genuinely I'm so sick of people wanting all fiction to be ethical. can we all just get a little gross with it. the point of fiction is that it's not real. we can be unethical in fiction; same goes with being perverted with fiction, being unrealistic with fiction, and being grotesque with fiction. not all fiction has to be ethical, not every character has to be ethical, and that's okay. can we stop with the puritanism. be gross. be unrealistic. be whatever. if I don't like it it's not my business as long as we're all clear that its fictional.
via ered.bsky.social, the only kinds of unethical fiction:
people in the replies are going "what about books glorifying unethical things" and "what if it's propaganda" and you, my friends, are who this comic was made for
This is probably my favourite line of Alya’s from the whole finale.
Like. God.
She knows Marinette so well.
She knows that Marinette is her own worst enemy, knows that Marinette has—on some level—good intentions. She understands exactly the logic that Marinette has been using to justify her choices. Knows that Marinette will always put her loved ones’ happiness above her own wellbeing.
She doesn’t want to be mad at Marinette. The lie itself hurts, but it also hurts that lie causes Marinette hurt.
And despite all of that, this is one thing Alya can’t excuse.
Tumblr being the "piss on the poor" reading comprehension site makes sense when you realize that 79% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate. Same goes for Twitter and TikTok.
that's a real high number, sport. where'd you get it?
this has been discussed before but reducing female characters to the girlboss braincell holder in the name of combating misogyny in fandom is ironically also a form of misogyny
people love love loooove to go on and on and on about whiteguy #135336843’s internal torment and the nuances of his writing and then when it comes time to talk about women it’s all um actually she can do no wrong and holds the braincell and babysits the boys like a mother hashtag feminism. i hope you fucking blow up
'A popular fanfic author stopped updating her fic because she said that the stress of being constantly falsely accused of using AI was a witch hunt and it was destroying her mental health to the extent that she needed to take a break from writing, leading to multiple online discussions defending her and debates about AI accusations and how You Can't Really Tell So Leave Her Alone, and then someone realised that there were Claude coding artefacts in her fics and that it was a super pervasive problem in that particular fandom, proven definitively by looking at the source coding of each work on AO3, and she denied it for a bit but then ultimately admitted that oopsie, she had been using genAI all along, and then she deleted all of her fics off AO3 and people got mad because they were being denied access to their favourite fics, even though they now knew definitively that they were genAI slop, and then it turned out that she'd actually stopped updating the fic on AO3 in the first place because she'd been shopping it around to agents and editors as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, and she'd been in conversations with a publisher which ultimately got dropped because she'd lied to them about her AI use' oh cool, so we're in Hell, then
Shipping fictional characters isn’t representative of your moral values. It’s representative of your particular psychic damage and the themes and motifs that haunt you. Hope this helps.
been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter
the fucked-up part is that I specifically notice this in like, BIPOC or queer romances because their authors a) are more likely to be harassed online b) tend to care about writing inclusive and intersectional books more, both of which are totally valid reasons, but unfortunately a book that is scared to be misunderstood is also scared to challenge the reader or allow for too much nuance or grey areas or character flaws and I am sorry to say that it often makes for less compelling stories because it means shying away from ambiguities and complexities in an effort to reassure me, the reader, that everyone here is a Good Person engaging in Healthy Behaviours and Relationships
my erotic fanfiction is more historically accurate than yours. here it claims that shes moaning 'yes,' however classical latin didn't have a word that corresponds to Modern English 'yes,' i.e. an affirmative answer to an interrogative. You could have easily avoided this glaring implausibility by allowing her to moan plus, 'more'—as exemplified in my critically acclaimed fic with an unprecedented number of kudos (eleven). I recommend that you log out of AO3 and return only after acquiring satisfactory knowledge of the subject matter.
the "my favorite character did nothing wrong" mindset is completely unappealing to me because i love thinking about all the things my favorite characters did wrong
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