so, thinking about the discourse regarding romanticizing Problematic things in fic—
when i read darkfic, i do not interpret the things happening in those stories as being romantic. i do not find these things appealing in the sense that they are things i would want to do in my life or have happen to me. no matter how explicitly detailed those stories are, i still do not find those stories to be an idealized version of life i want to strive towards having. i do not look at the things that happen in those stories and think “i want that, that’s something good to have” or at the characters and think “i want to be like that, that’s a good kind of person to be”.
there is appeal to them as stories and they appeal to me in the sense that i find them entertaining and stimulating, but i do not at any point look at those works of fiction and find my perception at the idea of the same things happening in reality warped by that. i do not enjoy a graphic murder scene in a fic and then leave that story under the impression that murder is a good thing in real life. i do not get off to stories of bad things happening to people and then leave that story thinking it would be good for someone to do those things to me.
this is true even when the dark content in that fic is not condemned within the text. if there is no author’s note stating at the beginning of the story “the things that happen in this fic are bad”, no narrator coming in at the end to give a TED talk about morality, and no point in the middle where a character breaks down the wall, looks into the camera lens and explicity says “my behavior is bad and no one else should copy it” — if none of that happens, i still am able to understand that the content of that fic is not something i want to emulate, i still do not idealize it, i still do not want it to happen to me or to do it to anyone else.
if we define romanticization as “making something look more appealing than it actually is, making something be seen as an ideal” then i have never read a single darkfic — dead dove: do not eat or otherwise — that has romanticized a damn thing because
can the content of those fics be considered romanticized if i don’t consider the content to be an ideal to strive toward?
can it be considered romanticized if i don’t see the murder, the torture, the abuse as something that’s appealing outside of harmless titillating entertainment had in a safe environment?
can it be considered romanticized if my perception of things in fiction does not affect my perception of those things in reality, if it does not make me thing those things are appealing in reality?
can it be considered romanticized if the author does not consider it an ideal that’s appealing in real life and explicitly tags those fics with things like abuse, rape, etc, making it clear they’re aware of what is happening in the story?
in romanticization discourse, a lot of people are defining romanticization by fiction that features Bad Horrible No Good Things happening but not being explicitly condemned as being bad in the text.
there are two problems with this:
one is that something not being explicitly stated as being bad is not the same thing as that something being portrayed as being good or ideal
and two is that i don’t think the content of a fic has to be condemned within the text in order for us to realize that it’s not an ideal to aspire to because most of us already have a sense of ethics and morality which allow us to hold separate how we feel about things in fiction vs. how we feel about them in real life
when bad things happen in fiction, do we really NEED to be told that they’re bad in explicit terms?
when villains exist in fiction, do we really need for the hero to always win and for the villain to always be explicitly punished in the text in order to recognize that they are in fact a villain?
when fics are tagged as containing abuse or rape or torture, do we really need an additional note that says “not only does this contain abuse, but abuse is bad in case you didn’t already know”?
when we read these fictions which are rated explicit and marked as being for adults only, do we really need to be treated like children who need to have our hands held throughout the story, reminded at every opportunity that what we’re reading is wrong and nasty and not to be emulated in real life?
do we not have brains and the ability to think for ourselves? do we not have our own ethics? do we not have our own morality? are we not capable of understanding that just because a fictional character is harmed in a fictional story that it does not mean that harming people in real life and being harmed in return are good things without being reminded of it at every single turn?
i think that MUCH of what makes something romanticized in fiction is not actually the content itself but the perception of readers towards that content. it’s in whether or not they find the content of that fiction to be more appealing than it actually is – to be an ideal they want to have or to be in real lie – and whether they can tell that the content of the fiction contains bad or unhealthy or harmful behavior, whether they can make that judgment, whether the behavior is explicitly stated as being so or not.
it’s in whether or not a reader has critical thinking skills, media literacy, education about what healthy (and unhealthy) relationships look like, education about what abuse looks like, an ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and an ability to know what stories are for them and what stories are not for them and a willingness to avoid the ones that aren’t.
