‼️ The only person who should have the power to decide if a piece of fiction is harming you emotionally or psychologically is you.
‼️ Any fiction you feel like you are being harmed by you can stop reading/watching/creating it at any time.
‼️ You are always in control when you are consuming or creating fiction.
‼️ Do not surrender the power to decide what fictional ideas might cause you emotional or psychological harm to other people.
‼️ No one will ever know better than you what ideas are harmful to you personally.
‼️ You cannot decide what is psychologically or emotionally harmful to another person.
‼️ Attempting to restrict the kind of fiction that people create or consume because you think it might cause them emotional or psychological harm is authoritarian.
‼️ It is safe to explore any ideas and themes in fiction. Fiction does not and cannot cause physical harm to any person. You are always in control of the fiction you are creating or consuming.
Yeah it is purity culture.
Big time disagree. It’s one thing to say “this rando on AO3 wrote some fucked up shit. If you don’t like don’t read”. It’s a very different thing to say “Sure this major Film/TV franchise is promoting harmful stereotypes, but if that bothers you just don’t watch it”
In general I really don’t like “if you don’t approve of X just don’t do it” arguments, because the reply is obvious “I’m not going to just bury my head in the sand while other people participate in something that sooner or later IS going to affect me”.
And the thing is it’s not a binary between small creators and big ones; the ability to do harm scales entirely with the size of the audience. So my attitude is whether censorship/backlash/dogpiling is ok depends entirely on what the thing is and whether the backlash is deserved.
Sexually explicit content? That’s fine; any haters just need to stop being prudes. If the fiction includes minors or nonconsensual situations? Well hang on, now there’s a debate to be had!
Racism? I don’t care if the story only has 4 likes; that’s too many likes and the writer needs to get shouted down.
Like… mob rule on the internet certainly isn’t ideal. But I see a lot of fanfiction writers overcorrect and say that we’re supposed to have “manners” when commenting on AO3 and… no… I like the dogpiling and assholery system just fine. It’s an effective way to make people decide, if they’re passionate enough to keep making art that everyone else seems to hate.
Frankly I don’t know the context of this original post, and I am definitely filling in some of the blanks with my own projection. But the last time I heard someone making the “You decide what you’re offended by” argument, it was from Sargon of Akkad. So… not a good look IMO. I just feel like it’s incredibly unfair; it’s actually a rather noble undertaking to engage with a work of fiction even though your initial impression leads you to suspect you’ll find it disgusting. People SHOULD look more deeply into the stuff they’re offended by, and if their final verdict is that it’s 1000x worse than their initial impression, they should be allowed to be as brutal as they want in their criticism. I’m really sick of hearing “Well if you knew you were going to be offended by it why did you read it?” Because I wanted to give the thing the benefit of the doubt. And now I’ve determined that it has none.
Even if this is about the book bans in school, just because I agree that purity culture is wrong and that the books which are getting banned should not be, that doesn’t mean I at all agree with the logic you used to arrive at this conclusion. I don’t think Mein Kompf should be available in any middle school library; not without annotations and fact-checking at least! Ideas absolutely can and do result in physical harm.
‼️ Attempting to restrict the kind of fiction that people create or consume because you think it might cause them emotional or psychological harm is authoritarian.
And yeah– this IS about library book bans. AND fanfiction.
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