I really think everyone needs to truly internalize this:
Fictional characters are objects.
They are not people. You cannot "objectify" them, because they have no personhood to be deprived of. They have no humanity to be erased. You cannot "disrespect" them, because they are not real.
I know this has good intentions, so I will just add the "how you treat them, even as objects of fiction, can speak about your own character, be careful out there"
Your addition is actually completely antithetical to my message. It is literally the opposite of what I am conveying.
Stop telling people to encourage the cop inside their head.
How you treat fictional characters, given they are entirely objects of fiction, does NOT necessarily speak to your own character, and you do not need to be "careful".
It is not dangerous to imagine dark things happening to fictional characters. It does not mean you are secretly a bad person. It does not mean you unconsciously want to hurt people in real life. It is not a "slippery slope" to doing bad things to people in real life. You cannot damage your brain or turn yourself into a bad person by consuming "dark" fanfic.
I can write tentacle noncon of my favorite character all day long and be a fierce anti-sexual assault advocate in real life because what I do in my head is not the same thing as what I do in real life.
Hey, so you know how in The Sims you sometimes decide to run fucked up little experiments to see what will happen to the little fictional people in your game?
Maybe you take away stairs. Or intentionally don't put in a smoke alarm. Or, like I did once: put fireworks in a house then paused the game, removed the door, and then had the Sim light the fireworks.
The Sim died. I laughed for a solid five minutes.
Why did I do it? Because it wasn't real. Because it hurt no one. Because I thought it'd be funny to watch the little Sim-flail, and oh boy, it was.
If you think I'm a bad person who wants to harm people because I did something dark and fucked-up to a fake thing, you have brainrot and need to desperately work on why you feel the need to be morally superior to others by trying to police what they do or don't do to fictional characters.
@hadeantaiga @sweaterkittensahoy
Ok. I understand where you’re coming from. The moral policing of fanfiction and fanart has been a growing problem again. And I get it. It’s tiring and exhausting and hurtful.
But please please read and consider these points.
1st: In many cultures/beliefs across the world all objects have a soul and feelings. You’re condemning others for being superior and taking the moral high ground in the same breath that you just decided thousands of people’s beliefs and cultures don’t matter.
2nd: This is not black and white.
Do I believe your evil for doing what you do to Sims or writing fiction others find problematic? No.
Do I personally believe objects can have souls and feelings? Yes. I believe trees do, for one thing. I believe things made by a person (as in not mass manufacturing but an artist making their art) can have souls and feelings? Yes.
So how do I judge people based on their approach to fiction?
I judge you based on real world effects. If your treatment of an object has real world consequences. You say how you treat a character doesn’t matter without recognizing how that argument upholds systematic racism. If it doesn’t matter, then it shouldn’t matter what color or race a character is.
Your stories are not in a vacuum. You are not in a vacuum. What you do to objects still influences the way you interact with the world.
Again, are you evil for writing shit or doing things to Sims? No. But if the Sims characters you always do horrible things to are specifically black women….
Things are not black and white.
This last point is arguably the weakest. But for me it’s the most personal: you assume everyone creates the same way. Some authors DO write their characters as objects, but not everyone.
For me, it’s much more personal.
When I was young I had seizures. And it came to a point that my parents had to put me on this new medicine. Medicine everyone believed had no negative side effects. Well, it did. It made it so I had no short OR long term memory. It took YEARS for my brain to heal and to develop these.
During this time, my one grandpa died and an uncle who was basically another grandpa.
Not only was I young, but I had memory problems. I thought I didn’t know them at all. I thought the “memories” I had were just images created from the retelling of others’ stories. For years. For over 1/3rd of my life.
And then one day I had started listing things I knew about a character that has been in my head my whole life (what I can remember of it). And my family started talking about my Grandpa as I did that.
Now I want to stress that my character is NOT my Grandpa. There are clear differences. However, as they talked I looked at what I wrote. I then asked things about my uncle too.
And it was shocking what had worked its way into my character.
I asked questions based on my character info.
I found out that there were things I was never told about my Grandpa and uncle that I knew. Because it integrated with my character.
When my body had no way to retain info about people and the world (fam, you don’t want to know how old I was before I realized I was doing things like brushing my teeth incorrectly and not using shampoo right and had to retract myself), but somehow, either my brain or the universe or both found a way to hold onto what I was likely so desperate to hold onto.
Many writers deal with grief and with trying to retain info by writing.
Everyone of Mark Twain’s novels can be tied to a tragedy in his life, a tragedy that fueled its creation.
I have a One Piece fanfic I’ve been struggling to finish and post for years because it’s about Kuina and it’s the absurdity of loss sometimes and it’s all tied up with my feelings of two friends who died too young.
You don’t know what someone’s relationship is to any object or any character.
My first car kept me safe on crashes and was the witness of so many tears and so much screaming. It was more actively there for me than literally 90% of the real life people in my life. It hurt when I had to let it go.
So … just please, please remember that there is no black and white in this matter. Just as you are tired of being nagged at and policed, I am exhausted in my soul of being told “it’s just a story” when the story is so clearly portraying the problems of our world. I am sick of people being like “it’s just an object, what’s wrong with you?” because I named my violin and cradle it gently when not playing.
I am tired of being told my emotions are not warranted and are out of control because I got angry at a movie that upheld systematic racism.
And, as usual, this got so much longer than I had planned. Thank you so much for reading through to the end.
