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Here’s the thing about the argument that fiction the argument that “fiction that portrays bad evil wrong things as good will result in the audience believing that bad evil wrong thing is good in real life.”
When fiction impacts us, it’s not because it has flipped our morality like a switch.
It’s because that the fiction, like anything else, has presented us with an idea. It has made a moral argument.
When someone makes a moral argument you don’t just automatically agree with them even when they’re persuasive.
You–instinctively, even, not just consciously– compare the moral argument to your current morality. You weight it against the rules you know, and how you were raised, and your current feelings about harming another person.
Fiction that says “murder is good” doesn’t flip a “murder is good” switch in people.
The only people you can convince that “murder is good” with a piece of fiction, is people who were already ready to believe that murder is good.
This post is probably my favorite way to describe how fiction impacts you:
Astolfo Says Disability Rights
tl;dr: if you already know that fucking your sibling is bad (and most do), not even binging GoT in one sitting will change that, because that is your internal template. “propaganda” has a higher chance of working on things you have a weaker internal template about, like a country or a group of people you don’t know much about. The argument analogy works well too!
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