Having an argument in my brain because the world is *as you know* and the way I want to deal with it is fictionally. And part of my brain is like, no, you know how this goes. You came from h3t4lia. You saw that dungeon food art about feeding people in Gaza. You know publicly considering irl large scale trouble with fictional characters gets gauche easily.
And the other part of my brain is like: ok but official media does it :\. Superman 2025 did a border massacre. Batman has been doing terrorist attacks for years. Dr. Manhattan is a meme, not a war criminal. No one got mad when I briefly wrote Wonder Woman stopping a school shooting in that one fic. If something's been happening for years and years and forever, frankly, (warfare; racism; fuel shortages; the pursuit of the panopticon) at what point am I allowed to ask "well what if we had a really nice person with crazy amounts of power and we just stuck them in there. What would they do?"
If I wonder about what would Superman have done in the blitz, is it old enough? If a world of superheroes existed, would WWII have even been allowed to progress so far? Would he have been able to stop the trains? In the Absolute Universe, Wesley Dodds is assassinated shortly after his debut in 1939, and the Allies powers defeat Nazi Germany with the use of nerve gas. If the arc of their history always points towards evil, how much worse could it be than what happened in reality?
At what amount of detail does it become cruel to imagine? What thoughts are too exploitative to share? When suffering cannot be turned off, at what point does disregarding reality become mocking? At what point is it taking a step back and organizing your understanding of the world through a softer lens. People witnessing others suffer also become traumatized, even if the pain never became personal. When Ukraine was first invaded, a post was made thanking fanfic writers for giving the poster something to pass the time hiding in the bomb shelter. If you aren't in the basement hiding from the bombs, do you get to suggest fanfic at a time like this?