How do you feel about "problematic ships"? Should fanfiction authors be allowed to write what they want regardless of how "upsetting" the material is? You're one of the first fanfiction authors I've ever read and admired and I'd love to get your take on this
People write murder stories. That doesn’t mean they support murder in real life. People write “problematic” ships. That doesn’t mean they support problematic things in real life. As someone who’s a fan of horror movies, and as someone who likes terrible awful villain ships where everyone is a trashfire, but who absolutely does not condone either thing in real life, I am of the firm opinion that people ship the things they do for their own reasons and I have no right and no place to demand answers from them, even when it’s something I personally find distasteful.
Maybe they’re working through trauma. Maybe they’ve had a bad day and need to vent. It is not my right to know that, because real people are not being harmed and they’ve tagged their stuff appropriately.
Partially my mindset comes from actually working in the mental health field and knowing that everyone has ways of coping. And, additionally, it comes from a deep, deep distaste of the sort of “trauma olympics” that comes from people trying to police what other people can write. Where do you draw that line? What makes a trauma “valid enough” for someone to be able to write vent-fic about it? How can you tell someone who can’t afford a therapist that processing their emotions through fic is wrong and bad? And like. I don’t know an author from Adam. I don’t have any say. I definitely don’t have the right to make them relive their trauma in front of the whole internet, and expecting them to because I don’t like the ship they wrote is not right.
It is also, frankly, because I’m someone who has been harassed and sent death threats over fic I’ve written. I was told that writing two consenting adults with an age difference, even in a time-travel lens, was pedophilia. That writing two characters in a ship after i’d written a cracky fic about one accidentally ending up the other’s parent was “basically incest”. So like, forgive me if I don’t think most purity watchdogs are the most logical.
Because that’s what it comes down to: if you’re not allowing authors to write certain content, who gets to decide? You? A council of those who think the same as you? What if you decide that just because in one universe I conceptualize X relationship as familial, I can’t write a completely different AU with it as romantic? Is that right? Who has the right to decide that?
So like. I get the drama. I do. Things that I find gross or bad give me that reaction, too. My instinct is to say fuck you i hate that and bolt. But. I am a rational human being and I can recognize that my personal freedom ends where someone else’s begins, and i have the ability to control what content I see and the mental wherewithal to read the tags on a thing to make sure it won’t fuck me up. I also don’t have any sort of right to try and control what other people do when they’re not actively harming people, and the sense to know that it would be bad for all involved to try.
Seriously. Read the fucking tags, mind your own mental health, and don’t concern yourself with what other people are doing unless it is actively immediately IRL harming you, like “has showed up at your door to murder you” kinds of harming. Problematic is a really, horrifically vague term that varies from person to person, and trying to police that for everyone else is not good. Not for you, not for them, not for anyone.
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