THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, youâll do it in real life.
No. Just NO.
Iâm so glad someone put it into words.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is a legend, and heâs absolutely right.
And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that donât get or donât believe this, and I think thatâs troubling. Iâve seen arguments that people shouldnât have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person. Iâve seen so much shaming over thoughts.
And if you get to a point where itâs bad to have dark thoughts and itâs bad to wonder what something would be like and itâs bad to put yourself in the shoes of anyone who isnât âpureâ, if fiction is no longer a realm where you can confront and explore, but an ongoing test of moral purity⌠well, maybe not everyoneâs brain works like mine, but I feel like that takes away something incredibly important to being human.
Purity culture is gonna kill art if yâall let it.
Fiction is a safe place to explore whatever fucked up or dark desire that you have. You can write the most vile and fucked up shit in fiction and it be absolutely nothing you desire in real life. You can write about a serial killer who gets away with it. You can write about someone who goes on moral crusades to purge the world of all evils and still be the protagonist. You can write anything in fiction because thatâs what it is meant for.Â
It isnât meant to be a social commentary unless you create it to be.Â
It isnât meant to be educational unless you create it to be.Â
Sometimes a story can be just that, a story. Entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less.Â
Not everything has to be deep, or have meaning, etc. unless the creator wants it to be and a lot of the purity types end up forcing something to have deep meaning or social commentary where it isnât meant to. Is this inherently bad? No, but these people donât just say âBut this is my interpretation of it.â they go as far as trying to force that interpretation onto everyone else, including the creator, as a means of saying âSee? It means that they promote/condone xyz so theyâre bad and shitty people who should spend the rest of their life in jail with/are the same as people whoâve actually committed acts of violence against other people.âÂ
THANK. YOU.
@ all the people in the notes saying âyes except u canât write about (list of immoral things they donât want to see in fiction)â congrats on missing the point so spectacularly Iâm not sure I could create better performance art if I tried
