I'm tired of this ridiculous, intellectually lazy comparison people drag out to defend anything they want to post online. "Oh, you have a problem with my fanfic romanticizing a teacher and student? But you play GTA! You're fine with murder!" It's a nonsense argument, and anyone who makes it is either being deeply dishonest or hasn't thought for three seconds about the actual media they consume.
The difference is so obvious it's almost painful to explain: framing and consequence. In virtually every mainstream story, murder is framed as a bad thing. It’s a destructive act. The murderer is not held up as a romantic ideal. Look at the poster children for this argument—the GTA protagonists. Are they cool, aspirational heroes? No. Michael is a miserable, paranoid, money-obsessed wreck of a man whose family despises him. Trevor is a literal psychopath, portrayed as a chaotic, dangerous joke. The whole point of these games is the grotesque, satirical exaggeration of criminal life, and the narrative never, ever pretends these people are having a good time because of the murders they commit. Their lives are chaotic, empty, and constantly on the brink of collapse. Murder is the engine of their misery, not the prize.
Same goes for other media. In Dexter, the titular killer is a monster grappling with his own lack of humanity. In God of War, Kratos's past as a murderer is a literal curse he spends centuries trying to escape. The narrative weight is always there: murder is a tragedy, a crime, or a symptom of profound brokenness.
Now, compare that to how pedophilia, incest, or abuse are often handled in the corners of fandom and certain media that this debate is actually about. The problematic element isn't the existence of the topic—it's the romanticization. It's the framing of an abusive power dynamic as a passionate, forbidden love story. The adult guardian and the child aren't portrayed as a victim and a predator; they're framed as soulmates fighting against a judgmental world. The incestuous pairing isn't shown as a destructive family secret causing lifelong trauma; it's written as a deep, irresistible bond that society misunderstands.
That's the critical disconnect. Nobody is out there writing murder-AUs where killing people is shown as a healthy, desirable foundation for a beautiful romance. But people are constantly writing stories where grooming is the meet-cute, where abuse is devotion, and where the victim's trauma is erased for the sake of a hot plot. The comparison fails because it ignores the moral framework of the narrative itself. One presents an act as fundamentally negative; the other deliberately repackages a horrific act as something positive, sexy, and aspirational.
To pretend these are the same is just a bad-faith attempt to shut down criticism. It's a way to say, "All fiction is fiction, so nothing matters," which is frankly a childish view of storytelling. Stories have context. Framing matters. Glorifying real-world harms that destroy actual lives—especially ones involving the exploitation of the vulnerable—is categorically different from portraying a universally recognized crime as exactly that: a crime. The first one can actively warp perceptions of consent and power for impressionable audiences; the second, when done with standard narrative consequences, usually just reinforces that killing is bad.
So let's drop this stupid false equivalence. It's not about "picking which taboo is okay." It's about having the basic media literacy to understand the difference between portraying something as a tragedy and packaging it as a fantasy.
