Fiction amplifies reality. Jaws didn’t manifest a never before seen fear of sharks, it played on existing misconceptions and existing fears, and amplified them. The fear of sharks already existed. With or without Jaws we feared sharks, then a scary movie came out and those fears became amplified. 

But amplification isn’t exclusively bad. 

Nabokov’s Lolita, aka the most famous pedophilic story of all time and heavily censored for being “pornographic”, amplified our understanding of pedophilia, the kinds of people who commit it (charming, well educated, attractive people), and brought that conversation from hushed rooms to national attention.

Fifty Shades of Gray should have caused an uptick of relationship abuse and misuse of BDSM (and maybe it did), but it also caused a nationwide conversation on abuse, stalking, cult behavior, controlling relationships, and healthy BDSM. 

A lot of young girls first encountered female masturbation through Judy Blume’s Deenie (one of the ALA’s top 100 banned books of all time and a 40 year old woman writing about teen masturbation, a big tumblr no-no). Deenie’s impact was so important that it’s often cited as an invaluable validation for women and queer women who felt that their exploration was somehow immoral. There’s an entire book full of letters from readers to Blume about how important that book was to them. 

Take a scroll through some ‘top banned books’ lists and count to yourself how many of them were banned for specifically exploring sexual content in a liberating way. Or how many were banned for questioning the system.

Every single censorship movement and every single banned book has an army of people insisting that “fiction [only negatively] affects reality”. Books like Perks of Being a Wallflower for daring to talk about child sexual assault by a woman and depiction of a gay teenager. Or Speak for exploring the sexual assault and suicide attempts of a teenage girl. 

In reality, these books amplified reality and gave voices to the voiceless–those who felt purposefully stifled by society. Visually represented by this comic. 

I also remember my church talking about how “that’s why it’s banned! It teaches rebellion! It teaches you to question authority!” I nodded along and assumed that those were bad things.

And then I read the book. I read it and I realised something.

The thing that that book taught me the most? Was to wonder WHY a book had been banned. Because once I read it I realized it wasn’t JUST about questioning authority, it was about questioning a system that enforces ignorance and conformity. Something that requires censorship to begin, control, and spread.

I’ve had moments in my life where I saw a piece of media and cringed. Where I was sick just knowing it exists. There are books and shows that I feel strongly against and have had passing thoughts about how they should be banned.

And then I remember reading Farenheit 451. And I remember to ask, “why do I want to ban it?” and “Who does banning this benefit and who does it harm?” as well as “If this is banned, what comes next? What else can be classified this way but is vital to society and the vulnerable people in it?”

Because fiction? Is an important exploration of humanity, good and bad. And it might amplify what’s already there in a bad way sometimes, but it also shines a light on the dark places that we can actually do something about. And if you take away that light, it doesn’t make the bad things go away, it just makes bad people able to hide in the dark.

Fiction reflects reality, and reality reflects fiction. Glorifying things isn’t a good idea because that will absolutely attract the people who also glorify those things. It happens with popular things, it happens with published fiction. It happens with online stories. And if you keep saying “well it’s just fiction” you’re protecting those types of people.

Fiction that glorifies the worst of the world attracts the worst of the world. They will always search it out. To justify themselves and to brainwash others into believing their “side”.

If you define glorification as “I’ll know it when I see it” you’ve just opened a very convenient door for anyone to rip fiction spaces apart in the name of “glorification of problematic ideas”. 

Do you know who suffers the most when we tear down “bad” fiction because it “makes bad people”? Survivors. Always. Far out and away, survivors are always the first to be ripped apart. 

It’s why Speak is banned, it’s why Perks of Being a Wallflower is banned, it’s why Looking for Alaska is banned, it’s why during strikeout that the far and away biggest group affected was sexual assault survivors,  CSA survivors, and queer spaces. Always. That’s why I told you to look through the banned book list. All of it is “bad” fiction. But all of it empowers vulnerable groups. 

Listen, I’m with you, underage fic gives me the skeevies, but I also know the answer isn’t “no depictions of minors in sexual situations” because you cross out teens exploring sex healthily through fantasy, you cross out adults looking back on their teen experiences, you cross out most of YA lets be real. 

Then maybe instead we say “no depictions of minors in sexual situations WITH ADULTS” for one, a good deal of CS abusers are teens themselves, but whatever, let’s pretend that doesn’t exist, you’ve just really effectively silenced survivors (teens and adults) from looking at their experiences through text.

Okay okay, let’s say “no depictions of minors in sexual situations with adults EXCEPT FOR SURVIVORS” kay now in order to not be harassed, a survivor has to tell a stranger who wants to harass them (or worse lbr) that they are indeed a survivor. AND you’ve just made a scenario where you are HAPPY and RELIEVED to hear that someone was sexually assaulted. I cannot begin to describe to you the level of gross that is.

Okay… @saltherpgnerd, as a survivor myself? Who was groomed using various pieces of media? Shut up.

Fuck this noise. Fuck all of it. You. Don’t. Get. To. Choose. What. Changes. The. World. Your personal opinion on whether something is good or bad means NOTHING about whether or not it has a place in the world.

I was groomed using media that, today, I would definitely consider skeevy (which I’m not naming because I’m not having that argument today). I would absolutely not give it to a kid to watch or read these days, but I also would NEVER demand it be banned. 1. Because there are about a billion harmless pieces of media that could fall under the same umbrella that would end up gone as well. 2. The stuff itself wasn’t the issue, it was my abusers. The shows didn’t abuse me, they did. And 3. I HAVE SEEN WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY BANNING THINGS. It’s guaranteed to get out of hand.

I do not care what some evil asshole thinks about a piece of media or that they can pervert it to their purposes. The very idea that the entire world has to suffer the loss of information because of a group of sick fucks offends me more than any piece of problematic media ever could.

Banning and destroying things that “glorify” gross things will ALWAYS be subjective and thus will always lead to vital things being thrown away and hidden. This is just how it works and as long as people are people, it’s how it will always be. We’ve seen it over and over again and it has never once ended up actually doing anything good for anyone. Abusers still abuse, they just find other methods. Like was said above, works that teach people how to identify and avoid abuse will also get defined as glorifying that shit and will end up banned. I may hate some shows with everything in me, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to let them disappear forever, if only so that people don’t come up with the same idea later and call it new and then we have to do this all over again.

You know how I finally realized I was abused and started to heal? Seeing my own abuse depicted in fiction. In a story that many, many people would consider glorifying abuse. I might be in a much different place if I hadn’t had access to it. I may have never found my way out of that place if I hadn’t had a chance to rewatch the shit from when I was younger after having my realization.

Media teaches us about what we are and aren’t willing to tolerate in our lives. It exposes us to new ideas and gives us a safe space to evaluate them. It let’s people explore the best and worst parts of themselves without making it anyone else’s problem. Even the very worst media out there serves a purpose.

You don’t protect someone by never letting them know what can hurt them. You teach them to protect themselves by exposing them to what exists in a controlled environment so they’re prepared. If no one tells me that arsenic is poisonous that doesn’t mean that it can never harm me. It just means that I might end up in a situation where I consume it just because I don’t recognize it.

And you know what? If nothing else? Gross media gives us an easy way to identify gross people. If a male has an unironic love of Fight Club on a surface level, I stay the fuck away. A guy tells me he relates to Rick Sanchez? I run all the way away. Problematic media drawing in shitty people is a feature, not a bug.

Along with being validated in the media they consume, survivors can also write about characters going through trauma, and getting the comfort and recognition that yes, what they went through was horrible– that they can’t/don’t get from people in real life.

Writing therapy isn’t just limited to journaling, it can be projecting your trauma onto OCs, writing poetry about it, headcanoning it happening to your favorite character, along with many other things. 

All of these are therapist approved ways of dealing with trauma. It’s extremely accessible, because you don’t necessarily have to have a therapist to do it.

This insane post I saw earlier today. Damn. I didn’t know that because I think people should be allowed to write what they want, it means I’m a pedo 😔

You claim to speak as a victim, but in your rush to condemn an entire community, you have become the very thing you claim to hate: a silencer. You are standing on a soapbox built from the lived trauma of others, using it to scream at people who use fiction to process, to vent, and to survive.

You state that "it’s not a thoughtcrime, it's an actual crime." This is a fundamental, dangerous delusion. A crime requires a victim: a living, breathing human being who has been harmed. Writing a story, drawing a picture, or engaging with problematic tropes does not harm a child. It does not facilitate grooming.

What does facilitate grooming is a culture of silence and the refusal to let survivors talk about the "ugly" parts of their history in the only ways they know how. By equating fiction with reality, you are trivializing real abuse. When you call a writer a pedophile for a headcanon, you are diluting a word that should be reserved for the monsters who actually hurt people. You aren't protecting children. You’re just playing a game of moral high-ground on the internet.

Many of the people you call "dead to you" are survivors of CSA, physical abuse, and domestic horror. We are people who were beaten by our parents, betrayed by our families, and left to drown—metaphorically and literally—while the adults in our lives looked the other way.

For many of us, proship or profiction spaces are the only places where we aren't forced to sanitize our trauma. We don't want to write healing stories where everything is fixed by a hug. Sometimes we need to explore the darkness, the power imbalances, and the complexities of the things that happened to us. When you tell us we are "just like the adults who looked away," you are gaslighting us. You are looking at a survivor who is using art to cope and telling them they are the abuser. That isn't activism, as I am an actual activist. It's cruelty.

Telling people to "drink propane" over fictional preferences is not the behavior of someone who cares about human life. It is the behavior of a bully hiding behind a badge of virtue. You are not guarding the community. You are creating a hostile environment where the only acceptable way to be a victim is to be quiet, pure, and perfectly aligned with your specific worldview.

this leads into a bigger conversation of government banning books with portrayals of lgbtq+ themes, racial injustice, revolutions and uprisings, and often times things of explicit sexual nature. look up book bans and tell me the themes of the top 10 worst ones, i assure you you’ll find portrayals of abuse, incest, rape, all the topics you’re uncomfortable with depicted in them.

why do you think the government doesn’t want you to read about these books and the contents portrayed in them?

pushing for the censorship of what type of fictional media can or cannot be created is a fascist ideal you need to actively fight against so you don’t stand on the opposite end of the so-called values and beliefs you say to promote.

fiction/fantasies are the only place where people are allowed to explore taboo and macabre in a safe and controlled environment that causes harm to no real world person.

many victims of abuse are often attracted to writing or reading these kind of stories because it is a safe, controlled way to process what has happened to them. authors also have all the power when they create these stories, something real victims of abuse in the real world aren’t beholden to at all.

It’s also a way for people who were not victims themselves to learn and get into the mindset of how this abuse could have occurred and why the victims couldn’t leave because in their distorted state of mind (which you are reading from) this is romantic. this is familiar. this is hard to leave behind or escape from.

when you engage with works like this, it facilitates compassion and understanding for victims without you having to actually gone through real life abuse. fiction creates a controlled environment where readers can confront uncomfortable realities without real-world consequences. this can make it easier to engage with topics people would otherwise avoid.

▸ I DONT CONDONE ANY HARASSMENT TOWARDS ANYONE THAT IS POSTED TO THIS PAGE, ANTI OR NOT.

profic, which initially meant "professional fanfiction" by the way? ended up getting claimed to be the same.

anti harassment, dldr, ykinmk, *whatever else* that existed way before the term proship even appeared *or* was specifically made after that to separate from the prejudice about "the weird ones"? all labeled as "proshitter dogwhistles" and still put on dni lists on par with the supposedly tainted term in question.