roach-works:mywingsareonwheels:duamuteffe:heroofthreefaces:moon-crater:fangirlofall:one-lonely-w
roach-works:mywingsareonwheels:duamuteffe:heroofthreefaces:moon-crater: fangirlofall: one-lonely-whumperfly: rainbowloliofjustice: athenagray: decepticonsensual: cleo4u2: THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life. No. Just NO. I’m so glad someone put it into words. Lin-Manuel Miranda is a legend, and he’s absolutely right. And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling. I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person. I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts. And if you get to a point where it’s bad to have dark thoughts and it’s bad to wonder what something would be like and it’s bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isn’t “pure”, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity… well, maybe not everyone’s brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human. Purity culture is gonna kill art if y’all let it. Fiction is a safe place to explore whatever fucked up or dark desire that you have. You can write the most vile and fucked up shit in fiction and it be absolutely nothing you desire in real life. You can write about a serial killer who gets away with it. You can write about someone who goes on moral crusades to purge the world of all evils and still be the protagonist. You can write anything in fiction because that’s what it is meant for. It isn’t meant to be a social commentary unless you create it to be. It isn’t meant to be educational unless you create it to be. Sometimes a story can be just that, a story. Entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. Not everything has to be deep, or have meaning, etc. unless the creator wants it to be and a lot of the purity types end up forcing something to have deep meaning or social commentary where it isn’t meant to. Is this inherently bad? No, but these people don’t just say “But this is my interpretation of it.” they go as far as trying to force that interpretation onto everyone else, including the creator, as a means of saying “See? It means that they promote/condone xyz so they’re bad and shitty people who should spend the rest of their life in jail with/are the same as people who’ve actually committed acts of violence against other people.” THANK. YOU. @ all the people in the notes saying “yes except u can’t write about (list of immoral things they don’t want to see in fiction)” congrats on missing the point so spectacularly I’m not sure I could create better performance art if I tried So, I have OCD. Responsibility/harm OCD, in particular. And guys, let me tell you, the hardline stance that having bad thoughts makes you bad is actively harmful to people like me. “Having a thought means you will act on it” goes against everything mental health professionals say and what mental health advocates stand for. And you know, there are people who have it even worse than me? Religious OCD often focuses on achieving complete moral purity. P-OCD features fears of secretly being a pedophile. Postpartum depression features intrusive, frightening thoughts that sometimes drive new parents to suicide because of the stigma of having those thoughts. There are stories of people actually being investigated by child protective services because they shared their fears with an ignorant health professional who believed thought=action. Many abuse survivors with PTSD live in terror of becoming abusers themselves, and any errant negative thought that floats across their brain can frighten them into thinking they’re becoming monsters. Perpetuating the idea that thoughts=actions makes it hard for people struggling with intrusive thoughts to reach out for help dealing with them. That makes mentally ill people live in unnecessary misery. It isolates them. Sometimes it even kills them. Accepting and exploring bad thoughts is actually the basis of exposure and response prevention therapy for OCD. It’s literally part of the treatment for the illness. Discouraging that act, portraying it as evil, can be detrimental to recovery. “Oh,” you might say if you’re guilty of this, “I don’t mean people like you with bad thoughts, I mean people who write bad thoughts!” Cool. Doesn’t fucking matter. People like me hear and internalize it. People who have these illnesses and don’t yet recognize that hear and internalize it; they may never get help because of it. You can’t lob a bomb at your enemy and un-kill all the bystanders caught in the blast. Not how that works. Fandom needs to stop being so far up its own ass about fictional content that it’s becoming ableist. There are real world consequences for the ignorant ideas being pushed. Even if you don’t care about fiction as a tool for catharsis, even if you don’t care about the importance of art as free expression, even if you don’t care about censorship, you should still criticize this trend in fandom because it’s ableist as fuck. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Transcription of the Miranda quote in the images: “I find that, for me, the work is a safe place to put all the stuff you don’t want to put in your real life. I don’t want to be a crazy, manic asshole. I don’t want to have an affair. I don’t want to have a fucking gunfight. But! There’s a part of your brain that wants to experience everything, and so work’s a safe place to explore it all. Both in the writing and in the performing. I get to write about having an affair. I get to have the guilt and the feeling of that without having to fuck my life up. [laughs] Art is the place to safely explore all those other sides of you, because the side you want to bring home is the side that wants to be a good father and be a good husband and be a good son. In art we can be fucking nuts.” [description of image above: an extract from “Witches Abroad” by Terry Pratchett:-“You’d have done the same,” said Lily.“No,” said Granny. I’d have thought the same, but I wouldn’t have done it.”“What difference does that make, deep down?”“You mean you don’t know?” said Nanny Ogg.] what matters is how you treat other people. not what you think or what you write or draw or what you read or watch or play or dream. just how you, a person, treat the other people in your life. antis might have the purest thoughts any person has ever managed, but they treat other people like shit, which means they’re assholes. it’s that simple. -- source link