đ You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.
đ You are allowed to have evil characters who win.
đ You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.
đ You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.
đ You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.
đ You are not obligated to teach your audience a moral lesson.
đ You are allowed to slap it,
only once.
In all seriousness, as evidenced by the original tags on this post:
This post is meant to conflate writing “proship” fanfiction to rebellion against societal concepts that lead to the creation of the Hays Code (which, by the way, regulated film, not literature).
In fact, literature involving power dynamics within romantic relationships has been on the rise. “BookTok”, a trend of certain kinds of romantic novels being heavily advertised on TikTok, has frequently pushed novels involving power dynamics, such as having a relationship with your employer, or a mob boss. This trend has been so prominent as to have dedicated sections in retailers such as Barnes and Noble. “Fifty Shades of Grey”set records as the fastest-selling paperback in the United Kingdom.
There is no large, active, cultural / political attack on the fanfiction (or published fiction) championed under the “proship” label. There have been no political movements with momentum within the US to crack down on literature romanticizing incest, csa, or abuse.
As far as the Hays Code goes, the sympathy from writers and the general audience towards villains has been quite high for a while now, with films such as Maleficent and Cruella seeking to humanize popular villains previously shown in an unsympathetic light. Films featuring morally dubious protagonists, such as The Suicide Squad, are also fairly popular and recieve large marketing and merchandising pushes from their publishers (Warner Bros., In this case).
The ideology behind the Hays Code is associated with US Conservatives, and yet relatively little pushback from conservative groups has been seen concerning these media trends. What has been seen is a political push against literature with gay or trans themes, sex education topics, and which tackles the history of race & white supremacy in the US. A library in Llano County of Texas has threatened to cease operations after being ordered to return books which were illegally removed without notice, such as “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group.”
When you see posts like these, consider whether the OP is talking about a form of censorship which exists in reality, or whether they may have run into someone who didn’t like their fanfiction on AO3, and spun a narrative for themselves.
Nah fam, this is about the kids on this app telling others to kill themselves over fictional content and harming actual SA survivors via watering down terms like pedophilia.
As an artist from the country that coined the term “degenerate art”: This is ufortunately way too familiar and I’d suggest looking into (art) history (lmk if i can provide ressources, happy to help!).
Side note: There’s a difference between causing discomfort and actually harming someone. Most antis don’t see this, but i hope you do.
Fiction, on its own, can’t harm. It can be _used_ to harm (but there has to be an intention behind that), or it can be viewed by people whose parents didn’t teach them media literacy. Which is why we say:
If you see content that makes you u uncomfortable, you have to simply use the block button. The internet is not your safe space.
âIâm not trying to ban books, Iâm trying to ban gross fanfictionâ
Are you hearing yourself?
Im here to remind you, that AO3 was banned in our country đĽ´
As a librarian the absolute bullshit âoh this stuff has nothing to do with real censorshipâ literally makes me see red. Because yes it does. Yes it fucking does.Â
How do you think the fucking âgroomerâ narrative got as far as it fucking has? Do you actually think they made it up out of thin air? Do you think it actually started in the last couple fucking years out of nowhere? Or is it just that you finally noticed it was a fucking stalking horse being used against your friends?Â
It fucking started ten fucking years ago and more when this toxic fucking bullshit started, and then when leaked out into YA twitter, out into YA writing, out into the Fucking Discourse. It bloomed. It grew. It was pouring massive fertilizer onto latent repressive bullshit and the fucking repressive, homophobic, transphobic, everything else -ist assholes loved it.
It fucking moved with challenges to Call Me By Your Name on the basis of âunhealthy age gapâ while people like fucking you went âoh but maybe they have a point tho, thereâs Better Representation out there than that and that is Problematic anyway!â And on. And on. And I had to sit there and fucking listen to people like you laugh off or mock the idea that this shit was going to get us right back to where we are right now while you fucking claimed to be protecting queer kids.
It fucking started with people deciding âoh no, Twlight IS magically Causing Abuse Amongst Our Girlchildrenâ it fucking started with people going âOh no 50 Shades will turn everyone into unsafe misogynistic kink fiends it fucking started when you all lost your fucking minds and pulled on the Moralist Policing of Fiction hats like it somehow wouldnât fucking come back to bite us, like it isnât always, always used against us first.Â
From people who should have fucking known better who decided to leap across the gulf between âhey rep is important and maybe we should spend some time thinking about the narratives we enjoyâ straight across to âany narrative I deem morally inappropriate is a poison on society shouldnât existâ like they didnât even fucking notice it was there, and also didnât know it would be turned against all of us in a heartbeat.Â
And we fucking told you that it would, and weâre still telling you, and above and beyond anything else (and there is so much else) it is literally putting my colleagues in anything from employment to literal physical jeopardy while youâve all fucking normalized the idea of âfiction that depicts immoral things is itself immoral and will Destroy Childrenâs Fragile Psychesâ for the last ten fucking years, and you sit there Tut Tutting about âbut this only applies to stuff that I think is a problemâ?Â
From the deepest part of me, fuck that and fuck off and people like you are absolutely, 100% part of the fucking problem. Get your head out of your goddamn ass and stop carrying fascist water because someoneâs fucking headcanon makes you feel icky. Because this shit was always going to end here. It was always going to end with whatâs happening right now. And we fucking told you so.Â
Discussion ¬