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🔹 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.
Valid, except in the case of children. Required and forced (via threat of punishment) to read what adults decide. One of my parental units made me read an extremely traumatizing book when I was young. Justified it by saying I needed to be tougher. Berated me when I cried.
Dunno what people in that situation can do. Try and find support networks, I suppose. Not that I had any clue how to do that at the time.
This is absolutely true and deserves its own post. I also experienced the same situation where material an abusive parent forced me to read was extremely traumatizing. I’m sorry you went through that, too.
Ultimately, I didn’t talk about that in my post above because I felt it would derail the meaning too much. Perhaps I should have put an aside in that forcing someone else to read something that upsets them is abusive.
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