🔹 Someone else’s fiction cannot cause you physical harm.
🔹If someone else’s fiction is causing you emotional or psychological harm, or distress, you can put it down and not read/watch it.
🔹Your emotional well-being is not the responsibility of fiction writers.
🔹Someone else’s fiction is not about your personal trauma.
🔹When reading or watching fiction, you always have the power. You can always stop. You are never reading fiction without your own consent.
🔹Fiction writers are not responsible for other people’s mental health.
🔹The content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of its author.
🔹Just because someone writes about bad things happening, doesn’t mean they want those things to happen.
🔹Don’t like? Don’t read.
“The content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of its author.”
Allow me to be clearer, because I think you misunderstand.
Your personal interpretation of the content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of it’s author.
You have to understand that you’re, lowkey, being dismissive.
Every interpretation of a story is- personal. You aren’t gonna interpret the entire story the exact same way your friends interpret it or even the author itself. Our interpretation is entirely based on personal feelings, knowledge, experience, etc. It’s an inherently subjective process.
Though, that doesn’t magically mean our interpretation of things are inherently false, kind of like how you shouldn’t just dismiss people that think the Earth is flat or Pluto is a planet. You should be asking, “Why? Why do you think the Earth is flat? Why do you think Pluto is a planet? Why do you think [random author goes here] is a bad person? What evidence do have that supports this?”
Media literacy is gonna stay low if we can’t bring ourselves to have more constructive discussions.
I feel like we have some kind of miscommunication or disconnect of meaning here.
Because I agree with you that every interpretation of a story is personal.
Which is exactly why we can’t draw any conclusions about an author’s morality based solely on the content of their writing and our interpretation of it.
There was a post going around recently where someone had misinterpreted Miyazaki’s anti-fascist work to believe that he was pro-fascist.
A person can’t go around assuming that an author believes in immoral ideas just because the characters in their fiction act in immoral ways.
Here’s some context for “"The content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of its author.”
and
“Your personal interpretation of the content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of it’s author."
You can’t say, "Well it’s okay to judge the morality of an author based on their fiction if you’re correctly interpreting that fiction.”
Because, my friend, every person who interprets a piece of fiction believes that their interpretation is the correct one.
The tumblr user who recently posted believing that Hayao Miyazaki had nationalist beliefs and made movies that supported fascism believed that their interpretation was correct, and judged Miyazaki’s morals based on that assumption.
The people who think Nabokov wrote Lolita as an endorsement of child abuse rather than a work of fiction against child abuse believe that their interpretation is correct, and judge the author based on that assumption.
The moment you allow yourself to judge an author’s morals based on your assessment and interpretation of their fiction–
–you are opening yourself up to falsely judging victims who were writing about the abuse and injustice they suffered or witnessed, because you falsely believed you were supposed to root for the abuser.
–you are opening yourself up to falsely judging people who were writing about the horribleness of crime and abuse, and injustice who fumbled the message or didn’t portray it in a way that is clear enough for you.
Unless and until an author comes out and tells you why they wrote a certain thing a certain way, you cannot know for certain why they wrote it. You cannot judge their moral intent.
If someone writes a horrible dystopia and then in an author’s note says “I wrote this because I think this is the world we should live in and aspire to you” please, please judge them.
If someone writes a book about child abuse and gives an interview where they say “I believe that this is the way we should treat children, this is good and just” please, please judge them.
But you can’t know. You can’t believe that you know.
You have to judge people on their actions in the real world and their words that they say they believe, not the fiction that they create.
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