Reader & Writer

And a lot of people would rather keep it unfinished and perfect in their head than done and flawed and out there. an unfinished draft can still be anything. once you finish it, it becomes one specific thing with specific failures that specific people can point to. so you keep tweaking. you keep saying it's not ready. you go back to the beginning again.

"If time didn't flow, perhaps I would." - #Hades 2

Am I procrastinating? Yes, yes I am. Do I care? Uh... still yes but also no. And very much going down the painfully shallow flamewitch rabbit hole.

"By Gaea, you'll be my undoing."

Prometheus Hadesgame: THE EAGLE NOW WORKS FOR ME

I think what people don't realize when they say stuff like that is that those are literal Hay's Code guidelines. "Yes you can portray the bad thing, as long as it's explicitly said to be bad, and done by bad people, and all the bad people are punished for it".

Saying "dark themes can be portrayed, but only if they're portrayed as bad" is not advocating in favor of art, it's more advocating in favor of propaganda. The main purpose of art is not to be didactic, or to teach good morals or a guideline to tell people how to live their lives.

So yeah, characters can have shitty harmful opinions and never learn or be corrected in the narrative, villains might never be punished for their actions, the evil toxic romance might be portrayed as sexy, and no one will turn to the camera to tell you how the bad thing is bad and you shouldn't do it in real life.

(I know there's not, really, but just pretend for a second that "violent video games make people more violent" or similar is simply a true statement.)

There is a difference between paternalism and actually being a parent.

When you are a parent, you are responsible for the actions of a person who does not have the experience/knowledge to reasonably make informed decisions, and who may not be capable of differentiating between fantasy and reality. My 2-year-old niece, for example, is not currently capable of comprehending the consequences of stabbing someone with a sharp implement, because she's 2. The contextual knowledge very simply isn't present in her mushy toddler brain.

When you are exercising paternalistic moral authority, you are telling a Whole Ass Adult that you have the right to limit or remove their autonomy because you disagree with their preferences or opinions.

Regardless of what potential future actions you may or may not be exerting an influence over by doing so, you are literally curtailing someone's freedoms based on your personal opinion. That is never an acceptable course of action.

Hot Take: Paternalism is Bad, Actually