To the person who asked about the immorality of my fiction --
I'm replying publicly so other folks can see my answer, but doing it this way to keep your name out of it. You asked, "Hey, is it true you write incest and child rape and fucked up sex? Why, my dude? You're a good writer, you don't have to do that immoral stuff!"
Yep, it's true, I do write about lots of uncomfy-making stuff in my fiction! I tend to write about topics like systemic oppression, identity, sexuality, generational trauma, abuse, power dynamics, and more, just because those are the directions my writer-brain takes me. Exploring those topics in a way that does them justice sometimes requires that I actually depict the "immoral"* things happening, explicitly or implicitly, and sometimes in harrowing ways. If I do my job right, then readers will empathize with the character(s) experiencing this bad thing, and maybe think more about the topic. If I screw it up, and I do sometimes, then people who've actually been through this in real life will feel like I've trivialized something important and intrinsic to their lived experience. So when it becomes necessary for me to write about these topics, I try to do them justice and not tapdance around the gory details, because I'm a good writer and that's what being a good writer means, to me.
That said, you're asking about morality**, which has nothing to do with being a good writer. There are lots of excellent writers in the world who aren't good people, as you've probably noticed. Maybe you've decided that I'm not a good person either; okay, if so. But writer or not, you cannot become a good person by pretending evil doesn't exist. Evil looooves silence. If you want to fix that evil, you have to talk about it, honestly and uncomfortably, and you have to make sure that everyone gets to participate in that conversation -- especially the people who are most harmed by that evil. Even bad fiction about these topics creates more space for those people to participate in the conversation. Without that space, the people controlling the conversation will inevitably be those with the most social power. That's going to be the rapists, the racists, the rich people who hate poor people, and so on, because the most immoral acts in our society pretty much boil down to abuse of power.
For me, it's simple: I think it's far more immoral to avoid Topic X and thus allow it to flourish, than it is to address the topic in a way that hopefully facilitates justice. So the latter is what I do.
*Scare quotes here because I don't know what "fucked up sex" is supposed to mean. If it's between consenting adults, it's not fucked up. If there's no consent or adults involved, it's rape.
**I do consider some speech immoral -- namely that which facilitates abuses of power, like hate speech and copaganda. But I could write a whole essay on this, and I got stuff to do today.
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