between model and real guns.

Problem 1:If children become desensitized to the sight of guns, they grow desensitized to the true danger that comes with holding a gun. One of the most powerful moments of my life, to date, is the first time I held a big, sharp knife. Because I had never held a knife before, I felt the weight of the metal, saw the glint of the edge, and oh boy, I was a little terrified knowing that I held a potential weapon in my hand. It kept me wary. It kept me careful.

Children who grow up desensitized to guns wouldn’t have that with guns. They wouldn’t feel that same danger, and really, that means there’s just one less hurdle between them and real guns.

Problem 2:Where oh where to begin with this. First of all, if children grow up thinking all the model guns are real guns, they’ll end up getting a real gun instead of a model gun. What will they say when they get caught and in trouble? “Everyone else does it, though!” and it may or may not be true.

Secondly, if some people start carrying real guns around amidst the model guns, and the model guns look realistic too, we have difficulty picking out the real guns from the model guns. We know they’re out there, but we can’t tell which is which. It’s not like you could check every single person out there carrying a model gun.

Thirdly, it becomes more difficult to tell real danger from fake danger. In a model gun society, maybe it’s commonplace for people to point model guns at each other as a joke. Haha, it’s fake, we all laugh. But maybe there’s someone out there being threatened by someone close to them with a real gun, disguised as a joke, and we can’t tell.

The Explanation:Maybe I lost you a bit there. It’s a little difficult to see how this relates to problematic fictional media. But again, let’s take Killing Stalking and pretend it became widely popular and mainstream. If something gets super popular and mainstream, it becomes a fad.

I’ll be honest, I lost this entire section when the post restarted, so I’m going to just give you the cliffnotes version. I’m sorry, I’ll rewrite it at some point;;

1) Children get desensitized easily. Think of any drugs, even alcohol or tobacco. The more you take, the more your body builds a tolerance, the more you need to take next time to have the same effect. The human brain is one of the most changeable parts of the body, and it will do the same thing with fictional media. Repeated exposure to something will have an effect. That’s why exposure therapy exists. Simultaneous exposure is a whole different beast. That’s why Pavlovian conditioning exists.

2) Desensitized children grow up into desensitized adults who think that what they went through / the intensity / content of media they watched was the norm, and they will go on to raise children who might end up even more desensitized than them. Perhaps that would just make it ‘natural social change,’ but is is a desirable one?

3) Also, in the case of Killing Stalking, people wore cosplay with visible signs of abuse to conventions. Some conventions have children attending. I am of the opinion that children should not be exposed to fake signs of physical abuse as that is not something that should be normalized.

4) Just these last two weeks, two separate men in two separate countries Facebook Livestreamed the murders they committed. We are living in a technologically developing society that is simultaneously exhibitionist, voyeuristic, and Orwellian. If media like Killing Stalking became popular and mainstream and encouraged similar media to come onto the market, especially in live-action, it will become harder and harder to distinguish the ‘real’ from the ‘not real’. In the future, someone might livestream someone they keep locked in the basement, reassuring their viewers that it’s all ‘fake’ and just an ‘experimental storytelling’ thing. In a society where such media is commonplace, we just might believe it. 

In Closing:

I am aware that not everyone has the patience, energy, or desire to do this research with every controversial piece of media they choose to consume. That’s up to them. However, even these individuals have a responsibility to be mindful about their behavior. Even if you don’t research, if there are people criticizing the content of whatever you are reading/watching, acknowledge that there must be something that bothers some people. You cannot determine that you are right and they are ‘too sensitive’ without actually doing the research.

Be mindful that, no matter what measures people take, there are probably preteens in your fandom. I won’t tell you what to do with that information, but at least keep it in mind.

One person’s mindfulness changes little, but little changes build up. I would write more but it is long and I have a headache, good bye;;