On the Curious Belief That Authors Endorse Their Monsters
Author’s Note: The thoughts expressed here are my own reflections and interpretations. They’re not meant to be definitive, just part of the broader conversation about fiction and how we read it.
Also, the quotes below are paraphrased from comments I’ve seen over the past few months. They’re not direct citations, but they reflect sentiments I’ve encountered online.
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“Including problematic behavior is basically saying you support it.”
“If the author didn’t agree with it, they wouldn’t have written it so vividly."
“There’s no reason to include a X unless the author likes it.”
“Why show terrible things unless you want readers to think they’re okay?”
“If the story doesn’t condemn it outright, that’s the same as endorsement.”
“Including taboo topics is basically proof the author is into those topics.”
“If the author writes about X, that says something about them.”
All excellent questions if you’re approaching fiction with the firm belief that stories should contain nothing complex, messy, or even mildly uncomfortable.
So, dear reader, I ask: When exactly did “writing about it” become equivalent to standing on a rooftop with a megaphone shouting, “I SUPPORT THIS”?
By that logic, authors should only write about impeccably behaved saints making responsible decisions at all times. No conflict, no flaws, no drama - just 300 pages of impeccably moral beings making sensible choices. Absolutely gripping stuff.
What really throws me is how often this logic pops up. Some folks are convinced that if a character does something horrific, the author definitely approves and should probably be on a watchlist, just in case. As if we’re all at our keyboards going, “Yes, my child, go forth and showcase my deep, personal love of toxic relationships and homicide.”
It feels like some people have collectively forgotten that fiction is allowed - encouraged, even - to explore uncomfortable or complicated things, not curate a list of behaviors the author personally endorses or has on their to-do list.
I miss when characters could be morally complex, messy, selfish, disastrous, or outright awful without the author being expected to brandish a gigantic neon sign screaming, "I DON'T SUPPORT ANY OF THIS."
Apparently, modern storytelling should go something like this:
Character: (Commits unspeakable crimes)
Author’s Note: Just to clarify, I do NOT endorse my character’s choices. I’m not morally aligned with this fictional menace to society. Please stop assuming they’re my personal ambassador or that I’m out here supporting their crimes.
And this mindset becomes even more absurd when applied to one of my favorite genres to write: horror. If portraying something means supporting it, then horror authors apparently endorse a laundry list of nightmare fuel.
Horror is supposed to depict terrible things, not because the author applauds them, but because the genre examines the darker corners of human nature.
Horror isn’t just about monsters and murder, it dives into a whole range of difficult topics. It grapples with taboo relationships, unhealthy power dynamics, obsession, manipulation, cycles of abuse, trauma, and so much more. Sometimes it explores the taboo precisely because it’s taboo: the forbidden, the morally wrong, the psychologically unsettling, and the socially off-limits.
Horror systematically engages with these prohibited subjects not to endorse them, but to dissect them, challenge them, and force us to confront why they terrify or repulse us in the first place. That’s kind of the entire point.
So yes, I'm deeply, profoundly confused.
How did we end up here? When exactly did people decide that authors are morally aligned with everything their characters do? When did fiction stop being a space for exploring complexity and start functioning as a background check on the author's morality?
If these people assume that every terrible thing a character does reflects the author’s personal beliefs, we risk creating a climate where authors become hesitant to approach anything difficult at all, constantly bracing for backlash, accusations, and dogpiles for daring to depict anything challenging.
Some stories are meant to lead us into the dark so we can return with something worth thinking about. Readers are always free to step away from topics they find upsetting or difficult - that’s part of curating your own reading experience. But demanding that authors sanitise their characters because certain subjects/behaviours make you uncomfortable only guarantees fiction that never surprises, never challenges, and never stirs anything inside us. That’s how we end up with stories that say nothing, risk nothing, and ultimately mean nothing. And how can a story that never truly touches us hope to stay with us at all?
Long story short:
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About Narrative Side Effects:
Narrative Side Effects is an essay series where I explore how we read fiction - our love of messy, morally dubious characters, so-called “problematic” topics, and the endless arguments that flare up around them. Want to read more of my ramblings? Check out the links below:
On the Troubling Notion That Dark Stories Should Be Fixed
On the Odd Impulse to Treat Fictional People Like Real Ones (and What It Costs Us)
On The Peculiar Impulse To Ignore Content Warnings and Then Take It Personally
Author’s Note: As usual, these are my own observations about how we interact with fiction online. This isn’t about people with trauma responses being “weak” or “wrong”, it’s about what happens when we treat clearly labelled content like a moral trap instead of something we can choose not to consume.
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Author: (Waves a giant sign reading THIS CONTAINS EXACTLY WHAT IT SAYS IT CONTAINS)
Reader: (Reads it anyway for reasons known only to God) I can’t believe I found exactly what I was warned about. Reading this ruined my day!
I feel like somewhere along the line, content warnings stopped being tools for informed choice and started being treated like invitations to a dare.
It goes like this:
Author tags their work meticulously: every trigger, every taboo, every uncomfortable element.
Reader sees the warnings, recognises them, and instead of going “Ah, not for me,” they think, “How bad can it really be?”
Reader proceeds anyway.
Reader does, in fact, have a bad time.
Reader concludes the real problem is the existence of the story, not their decision to read it.
At that point, we’re no longer talking about protecting vulnerable people from unexpected harm; we’re talking about someone opening the box marked dead dove and then demanding to know why there was a bird in it.
Let’s be very clear: You're absolutely allowed to be upset by fiction and you're absolutely allowed to say, “This makes me uncomfortable, so I need to step away.”
But there’s a difference between:
“This hurt me, so I won’t read stuff like this again.” and
“This hurt me, so no one should write or read stuff like this again.”
The first is curating your experience, the second is controlling everyone else’s.
Warnings exist to give you the power to do the first one.
It seems like some people treat the warning labels like a challenge, and then, when it upsets them, they blame the storyteller despite the labels.
It’s like walking into a horror maze, staring at the “Flashing lights, jump scares, blood, screaming” board, and saying, “Sure, but I didn’t think there’d be flashing lights, jump scares, blood, and screaming.”
What did you think was going to be in there, soft jazz and someone handing out biscuits?
Warnings used to mean:
“Heads up: this story contains X, Y, and Z. Proceed or don’t, but you now know what you’re walking into.”
Now they’re sometimes treated as:
“This content exists under a fragile moral licence, and if it upsets me even with a warning, then clearly the warning wasn’t enough and the content itself is the problem.”
And that’s the uncomfortable shift. The warning stops being a tool for informed choice and starts being treated like a flimsy disclaimer attached to something people think shouldn’t exist at all.
With that being said, here’s the uncomfortable bit: curating your own reading experience requires responsibility.
You have to know your limits. You have to close the tab, walk away, mute the tag, or block the author if you have to. The trouble is, that for some people that seems harder than launching into a righteous rant about how this kind of story should never exist in the first place.
Of course, as a writer, If you’re playing with heavy topics, you should:
Tag clearly
Avoid bait-and-switching readers with a wholesome façade and hidden horror
Listen when people say, “Hey, you missed a big trigger in your warnings”
Transparency matters, but once the warnings are there, once the “Dead Dove” label is plastered across the top in thirty-point font, the responsibility shifts. The writer's told you what’s in the box - opening it is now your choice, and (this is key) you’re allowed to not open it.
There’s also this odd prestige economy around suffering over fiction. People will say things like:
“I'm ruined. I've been emotionally obliterated by this book. Read it!”
We’ve turned “this upset me deeply” into an unusual marketing copy. So when someone says, “Hey, this really got to me,” it’s not always clear whether they mean “in a cathartic/powerful way” or “in a deeply unsettling way I wish I’d avoided.”
So, for anyone who needs it spelled out:
You’re not boring if you don’t want to be wrecked by the things you read.
You’re not weak if you avoid certain topics.
You’re not morally superior for stomaching things that make other people need three business days to recover.
You’re just a person with specific needs who's allowed to pick what they put in their brain.
Curating your reading experience looks like:
Learning which triggers are hard limits and which ones you can handle in certain moods.
Using filters, tags, and block lists like the safety tools they are.
Saying, “Actually, no, I don’t want to read X today.”
Quitting halfway through something when you realise it’s going somewhere you can’t follow.
No one will give you a medal for walking away from content you don't enjoy, but future-you will be grateful you did.
On the flip side, when we refuse to curate, and instead rage at the existence of anything that can hurt us even with warnings, we create a hostile environment for storytellers.
Authors start to think:
“If I write about X, even with warnings, I’ll get harrassed.”
“If one person ignores the warnings and then gets upset, they might try to get me dogpiled.”
So they stop writing risky stories and soften the edges off everything so no one can be upset “on purpose.”
The point of “Dead Dove” in this context isn’t “never write about dead doves.”
It’s:
If you’re going to put a dead dove in the box, label the box.
If you don’t want to see a dead dove, do not open the labelled box.
If someone else does want to see it and they open the box happily, that’s their business, not evidence of their moral corruption.
Fiction is allowed to be disturbing and you're allowed to opt out. Both of those things can be true at the same time.
We need stories that can go to ugly, complicated places. We also need readers who feel comfortable saying, “Not for me,” before they’re knee-deep in content that hurts them.
Warnings aren't dares, they’re signposts. You don’t earn moral points for charging past the “here be dragons” sign and then filing a complaint about the dragons.
Curate your experience and protect your peace. Warnings exist so you can make informed choices, not so you can ignore them and put the story on trial afterward.
Not every box needs opening, and not every story is meant for you.
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About Narrative Side Effects:
Narrative Side Effects is an essay series where I explore how we read fiction - our love of messy, morally dubious characters, so-called “problematic” topics, and the endless arguments that flare up around them. Want to read more of my ramblings? Check out the links below:
On the Curious Belief That Authors Endorse Their Monsters
On the Troubling Notion That Dark Stories Should Be Fixed
On the Odd Impulse to Treat Fictional People Like Real Ones (and What It Costs Us)
On the Troubling Notion That Dark Stories Should Be Fixed
Author’s Note: As always, these are my own opinions and observations on how we treat stories. This is not a manifesto for “no boundaries ever,” just a plea to stop treating “this upset me” as self-evident proof that something shouldn't exist.
Quotes below are paraphrased versions of things I’ve seen floating around online, not direct citations.
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“There’s no reason to [dark/taboo thing] in a story in the first place.”
“Some topics just shouldn’t be allowed in fiction.”
“This kind of content shouldn’t exist, even with warnings.”
“If a book has [dark/taboo thing] in it, it shouldn’t be published at all.”
It appears that somewhere along the way, we quietly slid from:
“This topic is dark and uncomfortable, so I don’t want to read it.”
to:
“This topic is dark and uncomfortable, so no one should be allowed to write or read it.”
That shift? That’s the problem.
But first, let’s address the obvious: some topics are awful. Abuse, violence, murder, cruelty, bigotry, exploitation, incest, war, genocide, systemic harm, the whole cheerful buffet of human horror.
The instinct to recoil from those things is good, and the instinct to prevent them in real life is necessary.
But fiction isn't real life. It’s a space where we can look at things without causing them. It’s one of the few places where the worst things humans do can be examined without anyone actually being harmed in the process.
Saying “this is too dark for fiction” is often just another way of saying, “I don’t want to look at this at all, in any form” which is your right as an individual reader, but not a great principle to build a culture around.
A lot of the “ban this topic” rhetoric assumes one core belief:
If something appears in fiction, it’s being normalised.
Not: “It’s being examined.” “It’s being criticised.” “It’s being shown as horrific.” “It’s being used to express anger, grief, or fear.”
Just: “It exists on the page, therefore the author is okay with it, and the story is telling people it’s okay.”
By that logic:
Any story about war is pro-war.
Any story about abuse is pro-abuse.
Any story about cults is a recruitment pamphlet.
Any thriller with a serial killer is a secret advertisement for serial killing.
And honestly, if fiction were that powerful and literal, we’d all be in much worse shape already.
Before we declare all dark topics in fiction suspicious, it’s worth asking: why are we drawn to them in the first place?
Part of it is basic psychology. Our brains are wired to lock onto threat, danger, and taboo. It’s an old survival system doing what it does best: That looks risky. Pay attention. Fiction taps into that wiring in a way that doesn’t actually put us in danger. We get to simulate fear, revulsion, and moral horror without anyone being physically harmed. As my old professor used to say, it’s a mental fire drill.
There’s also the question of control. Real-life trauma is chaotic, unwanted, and very often unfair. Dark fiction, on the other hand, comes with an off-switch - you can close the book or pause the show. You can choose when to look and when to stop. For a lot of people, especially those who’ve lived through awful things, revisiting similar themes on their own terms can feel like a small form of taking back control.
Then there’s meaning-making. Humans are terrible at just letting bad things sit there being meaningless. We want patterns, explanations, and narratives. Dark stories let us ask: How does something like this happen? What does it do to people? What choices led here? Even if the answers are incomplete, the act of exploring them can be grounding. It turns raw horror into something we can at least name and discuss.
And yes, sometimes it’s just morbid curiosity: How bad does it get? That impulse isn’t automatically evil, it’s the same part of us that slows down to look at a disaster, or reads history books about atrocities we’d never want repeated. The point is that this morbid curiosity is deeply human, and fiction gives it a far safer outlet than reality ever could.
When we pretend that “healthy” and "good" people should only want soft, wholesome stories, we’re not actually protecting anyone. We’re just denying how human brains work, and shaming people for using one of the safest tools we have for grappling with the worst parts of being alive: made-up worlds where no one actually dies when we turn the page.
Censorship advocates also tend to forget that dark topics aren't a separate genre living in some faraway corner of the bookstore. They’re baked into nearly every kind of story.
You want to ban:
Murder, assault, toxic relationships, and cruelty? Goodbye crime fiction, horrors, most thrillers, and a sizable chunk of classics.
Trauma and abuse? There goes a lot of poignant memoirs and literary novels, plus a lot of fantasy protagonists’ backstories.
Anything that makes people “uncomfortable”? Enjoy your new literature featuring only mildly inconvenient misunderstandings and slightly awkward dinner parties.
Even fairy tales are full of kids being abandoned in forests, people getting eaten, eyes pecked out, and assorted curses. We’ve always told dark stories. The difference is that now some people are trying to pretend we’re above it.
The push to ban or scrub out dark topics is often framed as protection:
“We have to protect vulnerable readers.” “This might trigger someone.” “This could upset survivors.”
Here’s the twist: vulnerable readers and survivors are not a single, united hive mind.
Some don’t want to see these topics at all, which is completely valid, but others do want to see them:
To feel seen.
To process their own experiences at a distance.
To reclaim a narrative.
To explore their trauma in a context they control.
If you erase the topic entirely, it’s not just the hypothetical “bad readers” (who want to use it as fantasy fuel or shrug it off entirely as some people claim) who lose out. The people who might have drawn strength, comfort, or clarity from the story lose it too.
Banning the subject doesn’t target harmful intent because it nukes the entire landscape. There’s also a nasty little side effect: once you decide “dark topics shouldn’t appear in fiction,” you very quickly slide into:
“This historical event shouldn’t be depicted, it’s too awful.”
“We shouldn’t show this kind of oppression; it’s upsetting.”
“Let’s not include racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia as a theme; it might normalise it.”
In the name of being “safe,” you end up erasing the very things that shaped people’s lives.
Another thing: censorship doesn’t actually prevent harmful ideas. It just pushes them into less visible, less regulated spaces.
If you tell creators “you can’t write about this topic at all,” they don’t vanish; they move.
They go to smaller platforms with no moderation at all.
They stop tagging accurately and start hiding content under vague labels.
They bury their work in private servers and invite-only spaces where meaningful critique can’t reach them.
If your concern is genuinely “harmful depictions,” this is the worst possible outcome. You’ve just turned the lights off in the room and then walked away.
Allowing dark topics in fiction with clear categorisation, warnings, and space for discussion is actually safer than driving them into the shadows and pretending they don’t exist.
Also, not all “dark fiction” is the same.
There’s a world of difference between:
A story that treats violence as consequence-free fun, and
A story that uses violence to interrogate power, trauma, and morality.
Between:
A work that fetishises abuse, and
A work that shows abuse in a way that some survivors find deeply validating or cathartic.
Censorship flattens that nuance.
It doesn’t ask: “Is this handled with care?” It just declares: “This topic is bad. Out it goes.”
Imagine applying that to anything else.
“All surgery is bad; ban it.” (No distinction between a back-alley hack job and a life-saving operation.) “All fire is dangerous; outlaw it.” (No distinction between arson and a stove.)
Dark topics in fiction are tools. They can be used thoughtfully or carelessly. The presence of the tool is not the issue, the use is.
And, of course, there’s the impact on creators.
If the message they keep hearing is:
“If you write about X, you’re suspicious.”
“If you depict Y, you’re endorsing it.”
“If your work upsets me, you’re a bad person.”
. . . then, shockingly, fewer people will take the risk of writing about anything difficult including the creators who might actually handle it well.
You don’t get better, more nuanced depictions of dark material through fear and threat, you get silence, self-censorship, and a lot of resentful authors.
To be clear: none of this means “anything goes, no criticism allowed.”
You’re allowed - encouraged, even - to say:
“I think this story handled that topic irresponsibly.”
“This depiction is harmful, here’s why.”
That’s critique. That’s part of a healthy culture around media.
But critique is not the same as: “This topic is dark, so no one should touch it, ever again, in any way.”
You can dislike a work, condemn it, warn others about it, and still accept that it has the right to exist, tagged and shelved and far away from your eyeballs.
Ultimately, this comes down to a very unglamorous principle:
Fiction should be allowed to go to dark places.
Readers should be allowed to say “no thanks” and walk away.
The moment we decide that the existence of dark content is itself a moral failing, we lose what stories are uniquely good at: letting us look at the worst parts of humanity without anyone actually being hurt.
Stories won’t stop bad things from happening in the real world, but they can:
Help us recognise those patterns sooner.
Let us process fear, grief, and anger safely.
Give us language for things we’ve experienced.
Make us ask “what if?”
If we ban or censor topics just because they’re dark or uncomfortable, we don’t create a kinder world, we create a more fragile one, where people are less prepared to face the things stories might have helped them understand.
Fiction isn't obliged to protect us from every unpleasant feeling. It's one of the few places where we can walk right up to the worst of what humans do and still be safe when we close the cover.
Discomfort isn’t proof a story shouldn’t exist. It’s proof that something in it hit a nerve. The real question isn’t “How do we stop anyone from ever feeling this way?” but “What is this reaction telling me, and what am I going to do with that information?”
Dark stories will always exist, because dark realities do. The question isn’t whether they’re allowed to be told, but whether we’re willing to let them sit in the open where we can actually think about them.
Ultimately, fiction can lay unsettling, even disturbing subjects at our feet; what comes next - whether we explore them, question them, or choose to walk away - is ours alone.
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About Narrative Side Effects:
Narrative Side Effects is an essay series where I explore how we read fiction - our love of messy, morally dubious characters, so-called “problematic” topics, and the endless arguments that flare up around them.
Want to read more of my ramblings? Check out the links below:
On the Curious Belief That Authors Endorse Their Monsters
On the Odd Impulse to Treat Fictional People Like Real Ones (and What It Costs Us)
On the Odd Impulse to Treat Fictional People Like Real Ones (and What It Costs Us)
Author’s Note: This is about fictional people being treated like real ones, not about fans having feelings or enjoying characters. Feelings are fine, but harassing real humans over fake people is not.
As usual, quotes are paraphrased things I’ve seen online, not direct citations.
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It seems that some people have forgotten a basic fact: fictional characters aren't real. They're narrative tools designed to tell a story, not independent beings with lives outside the page.
Instead, they’re treated as though they have agency, boundaries, rights, and reputations.
The problem is, once you forget they’re tools and start treating them like real human beings, it’s a short slide into judging real people by their taste in fake ones. Your fave is now a diagnostic tool!
That’s how a medium designed for imagination and exploration turns into a weird personality test where your result is “morally suspect” because you picked the wrong blorbo.
Let’s be fair: our brains are built to blur this line a bit.
We form parasocial relationships. Psychologists talk about “parasocial relationships” – one-sided bonds we form with media figures (celebrities, YouTubers, fictional characters, etc). Our social systems don’t cleanly distinguish between “person on screen” and “person I know” so emotionally, it can feel very similar.
We simulate stories as if they’re real. When we’re deeply absorbed in a story, the brain activates many of the same regions it uses for real experiences and real social interactions. We mentally “run” the scenario: what would I do, how would that feel, what does that mean? That’s part of why stories are powerful.
We practice empathy on safe targets. Fiction allows us to try on different perspectives, including horrible ones, without risking real harm. Caring about fictional people is kind of the point. It’s evidence the story worked.
So yes: it’s normal to feel for characters, to cry over them, miss them, be furious with them, horrified by them, joke about them, and more.
That’s not the problem.
The problem starts when we forget that this person we’re defending is, ultimately, a construct built to serve a narrative.
Our brains are always going to lean in, care too much, and temporarily forget the difference, that’s part of why stories work. The goal isn’t to shut that down, it’s to keep one small light on in the back of our minds that says, this isn't real.
Empathy is the engine of fiction, but the trouble starts when we stop remembering there’s a page and a writer behind the “person” we’re ready to die on a hill for.
When Empathy Becomes Evidence
The dangerous leap looks like this:
“You care about/like relate to/defend this character” → “Therefore, you're a terrible person and must be like them (or approve of them) in real life.”
So we get:
“You like a villain? Red flag.”
“You relate to that dumpster fire protagonist? Yikes, stay away from me.”
“You ship those two toxic people? You’re basically endorsing abuse.”
That isn’t moral clarity, it’s policing - fiction recast as a pass/fail course based entirely on which character/s you’re fond of.
“Choose the wrong fave? Fail.”
“Feel for the villain? Deeply suspicious.”
Under that pressure, readers stop being honest about who they connect with. They either fake the “right” preferences or step back from fandom spaces entirely.
And that’s the real loss here: not that someone gets side-eyed for liking a villain, but that any attempt to unpack that enjoyment turns into putting a target on their back.
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Campaigning for Character Welfare
Another odd outcome is that discussions revolve around whether the narrative has “protected” the protagonists enough and whether it has “properly” punished the antagonists.
I see it with alarming regularity:
“They deserved better.”
“She deserved happiness.”
“He deserved worse after what he did.”
It’s a natural way to talk, but it can be a misleading one. Characters don’t deserve anything. They can’t. They don’t exist.
What a character actually gets should be whatever best serves the narrative and that can be catharsis, discomfort, injustice, irony, or the sense that the world on the page is just as messy and unfair as the one outside it.
When we start talking about characters as if their wellbeing is being violated in some cosmic sense, we end up with:
Guilt-tripping authors for following the internal logic of their own narrative.
Discouraging difficult, tragic, or morally complicated characters.
Prioritising fictional comfort over artistic exploration/coherence.
Flattening fandom conversations into “protect them at all costs” vs “how dare you”.
When we centre everything on fictional wellbeing, we quietly swap out the question “Is this a good/interesting story?” for “Did this imaginary person suffer more than I’m comfortable with?”
The point of fiction isn’t to guarantee every character a fair, gently cushioned life or every villain a neatly packaged punishment, it’s to explore possibilities, including the ones that hurt or feel unfair. If we can’t tolerate difficult arcs and ugly behaviour for people who don’t even exist, we just end up with blander characters and fandom spaces where no one feels safe being honest about what actually moves them.
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Why This Actually Harms Discussion (and People)
Treating fictional characters like real people might feel harmless but at scale, it leads to real problems because it fuels harassment of real humans.
Actors get abused for what their characters did.
Authors get death threats because a ship didn’t sail, or a character died, or a villain was too compelling.
Fans are dogpiled for liking the “wrong” character or enjoying a certain ship.
All of this is behaviour is aimed at real people, justified by feelings about fake ones.
And what does that lead to? Well:
It shuts down nuanced critique. If you say, “I find this villain fascinating,” and people hear “I support their ideology,” conversation becomes impossible. If you say, “I empathise with how this terrible character got here,” and people hear “you excuse their behaviour,” nuance dies.
It discourages complex characters. Writers learn very quickly that they’ll be accused of endorsing whatever the character does. Easiest solution? Flatter characters with clear-cut morals and no ambiguity. How exciting.
It teaches people to moralise their own reactions. If relating to a fictional mess is seen as a reflection of their own morals, people learn to be ashamed of parts of themselves that are completely normal: anger, envy, spite, grudges, intrusive thoughts, etc. Fiction should be where we safely explore that stuff, not where we pretend it doesn’t exist.
What looks like harmless over-identification with fake people ends up doing the most damage to real ones and to the stories themselves.
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“But Caring Is Half the Fun?”
By all means:
Cry over characters.
Be angry at them.
Be disgusted by them.
Feel a connection to them.
Miss them when the story ends.
Write essays, fanfic, meta, memes, draw them.
Rant and rave about them with friends for weeks.
Intense feelings are the point.
The problem isn’t caring; the problem is what we do with that care:
“He's abusive, so you’re a bad person for liking him.”
“She's traumatised, so you can’t criticise her choices.”
“They are in a toxic relationship, so enjoying the story is endorsing toxicity.”
Fictional characters aren't real - they’re text.
The fact they’re not real is exactly what lets us question them, reimagine them, and put them back together differently. You’re not harming anyone by saying, “This character is a disaster and I love them,” or “Wow, he’s awful and fascinating,” or “I wouldn’t go near her in real life, but as a character? I love her.”
When we let ourselves treat characters as real enough to care about but fake enough to dissect, fiction can actually do its job. I promise that the characters will be fine no matter what we think of them. The only people who get hurt when we police each other’s feelings about fake people are the real ones.
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Conclusion
We don’t need to stop loving fictional characters; we just need to remember they’re not the ones who can be hurt.
Fictional characters don’t need our protection. They don’t know what we say about them, and they can’t be damaged by a hot take. They don’t have agency or rights, they can’t read call-out posts, and they don’t lose sleep over shipping wars. The only people we hurt when we moralise, dogpile, and police each other over fake people are the real humans on the other side of the screen.
When we treat characters like real people and each other like potential criminals for liking the wrong guy, we don’t make fandom safer, we just make it smaller. People stop opening up about what fascinates them, nuanced conversations dry up, and whole corners of fiction get quietly labelled off-limits. All that outrage gets wasted on paper people who can’t acknowledge it, while the real harm lands on readers, writers, and fans who were just trying to enjoy a story together.
And nothing kills curiosity, good faith discussion, creativity, and simple enjoyment faster than the fear that caring about the “wrong” imaginary person makes you a bad real one.
Long story short:
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About Narrative Side Effects:
Narrative Side Effects is an essay series where I explore how we read fiction - our love of messy, morally dubious characters, so-called “problematic” topics, and the endless arguments that flare up around them. Want to read more of my ramblings? Check out the links below:
On the Curious Belief That Authors Endorse Their Monsters
On the Troubling Notion That Dark Stories Should Be Fixed
