i see antis argue sometimes that you CAN portray “problematic” things in fiction, as long as you show they’re bad/don’t romanticize them.
first of all that’s super suggestive. second of all.
have you ever read major character death. have you ever read hurt no comfort. have you ever read, like, mindbreak.
i’ve never seen anyone complain about a fic that is graphic torture and nothing else, or like, a mental health ventfic with a dark ending. and i think about that quite often, the different standard we have for sex.
yknow? it applies in other contexts too. have you ever noticed that when people argue fanfiction is a lesser form of writing or otherwise bad, they always bring up sex? “the odyssey vs your 200k destiel omegaverse mpreg” “the great gatsby vs your slowburn stucky hs au where the climax is a full chapter of smut”
it’s a trend i noticed. it exists outside of fanfic too! original fiction circles have this whole thing about not including sex scenes bc The Plot, or dismissing erotica as a less serious, or maybe just lesser, form of literature?
and maybe, just maybe, that’s bad. to some degree i think we put sex on too high of a pedestal. it’s just a thing people do. and, i dunno, i write a lot of angst and whump and what-have-you. i like exploring trauma and recovery, it’s literally a thread somewhere in 90% of what i write. maybe all of it, in some small capacity. i don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of my own work.
so i’m not directly affected by this, but i do think it’s hypocritical, and i do think it’s strange to impose limits. you can create, but only within these boundaries, defined arbitrarily by me. like, okay jan. sure.
