"fiction doesn't affect reality!"
but it didnt affect reality. jaws didnt make sharks more violent
holy shit have you literally never heard of the jaws effect. are you really this stupid that you dont know the very real effect jaws had on peoples perceptions of sharks
for those who don't know: after the movie Jaws came out, people started killing sharks indiscriminately because they were perceived as extremely dangerous to humans and/or malicious predators who hold vendettas.
In reality sharks don't routinely go after humans, and while a test bite could seriously maim or kill a person, sharks are not the most dangerous thing in the ocean by far.
And their position as apex predators is very important in the food chain, and it's been severely disrupted by human hunting. The makers of the movie Jaws actually regretted the impact the movie had in the ocean ecosystem
I think what’s interesting about the Jaws Effect though is that it also highlights that fiction’s impact on reality is often not, like, a direct 1:1 kind of a thing? It’s often more obvious in hindsight than anything? like ‘yeah of course a horror movie about sharks would increase public fear of sharks’ is mainly an obvious outcome because we’ve seen it happen
in some alternate universe more people could have fixated on the corrupt mayor than the shark (which I believe was the intended target of the story tbh) and started more campaigns to oust political leaders who prioritize economic matters over lives and safety, and in that alternate universe maybe the coronavirus outbreak we’re dealing with right now has seen far less mismanagement
predicting a ‘Jaws Effect’ is purely speculative until it’s actually happened, although some cases are more likely than others because of precedents - for example, we’ve established by now that horror movies need to be careful what they choose for their monster, and that something like Jurassic Park (with monsters that are not real) will have a better job directing ire towards like, rich assholes and animal abuse, than movies which pick something real (actual animals, mental illnesses, etc) to be their 'monster’
but there are indeed a lot of people who take the Jaws Effect to mean that fictional stuff will specifically have the impact that they’re already afraid of, like ‘video games encourage violent behaviour’ or ‘unhealthy relationships in romance increase abuse cases’, which doesn’t actually seem to be the case - rates of violence and abuse don’t spike much any time a new Grand Theft Auto or Twilight happens (definitely not to the degree that sharks were impacted in the wake of Jaws, for sure)
it can also be unclear how much something like the movie Jaws impacted the rush of shark fear, since Jaws itself was based on some very topical shark attacks that had happened around the same time - we can’t actually test the theory by examining a universe where Jaws never happened and seeing if the hysteria over shark attacks still occurred or was reduced, and therefore it’s harder to say if Jaws was the direct cause of more fear of sharks, or if Jaws owed its success and popularity to the existing build up of fear towards sharks that was already there. (personally I think it was a mix - sharks were a dangerous and fascinating topic at the time which the movie picked up on, and because the movie was popular more people went to see it and were subsequently drawn into the public overreaction to ‘dangerous sharks’ - but again, it’s hard to say for sure with this stuff)
so like yeah the Jaws Effect is really interesting and fiction’s potential impact on reality is certainly a thing, it’s just not a simple thing and that’s - I think - where people run into the most trouble with the concept
oh this a fantastic addition, thank you @siltrafest! the Jaws effect IS real, but it's not always predictable, not even for the creators of media
