Fascinated with this type of person who will see a post with a completely clear and direct intent and imagine that it is secretly about something else.
In this case, imagining that a post reminding people that they are allowed to write about evil characters is somehow about believing it’s okay to do evil things in real life.
For those of you who might see this post and not know what “proship” means: it’s a fandom term that means you don’t believe people should be harassed for writing immoral characters or taboo relationships in fanfiction.
New writers living in an anti world will have internalized they aren’t allowed to enjoy their villain and antihero characters, which is terrible because so much of writing is finding a way to kill the critic.
I wish more people would try writing horror fiction. I think they would realize that there is no “pure” way to write it. You get sick satisfaction from the evil shit you are putting on page or you don’t write it at all. That’s how creativity is. The well dries up if you aren’t enjoying what you are doing.
Many of the best horror writers know that what they are doing is monstrous. It’s an act of a particular kind of creativity – like making a bonzai tree but bending all the limbs to look the least natural.
When I was a kid, monsters made me feel that I could fit somewhere, even if it was… an imaginary place where the grotesque and the abnormal were celebrated and accepted.
-Guillermo del Toro
I’m not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.
-Stephen King
Even if the genre isn’t horror, when you are writing about your blorbo suffering, you want them to suffer. You take glee in it. And if they start to triumph against the foe, they are triumphing against something that you put them through. They are defeating you. And you feel the need to put things in the way of their victory. Make it a phyrric victory – you the writer, are what is getting in the way if the beloved characters success! You are the villain!
This well of creativity cannot exist if you constantly practice thought policing your own brain. Antis, hyper aware of checking that that they are enjoying things the right way because they have gotten in the practice of testing whether it is ok to ship or identify with a character based on some percieved moral criteria, will rightly look at a post telling them that its ok to write evil characters being cool and think that it’s directed at them because it is in fact directed at the same moralizing and shaming property.
Kill the critic and you realize that you can write what you want.
Antis who are themselves more experienced writers are the most likely to write hypocritical screads that try to explain that their dark fiction is guiltless while someone else’s is not. They are writers – by definition they must have partially killed the critic, but they have to wear an anti shaped mask in order to exist in polite anti society. But the mask doesn’t fit right. They point fingers at other writers – I can’t be the monster, look, that is what a monster looks like! It’s not me.
They know that the crowd is hungry for blood, they live in anti society, populated by anti people. Monsters get doxxed, harassed, abused, mocked, they are acceptable victims. It’s dangerous to be a monster.
And anyone who doesn’t participate in pointing fingers, (maybe, maybe because they are tired of all the blood) must be a monster too.
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