I'm gonna say it.
It's unhinged to assume that someone's taste in fiction equates to what they believe is moral or good, or is something they want to see or experience in real life.
That is a bonkers assumption to make.
I'm tired of humoring people with long arguments about it when the simple fact is it is a totally fucking absurd reach to accuse someone who enjoys something in fiction of being in favor of it in real life.
I'm tired of pretending like this is a legitimate position to hold-- that they should be afraid of fiction's dire influence on a reader's moral decay or that it's a sign of what the author secretly wants for realsies in real life.
I promise you it is still getting me death threats in 2024.
During a creative-writing workshop during my undergrad, the professor shared an anecdote about a past workshop where one of the writers shared a first-person short story about a man contemplating having an affair with a married woman. Apparently at the beginning of the workshop, some uptight gal slammed the story on the table in front of him and shouted, "Assholes like YOU are the reason so few marriages last!"
This has been a problem for literal thousands of years, as long as storytelling has existed probably. Because a man by the name of Gaius Valerius Catullus, before the hypothetical BIRTH OF CHRIST, wrote what is now called either Catullus 16, or Carmen 16, explicitly (in several senses of the word) raising his frustration with *this very concept.*
It's a 14-line poem, I beseech thee, read it real quick.
