Most fiction “romanticizes” human experiences and behaviors.
I’m not saying that in the tumblr/twitter discourse way, where romanticizing = bad. Quite the opposite.
Fiction takes human experience and makes it poetry.
The representation of trauma, mental illness, interpersonal conflicts, harmful behaviors etc. that you see in fiction, no matter how well done, are not wholly accurate to the messy, complicated realities of being an adult human interacting with other adult humans. Reality is just not as easy to parse through as fiction is. It’s also not as compact, time-wise. People are difficult. They will disappoint you. They will hurt, and they will cause hurt. They will want, and need, to be loved anyway. And when it is you doing the disappointing, and the hurting, you will want to be loved anyway, too.
There is a reason for why art does what it does: we use the simpler, more coherent language of fiction to help us parse through the real world experiences that can become very difficult and obscure. Fiction can present situations that are easier to mentally digest, especially in a short amount of time.
I’m saying this so maybe the young people online who play fast and loose with the word “romanticizing” might recognize that maybe their perspectives on this matter can often be a little bit…well. Juvenile.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.
I feel like certain people tend to get hung up on a concept of “realism” as a moral quality of fiction, which….defeats the purpose of storytelling, or at least plays against its strengths.
Like…yes, we could just tell our kids a bunch of rules and moral truths like “If you let yourself get lazy because you think it’s a sure bet, you might lose to someone who keeps trying” but honestly? It’s actually just easier to communicate this concept by telling the story of the Tortoise & The Hare. The Tortoise & the Hare is an extremely simple story that small children can understand. Trying to explain the lesson it teaches is surprisingly difficult! I know because I just rewrote it like three times for this paragraph and still am not happy with it!
Which is not, of course, to say that all stories have (or should have) moral messages at their core, or rather that they should exist to teach these moral messages.
Just that we have an easier time learning things when they’re distilled down into stories that clear away some messy external details and let us look at just one thing for a little while.
And the big thing that I rarely see people talking about or acknowledging when they get on the disc horse is, like…stories are metaphors. They are about how things feel. They are representative of how experiences feel not how they actually are. This is just as true of the fictions we tell ourselves about our own lives and identities as it is about the fictions we watch on the TV. Like…yes, we know there are a million things wrong logistically with the idea of vampires having sex, but vampires can be sexy because they represent things about vulnerability and consent and loss of power and vital fluids and so forth.
I don’t know if I’m explaining this very well but it’s just….a thing that irritates me a lot about the way a lot of people talk about/engage with fiction in a lot of online spaces.
The last time this “romanticization” discourse rolled around, I recall it ending with mentally ill people posting “romanticize whatever the fuck you need to romanticize to stay alive”
I think there was a reason for that
