Too Wild to Be True: Why Audiences Aren’t Ready for Your Unfiltered Experience
Yesterday I wrote about something that’s slightly related to a topic I came across here today, a post saying that readers and critics have forgotten how to perceive a speculative premise as an independent idea. Any fictional conflict is immediately equated with real-world politics or specific social groups.
My situation, however, is that I can’t seem to translate the real-world experience of a group into a fictional format.
When I was leaving Russia, I used the services of lawyers who handled specific human rights cases. There, I crossed paths with a trans woman who was a journalist. She told me about her experience with conversion therapy. Her relatives had her committed there against her will for an indefinite period. This was April 2023. The bill banning gender transition had been introduced but not yet passed, and the official “extremist” label for the entire LGBTQ+ community was still a few months away. So, this girl told me how she spent nine months in a rehab facility undergoing conversion therapy. Nine months of torture, from which she eventually escaped by literally running through forests and fields.
I felt it was worth documenting. Didn't overthink the 'why', it just seemed necessary to track it. At the moment when the state dropped the act and declared us internal enemies, a lot of creepy shit started happening that you just can’t unsee. And, as it turns out, recording it is a problem of its own.
I thought: okay, I’m an artist, I make comics. You know. But the thing is, this girl's story is a sadistic torture of the mind and body of a living human being, and there are no fucking words for it.
The most fucked up part is that Western and European audiences read this as sadistic content. Every culture has its own representative canon of what is marked as “realistic” and what is automatically pushed into the realm of exploitation, horror, or edgy shock content. What is “permissible” is dictated not by logic, but by the collective experience of the environment.
To put it bluntly, different audiences have different "markets of realism." In some places, realism is a divorce, depression, an emotionally distant father, school bullying, and one uncomfortable family secret. In others, “everyday life” includes things that, to a more sheltered viewer, look like excessive directorial sadism.
This creates a state of narrative impasse - a problem of the horizon of plausibility.
Firstly, the reader accepts a story as “possible” not because it is objectively possible, but because it fits into their existing mental maps of the world (Shout-out to the original post).
Secondly, this is linked to testimonial injustice - epistemic injustice. This is when a person's testimony is given less weight not because it’s been debunked, but because the bearer of that experience exists outside the "norm." If you talk about this kind of violence from within the environment, they effectively tell you: “You’re either dramatizing, or your perception is warped, or you’re just retelling an internet horror story.” Reality is turned into an allegedly problematic aesthetic choice. I’ve been dealing with this for years.
Privileged viewers often perceive violence as an anomaly rather than a systemic infrastructure. It seems to them that if something horrific happens, there must be exceptional circumstances. There’s a political layer here, too. The center of the world loves to think of its norm as universal. If something sounds “too wild” in their cultural field, it isn’t immediately recognized as a local reality of the periphery. It first passes through a filter of exoticization. It’s not “this is happening,” it’s “this is some dark regional extreme of yours.”
As a result, a person from a harsher environment ends up in a trap of double alienation: they lived through it, and then they have to prove they didn’t invent it for effect.
By the way, my lawyers were later attacked. They managed to get the fuck out of Russia even earlier than I did.
The reason I’m speaking up at all is that for a year now, I’ve been watching the LGBTQ+ community in many countries go through more or less the same thing we went through. I figured you guys were finally ready for this conversation, lol. Now it won’t sound as unrealistic to you as it did two years ago.
