Engaging with fiction in good faith allows you to build empathy by experiencing things through the eyes of other people
and refusing to engage with certain fiction because of a hard line moral stance against The Wrong Kind Of Fiction just makes you a less empathetic person over all.
The thing is, I engage with a lot of fiction that I would object to in real life. Sometimes I also run into fiction that I'm not particularly happy or comfortable with, but because the story is compelling, engaging, genuine and earnest and presented in a vulnerable, earnest, human way, my surface level distaste is overridden by my connection with a stranger who I've been given the opportunity to know.
I just read a comic by a gay man that has heavy drug use, written in a way that has an intimate knowledge of the kind of life and culture a lot of gay men run into, full of casual sex and hard drugs and sudden death and violence. The protagonist isn't a bad person, but he's also not the best person, but you root for him all the way through. And then he has a really bad trip and dies.
I don't feel particularly comfortable with any of that, but I was engaged all the way through. And by simplistic metrics many people might not consider it "good gay rep" or whatever because it involves a gay man doing all the hard drugs, being promiscuous and then dying, but it was written authentically, by a gay man who clearly has had experience with these things, and encourages you the reader to seek help and provides resources if you've experienced something similar.
I do not accept the idea that you should always have a moral stance on the fiction you consume. You don't have to make excuses, or have caveats, to justify the "problematic fiction" you've engaged with, maybe even enjoyed. Because a lot of fiction, particularly indie fiction, is a conversation between a creator revealing something honest and vulnerable, and a reader learning about the lives of others and experiences they will never have.
And it is a silly exercise to try to give that sort of conversation a (very ironically named) Common Sense Media review because it's got violence and drugs and kinky sex or whatever.
It is easy to stick to fiction you're comfortable with. I've done it, I do it. But in my experience, allowing yourself to engage with other people's stories, comfortable or not, is healthy for you as a human being in learning empathy and compassion for other human beings. Try reading some books in the local library, or do what I did and buy a bunch of indie comics and books from a convention full of indie creators (easy) and actually read them (Dark Souls Hard Mode).
And who knows, maybe you'll find something that'll change your life, or help you grow as a person. Or maybe you'll find a cool new thing you like.
titsay
baratheonpilled
romaincrisis
izzy806
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
