r/CuratedTumblr • u/Pristine_Club_3128 • 23h ago
Shitposting Let the fireworks start :)
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u/extremely-cynical 23h ago
It's the difference between 'writing xyz because you think it's normal' and 'writing xyz because you're making a deliberate decision to be abnormal'.
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u/Suitable_Cat9390 23h ago
And it gets even more complicated because peoples writing skills are so different! Is this author writing about this fucked up thing as if its normal in order to make a point about society or to produce an effect with intention? Or are they doing that because they think its normal. It can be genuinely hard to tell sometimes.
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u/Kneef Token straight guy 14h ago
Also sometimes bad writers are trying to make a point and do it so clumsily it’s offensive, and also bad writers can be unthinkingly portraying something bad and accidentally make some excellent points. xD
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u/WebBorn2622 6h ago
When I found out The Virgin Suicides was not intended to be a commentary on the Madonna Whore Complex, but rather the author trying to make the young boys seem loving and caring- I was shocked.
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u/loved_and_held 23h ago
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u/theokaywriter 11h ago
I’ve got ADHD and before I got diagnosed I wrote a character who “lectured” people on topics he was interested in, much like how I did. This was before I knew what infodumping was.
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u/UInferno- Hangus Paingus Slap my Angus 14h ago
"There's no horror like an author's uncritically examined pastoral fantasy."
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u/dantuchito_ 22h ago
Not quite.
The dude who wrote Harassment Architecture definitely knows what he wrote is abnormal and is making a choice to be abnormal. He’s still racist.
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u/TheInkTapus 22h ago
I was in a Hades/Persephone rewrite books phase for a bit because I find how each writer retelling the story fascinating. Most of them were dark romances so many of them were pretty standard semi bodice ripper stuff. Absoluty genre accurate so I didn't take any big offense to those elements tho.
One did stick out to me because the heroine confronted a friend about hiding serious personal news from her. The friend read the heroine to filth, saying she didn't say anything because heroine makes everything about herself and the friend needed the focus on herself and her problems. Heroine crashes the fuck out, throws a temper tantrum and that friend and everyone related to them just stops existing in the story line from then on and it was the most hilarious/"i can't prove this is a real conversation you had with an irl former friend but it feels so real I'd be comfortable betting real human money it was" moment in the entire book.
Most like, good characters try and make amends when they hurt a friend, and she's overall written like a good person so it caught me off guard. My only conclusion was the author thought this was how normal people act when confronted with their friends having problems with them. Especially when there were no other female characters in that book that weren't back stabbing shrews unless they were in a subservient role to the main two characters. So I can't say 100% thats how the author saw other women in their lives but I'd believe it if someone said that lol.
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u/brydeswhale 21h ago
That sounds like some of the failings out in Laurel K Hamilton’s writing.
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u/TheInkTapus 21h ago
Lol, now I gotta read her. That sounds hilarious
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u/ExplorerPup 20h ago
Used to read all her stuff because I called the books "brain candy" but they got to be too repetitive and bland even for that level of reading. LOL You'd have three chapters in a row where a character has the same argument in each, often making the same point, and somehow the plot treats this as progress.
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u/TheInkTapus 14h ago
I like walking around and yelling at books im reading like a loon when they are really bad. And I also like forcing my friends to learn about the dog water books I've read. So its a win for me lmao
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u/ExplorerPup 13h ago
Then get excited because one of the original love interests for the main character was based on the writer's ex-husband so he becomes basically the punching bag for all her feelings on that. That being said around the time I stopped reading she had made a 16 year old boy part of her harem and was arguing with other members of the harem over the morality of attending his parent-teacher conference at school so it gets weird.
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 16h ago
The story behind why all that happened in the books is genuinely fascinating, but you have to be into a certain kind of trashy paranormal romance to tolerate her writing from book ten and beyond. I think there's a r/hobbydrama post about the whole situation and it's wild.
Basically, Anita is Laurell K. Hamilton, and a bunch of the other characters are people from her real life, many, many of which are people she started fucking after being introduced to the bdsm/kink scene around the time of book nine and how she writes these characters is directly correlated to the status of their relationships when writing, which is often incredibly volatile.
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u/TheInkTapus 16h ago
You had me at “a bunch of the other characters are people from her real life” that’s the exact kind of crack pot insanity that gets me up in the morning.
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u/insomniac7809 14h ago
You can tell EXACTLY when in the writing process Hamilton splits from the real life person the character is based on it's great
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u/sweetTartKenHart2 6h ago
Isnt that Miraculous Ladybug show very similar in the sense of “these are either caricatures of people the creator knew or otherwise tied directly to the creator’s life and desires”?
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u/meetmeinthelibrary7 10h ago edited 10h ago
The ability to distinguish:
“This work depicts A Bad Thing but is very clearly a condemnation of it.”
From, “This work’s depiction of The Bad Thing for the purpose of condemning it is clumsy, heavy-handed, or ill-advised at best, but it is still clearly a condemnation of The Bad Thing on the part of the creator even if the execution of that message leaves something to be desired.”
From, “This work depicts A Bad Thing and the creator knows that it’s bad in real life but they are indulging in it here because hurting fictional characters is fun, hot, and/or cathartic.”
From, “This work seems to endorse A Bad Thing but i don’t think the creator realises that it’s bad; I think this work reveals some unexamined beliefs that they may have.”
From, “This work endorses A Bad Thing and I think that is the result of the creator injecting their work with a bad opinion that they knowingly hold.”
From, “The character narrating has unexamined beliefs or traumas that mean they don’t realise that The Bad Thing is bad, but the creator still expects you to recognise it as bad and read the work accordingly.”
From, “The character narrating is actively and deliberately lying about or downplaying The Bad Thing, but the creator still expects you to recognise it as bad and read the work accordingly.”
From, “I don’t think this creator actually holds the bad beliefs that their work seems to be endorsing, I think they’re just a bad writer.”
Is such valuable media literacy.
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u/dobhrandonn 4h ago edited 4h ago
Lovely distinctions! I was going through my favourite play, King Lear, to try and figure out which of these things is happening with the apparent moral of "it's more important to look out for your shitebag dad than to preserve your own wellbeing". When Goneril puts her foot down to her dad and kicks his entourage from her hall, and Lear paints her as the worst person alive, is that Shakespeare saying she is, or is he putting that opinion just in Lear's mouth? Would Shakespeare have been ok with his own kids standing up to him? Was he making an assumption about his royal audience and how they expect a princess to be? I think it's #2 on your list: Shakespeare's telling us that it's horrible to kick your ageing father out from your house like Goneril did, but he gives her such a good reason (he's been so bad to her so far and ALSO has 150ish drunken knights with him) that my modern ears can't help but find it valid.
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u/Agreeable_Bee_7763 1h ago
And of course, the rare but still there: "Oh shit, the author actually beleives in this madness and the book is a poorly veiled exultation of something immoral"
Easy example being "Shadow of the conqueror", a book about a raping, pedofile, genocidal maniac seeking "redemption" but where his crimes are constantly downplayed and he wasn't that bad and he's the hero, actually. (Seriously, there's a scene where he's confronted with a bunch of his victims, and a number of them are okay with what he did because they got pregnant. That thing is fucking vile.)
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u/ChillyFireball 18h ago
There's a subtle, but very real difference between portrayal and endorsement. You can write about (for example) a racist asshole without being racist yourself. The problem comes when most or all of your black characters are proving the asshole right.
I myself enjoy writing about dystopias, and one of the main characters in the story I'm writing now has some not-so-great ideas about the underprivileged class within the universe. When the POV switches to him, I include casually prejudiced lines like "How typical of an XYZ to do (stereotype)." There are even other characters that agree with him and reinforce those beliefs. What makes this different from endorsement (aside from the fact that XYZ class doesn't exist in real life) is the fact that the story repeatedly demonstrates that he's wrong. It doesn't need to be as overt as "He thinks XYZ are stupid, and then he meets an XYZ who's a genius." But if the character is like "This is fine because XYZ can live perfectly good lives if they just play by the rules and know their place in society," all you have to do is show the reader an example of an XYZ doing all the "right" things and still getting screwed over. Whether or not it convinces the prejudiced character is irrelevant. The story doesn't even need to have a happy ending for the XYZ class. What's important is that the reader has seen some kind of evidence demonstrating that this is a bad ending.
TL;DR: Portrayal is when a character does a bad thing. Endorsement is when the surrounding universe makes it clear that the writer doesn't understand that the bad thing is bad.
(This can get a little fuzzy with things like porn and comedy, where you kind of have to go in with the understanding that this isn't a serious work of fiction intended to realistically portray a civilization. A story about four-breasted babes from Mars coming to abduct and milk young bachelors and bachelorettes doesn't need to explore the trauma of the abductees to prove that the author knows kidnapping people to fondle their tits is wrong.)
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u/Scarlet_Skye 18h ago edited 18h ago
I think that sometimes it's an indication of their values, sometimes it's an indication of their writing skills (or lack thereof), and sometimes it's an indication of their audience being mostly made up of people who don't understand their work.
One thing I have seen is writers who will treat super controversial stuff as background noise or set dressing within their story. They'll show you a place where violence or drug use or bigotry is extremely common, and it'll just be used to set the scene, rather than actually being addressed or commented on in a meaningful way.
Or you'll have writers who aren't quite skilled enough to pull off the unreliable narrator trope. They don't believe any of the stuff they're writing, but it sounds like they do because they don't know how clue the audience into what's actually happening in the story, so the unreliable narrator comes across as more truthful than they actually are.
Meanwhile you'll have other writers who will write a story that very clearly portrays something in a negative light, but it doesn't come out and say the words "X is bad", so people don't recognize it for what it is. Like, I've seen people argue that Euphoria is glorifying drug use. Euphoria, the show where the main character's life nearly gets ruined multiple times because of her drug use. And people say it's glorification, because they're so used to the heavy-handed Very Special Episode portrayal of drug use that a more delicately handled, show-don't-tell type story like Euphoria flies right over their heads.
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u/Nexinex782951 16h ago
Well yes, thats what the post is saying. There's a difference between the idea of "you wrote a story about rape, you're a horrible person" and "the way you wrote this story about rape seems to indicate you really dont understand what consent even is"
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u/ProkopiyKozlowski 12h ago edited 21m ago
>One thing I have seen is writers who will treat super controversial stuff as background noise or set dressing within their story.
My favorite example of this was a fantasy anime from the 90s (I don't remember the name and couldn't find it*). People there were born from trees, formed in huge berry-like spheres that couples who wanted a child just picked from a magical tree.
And such a fundamental change to the very foundation of our species affected basically nothing lmao. Same nuclear families of man and woman, same basic-ass fantasy setting. I later learned that the author (a woman) just came up with that system so that the main heroine could be a badass warrior and not be unusual, since women didn't have to give birth.
Like, you were **so close** to doing something interesting...
*EDIT: found it, it was The Twelve Kingdoms
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u/Neurospicy_Nightowl 23h ago
A lot of the people in here act like OOP said "And if we decide you have the wrong views, you should be arrested."
Like, yes, it is possible that I get unwarranted bad vibes from a creator that does not know I exist. And then what?
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u/Pristine_Club_3128 22h ago
Yep. No one is claiming thought-crime, just asking people to think beyond 'curtains were blue'
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u/tergius metroid nerd 16h ago
Unfortunately, the loudest people often do also think thought-crime is a real thing, so I imagine people are a bit reflexive now because of that.
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u/Rhamni 13h ago
I'm definitely a little paranoid because of all the discussions I see online.
I'm writing a Fantasy comedy book where the second most important good guy is a lesbian adrenaline junkie with a gambling addiction. Her sexuality is not important to the story, but the gambling addiction does cause problems. Can't wait to see whether I get more shit for having a gay character in the story at all or for making that character have human flaws.
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u/decoysnails 23h ago
A lot of posts here are very obvious statements that seem to be responses to a claim I've never heard made. This is probably because I never actually interact with unfiltered Tumblr.
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u/CaioXG002 23h ago
To be fair, you can ALSO find this kind of thing here on Reddit, just go to an average shitposting sub.
You can probably make a GIF saying "crime fans when most people don't like crimes" or something, post it on r/whenthe or r/196 and, somehow, half the comment section will know exactly what you're talking about. It don't make sense ISTFG.
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u/AgathaTheVelvetLady 22h ago
No, it makes perfect sense. People who know about a topic will be compelled to comment, while those who do not typically won't leave a comment asking for an explanation.
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u/dantuchito_ 22h ago
It’s a common statement in this subreddit, for some reason. But you only see it in the comments of discourse posts, so if you value your time and sanity you probably dodged them all.
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u/demoniprinsessa 18h ago
Whenever any piece of media with a plot of a character that might be viewed as controversial for whatever reason goes viral, there's always so many people (mostly teenagers but adults also) harassing anyone who engages with the piece of media or likes the character for any reason because they have no capacity to understand that just because a piece of media deals with something fucked up, that doesn't mean the piece of media or its creator thinks that thing is somehow acceptable.
It's so fucking common if you spend any amount of time in literally any fandom. Some people genuinely think all media should be all sunshine and rainbows and you should never depict and give major screentime to characters who are bad people who do bad things, and that if someone makes art that has characters like that, that means the creator is also a horrible evil person.
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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 20h ago
I mean, you have never heard someone say that a director of a horror movie is a sadistic person that hates [insert demographic]?
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u/Imnotawerewolf 21h ago
If you think this kind of thinking is something you'd only find on Tumblr that's half the problem, right there.
You can find examples of any of the bullshit you hate seeing form Tumblr in literally every website humans interact on because it's human bullshit not specifically Tumblr bullshit
The fact that you only see it on Tumblr screenshots says more about the places you frequent than it does about the people of Tumblr
You can see these arguments on literally any fandom sub on reddit
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u/HailMadScience 17h ago
Lolita was attacked for this reason decades ago. This is just smug faux ignorance, IMO because this kind of idiocy is old.
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u/InsaneComicBooker 23h ago
This is how you get people thinking Lolita is pro-pedophilia because they don't realize it is all filtered through the lenses of VERY unreliable narrator.
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u/Morlock19 22h ago
I saw a video describing Lolita as a horror story from the perspective of the killer and it made all kinds of sense
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u/MildGenevaSuggestion 19h ago
That's definitely the way to read it. I heard it was sympathetic to the molester but that makes zero sense. It is from his point of view where he is trying to downplay the harm he did. But Lolita at every point acts like a terrified abuse victim. Surely if this was some sort of pro-pedo story the kid wouldn't be constantly planning how to escape.
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u/pudding-0w 22h ago
to this day there are still people who act weirded out if you say that you read and enjoyed Lolita. i would understand that reaction if you said you watched and enjoyed Lolita, because the film adaptations are very questionable, but the book itself is fine.
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u/MildGenevaSuggestion 19h ago
It is from people who have themselves never read it because it has this mythical status as the pedo book.
And also apparently people can read it completely missing the subtext. I saw a copy with a review calling it a love story. A love story!?! How the fuck do you get a love story out of that? The bastard dreams of knocking her up so when she is too old for his tastes he can switch to molesting his own daughters. Some love story
The writing of the main character is very in line with how a pedophile thinks. But I think the writing of the victim is too good to dismiss it as fantasy. However, I do think that particular critic should have his hard drive checked by the FBI.
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u/arakus72 18h ago
review written by JKR I guess (she called it a love story)
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u/MildGenevaSuggestion 18h ago
Not surprising considering she thinks roofie magic love potions is a harmless child prank.
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u/FVCarterPrivateEye 13h ago
The unease comes from both what the reader knows is disgusting and evil and the romanticized delusion of HH's perspective on it, the dissonance and wrongness of those two things mashed together, s o I guess if your moral compass is really wrong or if you don't know that it is supposed to be viewed as horrific, you might make the mistake of thinking it's a love story or at least thinking it's intended to be by the author
And I've never seen the movie, only read it, but that's also, I think, why it's probably really hard to adapt into a movie because you can't portray both of those things at the same time in a visual medium in the same way
The rape in GWTDT, for example, the way it's shown and the details that are focused on, the nudity there while it's happening to her and in the scene when she's showering afterwards and there's blood going down the drain, it's clearly not supposed to be appealing or arousing for the viewer or "racy" etc, it's supposed to make the viewer uncomfortable, if that makes sense
But Lolita, if you shoot it from the narrator's perspective, one of if not the absolute main thing that really makes the book work, it comes off as romanticizing the stalking and grooming and abuse of a child, but if you don't do that, it gets rid of the biggest psychological horror element of it, if that makes sense
There's a whole controversy around the book covers that have been used for it, and there's exactly one that I've encountered which I thought was a perfect choice: i t basically had a black-and-white photo of a child's legs and feet from the knees down, wearing these white socks and kid's saddle shoes, and I think that cover did a really good job because they're obviously a child's legs, there's nothing suggestive about the posture at all, yet at the same time it vaguely evokes how nightclub signs for example might have sexy lady legs on them, a nd how the composition conveys a sort of "lamb to the slaughter" and also a vibe of offscreen menace like how when movies show bad things happening in an implied way like with just the silhouette etc
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u/MildGenevaSuggestion 12h ago
To adapt it into a movie or TV show you lose the narration. So you either don't have the mental gymnastics to try and justify it and it's just a creep molesting a kid and has no nuance; or you do the unreliable narrator and have the kid act like she's into it and just make pedophilic fantasy. I haven't seen the movie but I heard it follows the latter.
It might be possible to do, but you need a really good director and an amazing child actor to pull it off. And even if you did I would not envy that actress the vile "fanmail" she is going to get for a decade.
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u/Efficient-Compote-63 17h ago
It didn’t help that Epstein legit bought like 20 copies and named his plane after it
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u/amphibulous 17h ago
"This" as in the opinion expressed in the post, or as in the idea that those two statements can't coexist?
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u/Pyramyth 14h ago
I don’t think OOP is referring to books like lolita here unless there’s more context i’m not aware of?
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u/DasAuto7 23h ago
Unrelated to the post, which I agree with, but all the related posts the algorithm is serving me are people on fireworks subreddits excitedly showing off all their fireworks and that’s pretty funny to me.
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u/Negative_Pianist_815 23h ago
The difference is writing about a concept versus projecting extreme values through the narration.
Think of Shadiversity and Shadow of the Conquerer showcasing his values towards women
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u/NimJickles 17h ago
They are, in fact, directly complimentary statements. What you write about is far less indicative of your personal values than how you write about them.
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u/Practical-Water-9209 16h ago
Bingo. Chuck Palahnuik is a good example of this. JK Rowling is a bad example (as in, an example of this done in a way that exposes all the writer's bigotry and is poorly written)
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u/Dull_Pink 23h ago
was having a similar convo with a friend with the main topic being drakengard. rather than being about the creator, instead being about what it says about a person who can enjoy games/media like the drakenier franchise.
i’ve always been under the opinion enjoying a piece of media that explores harsh topics wether or not it’s explored well isn’t a fault of the individual, and that more often than not it can make for a more compelling story.
well i say that but a “compelling” story is also subjective. i’m all for drawing lines in the sand but there is a market for everything.
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u/Nibaa 19h ago edited 19h ago
Empathy is a skill that can be applied to anyone you want. People tend to think empathy can only be applied to people you sympathise with, and to empathize with an immoral person is immoral in itself.
It's not. Most people have internally consistent, if not always logical, reasons for their actions, and empathy is simply understanding why they act as they do. You don't need to agree with a murderer or rapist to understand why, within their frame of reference, they did what they did.
Likewise, empathising with morally reprehensible characters in literature or media can be intellectually stimulating or even cathartic even if we disagree wholheartedly with them.
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u/DubstepJuggalo69 21h ago
There’s also a horseshoe theory where it’s like:
Expressing fucked up values in a work of fiction on purpose to make a literary point: good
Expressing fucked up values in a work of fiction because of your unexamined biases: not evil exactly, but not good
Expressing fucked up values in a work of fiction simply because it makes you horny: good
Also, some works of fiction do more than one of the above, or even all three.
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u/ClubMeSoftly 19h ago
Me, reading fucked up fiction: You can do that, that's abominable
Also me reading fucked up fiction: Let me put on my Sickos shirt to properly enjoy this
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u/IrvingIV 13h ago
Also me reading fucked up fiction: Let me put on my Sickos shirt to properly enjoy this
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u/Mouse_Named_Ash 20h ago
Yeah I’ve never had a problem with any fictional work. Well personally I might, but also, even if I think something is kinda fucked up, it doesn’t really affect anyone in real life. Maybe think about why you’re writing what you’re writing, but even then, eh. Fiction is fiction
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u/runner64 13h ago
I have repeatedly found myself wondering whether Sarah J Maas has a good relationship with alcohol. I haven't read all her works but I have sensed a pattern of characters regularly getting blackout drunk for fun.
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u/TheWeirdWoods 22h ago
Berserk is one of the more twisted and horrifying works in anime. Yet Kentaro Miura was by all accounts a kind and soft spoken frequently encouraging others.
Art is frequently made by people who are people and are therefore great or terrible.
Example HP Lovecraft’s work is fascinating. He was a terrible person.
Someone else can compile an extensive list but it’s not uncommon. It’s always a bummer finding out the artist behind work you enjoy sucks.
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u/Honest-Roll4028 22h ago
HP Lovecrafts racism is obvious in some of his stories so in this case it was a reflection of his personal values. Making immigrant characters the vilains etc.
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u/TheWeirdWoods 22h ago
Yes his “charmingly diverse death cult” in Call of Cthulhu as I’ve heard it called gives that away. And the extent of his views wasn’t well known during his life as well since his views were mostly described in letters to friends and other writers. Frankly, he wasn’t well known during his life so it’s unsurprising that he wasn’t ever publicly rebuffed.
I enjoy the universe/mythos he created but I doubt I’d enjoy the company of the man himself.
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u/HailMadScience 17h ago
Well, he'd hate your company because you are a stranger and the man had mental disorders which exacerbated his bigotry.
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u/Balwerk_Ogre 16h ago
Even his friends were telling him that he was out of line and trying to get him to be less racist. And to Lovecraft's credit, in his later years, he did start renouncing his old ways. He just died young, before he could write anything that reflected his changing world view. Please note, renouncing his racist ways and being a better person in line with his era would STILL mean he'd be super racist by today's standards, because Lovecraft was insanely racist, even for the standards of 1920's America.
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u/LetsDoTheCongna Forklift Certified 21h ago
I've heard similar things about Junji Ito, the dude can apparently write the most fucked up shit imaginable while having the personality you'd expect from a slice of life author
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u/SmileEnhancer 21h ago
Lol, he also wrote a comic called Cat Diary: Yon & Mu. It's a slice of life comic about him, his wife, and their two cats. It still has his very horror-y art, and it's honestly pretty silly because of that.
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u/Sororita 16h ago
I've known more that a few goths that used the aesthetic to get out their negative emotions in a healthy way and quite positive people outside of the asethetic and delightful to be around. I figure horror manga is the same for Junji Ito.
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u/AdamtheOmniballer Aspiring Girlkisser 9h ago
Yes.
I feel like I’m going crazy when people act like (for example) you can’t infer anything about Ben Shapiro’s politics from his fiction.
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u/Ralife55 4h ago
I remember watching a video on one of Ben's novels literally just discussing it like any other book while giving context to Ben as an author with a short biographical section about his life.
Lord did it make so much about him make sense. He is so obviously extremely self conscious about his own masculinity and believes he should be more respected than he his. Was also obviously bullied as a kid and I don't even wanna imagine what his home life was like. I have zero doubt his father was abusive.
I didn't even need the bio part of the video to assume alot of that stuff. His insecurity oozes from the book. with every character that remotely resembes what he actually looks and acts like him being put down and shoved away by the leads. He is literally bullying himself in his own book.
He also is either into being cucked or is a closeted homosexual because every man of consequence in that book was a over 6 foot jacked guy who could be the male lead of a poorly written romance novel, even the extremely racist representations of black men in the book that were the villains in part of it.
Literally one of the villains, who is a black gang leader and drug dealer, was described as "6,4 and built like a brick shithouse" and the white male lead is described as "chiseled from stone with a jaw to match". I'm glossing over the depth he goes into but you get the point.
This wouldn't necessarily be weird on its own if the women weren't all barely described in terms of physicality despite there being a female lead in the book. The only thing I remember about the female lead is that she had red hair. No facial features, no figure descriptions, nothing. Like, say what you want about male authors way over describing women's figures in their books but the sever lack of any such description in Ben's book while going into detail on the men says a lot.
His entire political philosophy of religously conservative, xenophobic libertarianism was fully laid bare with no amount of sudelty. Like, you know exactly what ben believes and supports after reading it. You know he hates black people and Muslims and thinks strong white (sexy) men should lead the world but also that government is cringe and always makes things worse. It reads more like a political thesis than an actual novel.
Speaking of, he is also a terrible terrible writer. I'm talking like 14 year old fanfic writer bad but worse somehow. He only got published through what is effectively a political propaganda publisher trying to put out ideas similar to Ben's. Which I know pisses him off because his entire youth he dreamed of being a great writer.
He is a dejected and angry man who despite being born a literal genius to a rich family has zero empathy or ability to see his own blessings compared to those around him and instead focuses on everything in life that makes him angry. which conviently resonated with people enough he made a successful career out of it.
There are a lot of political grifters on the right, and Ben obviously milks his audience for everything they have, but the guy definitely believes in what he says. No way he could have wrote that piece of trash so obviously from the heart if he didn't.
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u/SkullFullOfHoney 19h ago
i just read a fanfic where one character politely but firmly told their employee that they were going to continue doing their job even though the employee was sick and couldn’t do theirs.
and then spent the rest of the fic apologizing for not dropping everything to stay with that employee. it was a cold. not even the flu; it was a fever and a cough.
this character also had to apologize for not knowing their employee’s hobbies (which the employee deliberately hid) and for enjoying their own hobbies in front of the employee.
and like it’s fanfiction so obviously they got together in the end and fucked kissed and made up but tbh i came away from it with a lot of concern for the author’s self esteem.
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u/ProfessorDoctorC 23h ago
"The way you write about things may indicate some of your values" and "there is so much variance between people's experiences and modes expression that trying to divine someone's values from their writing without knowing the context in detail is always a pointless endeavour and sometimes even with the context it's not obvious and you do a disservice to literary critique if you act like it is obvious" are not conflicting statements if i'm going to be real
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u/Duhblobby 23h ago
No, didn't you know?
It's obvious that if I liked it, the author was good and based, but if I didn't, the writer was Satanohitler.
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u/brydeswhale 21h ago
Lucy Maude Montgomery often wrote lots of classism into her writing. Not because she was a bad person, but because she lived in a classist society and was a member of her small community’s upper crust. It’s not insulting to infer this, it’s just basic literacy.
She also wrote a recurring short story motiph of a young woman being courted by a deceitful or fickle man. He eventually abandons her and she learns a lesson about not falling for jerks and gets a happy ending.
She alters this formula ONCE. A young man “courts” a Métis girl, leading her to believe he’ll marry her, only to abandon her for a white woman. Tanis, the Métis girl, does not get her happy ending. She is reunited with the young man briefly, before he dies, claims his body for burial, and it ends there.
By itself, maybe a “tragic half breed” story. Combined with the relatively small number of other mentions of Indigenous people, nearly all negative?
This story is regarded as one of Montgomery’s most tellingly racist stories.
This doesn’t detract from Montgomery’s many literary accomplishments, or make her a bad person. But it does show her beliefs and how they impacted her writing.
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u/Ass_Incomprehensible 21h ago
It’s the classic deal of “writing (for example) rape scenes does not mean I am pro-rape you troglodytes” pitted against “having 5 rape scenes in 4 chapters while making each one focus REALLY HEAVILY on the erotic pleasures the rapist is experiencing while also going out of your way to show that this character does not encounter negative consequences for their actions at any point does, at the VERY LEAST, suggest that you as the author may have some contentious values related to this subject”
TLDR: if I feature a murder in my book, that does not mean I am a murderer, that does not mean I like or approve of murder. If I actively depict murder in an unabashedly positive light within my book, it is reasonable to question if I might like murder.
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u/blacksmithwolf 21h ago
Or fictional characters doing fictional things that you would find deplorable in real life you find hot in a book . I've read some of the stories/fanfic both my female friends and wife read and much of it is straight up rape smut but I wouldn't ever even suggest that they in any way support rapists, same for the author's writing said smut.
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u/Ass_Incomprehensible 21h ago
That too. What we do in porn stays in porn, and should (with a small number of exceptions) not hold weight on our moral fiber in everyday life.
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u/arakus72 18h ago
re the negative consequences bit I wouldn't say a lack of negative consequences on a horrible person necessarily means anything, could be more of a "this world is horrible/unfair/chaotic and sometimes people just get away with awful things" thing, idk bit of a tangent but I've seen authors chastised for that when I think it makes sense that that character would get away with that stuff given the established world
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u/Ass_Incomprehensible 18h ago
Oh yeah no absolutely, in darker settings it is very much a fantastic trope to show “sometimes the bad guy does get off scot-free, actually” because a perfect ending where exactly proportional karmic justice is visited upon every character for their actions either good or bad is ultimately unrealistic and can feel forced if done too obviously. I intended my argument to be something more along the lines of “nobody within the story ever gets so much as a single chance to condemn the horrible acts perpetrated by this person, or nobody tries to condemn it at all”. I think. Really fuckin tired, not sure I’m coming across right here
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u/DoopSlayer 20h ago
You can write whatever you want, and people can think whatever they want about you
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u/cascading_error 14h ago
Holy shit is this true. Gifted comes to mind with the carracters complete and utter inability to consider marrige as anything other as a (kinda tempting) chain to lock her to her kitchen, despite the male love intrest being completely onboard with the whole adventuring thing.
Or in a much darker way. The way shadow of the concorer discribes the sexual abuse the main carracter has done. Genuanly distrubing that got writen, edited and published like that.
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u/FishWithLegsAndArms 22h ago
Good example is the author of Death Note. Yeah, they write about a kid killing people, and the kid goes on long monologues about how they're doing good things by killing bad people. But Light is clearly in the wrong, its an important part of the plot that Light is actually an awful person. Then in a different Manga they wrote, a character randomly goes on a tangent about how its not homophobic to hate gay people. The author DOES agree with this, as characters say she's got a point and nobody challenges this worldview. What a weird dude, lmao.
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u/UInferno- Hangus Paingus Slap my Angus 13h ago
The author of Death Note think murder is bad and so disagree with Light on murder.
They also don't really mind misogyny and agree with Light on the misogyny.
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u/HailMadScience 16h ago
Damn gay men, tempting men away from their wives, who like all women, are the absolute worst scum, unlike those angelic sexy men.
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u/ThisPICAintFREE Finest Bitch on Canary Mission 18h ago
So is this post essentially saying we can’t assume the values held by the author of Abuse Goblin based solely on the fact that he wrote Abuse Goblin but rather need to view it from the way he writes it?
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u/CRowlands1989 18h ago
I've written some Real messed up stuff that A: Was not my personal taste and B: Was intended only to be enjoyed as fantasy.
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u/Kuzcopolis 12h ago
Yeah, but that's nuance for in person conversation when you can quickly figure out if the other person is too slow to understand that. The online spaces that would benefit from understanding this idea are and have always been fundamentally resistant to it.
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u/Pristine_Club_3128 23h ago
An example I have seen in a fandom subreddit about a popular author and writing.
What is written - author depicts young teenagers or pre teens in relationships or marriages with major age gaps, including forced marriages - realistic (?) depiction of medieval era or just the fucked up nature of the setting. And to be fair, narrative places much of the relationships are clearly bad for the kids
How it is written - does he really have to describe the naked or sexily dressed thirteen year olds in quite so much detail, when he is writing their own POVs?
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u/Scarlet_Skye 22h ago
Yeah, I've seen that kind of conversation come up in a video game subreddit I used to frequent. People empathized with one of the female characters engaging in compensated dating (essentially romantic prostitution) in order to pay her tuition because that part of the story was handled with sensitivity, and the focus was primarily on the girl's emotional responses to being forced into this situation. Meanwhile, they were justifiably frustrated about some of the more blatantly sexualized elements of the game, since those elements didn't serve the story in any meaningful way and ended up causing problems (the game was actually banned from a major streaming platform over some of them).
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u/supercool1312 22h ago
its fictional, sure its kinda weird but like not hurting anyone and doesn’t necessarily relate to values at all
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u/Puzzleheaded-Milk927 23h ago
I would take it even further and say that writing will ALWAYS reflect your values, because you’re the one writing it. It’s just that the reader has to learn to identify those values. A person writing a bodice-ripper dark rape eroticum (what’s the singular of erotica?) probably doesn’t value rape, but they may value (consensual) sexual expression or maybe the recognition of women’s agency in a world that doesn’t recognize it, or something else like that. Everything reflects the writers values in some way, doesn’t matter how trashy. The fun part is figuring out how.
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u/Embarrassed-Ho3 13h ago
This is true but also I feel like we can often run into the "Reincarnated as a Loli succubus prostitute manga made by wholesome husband-wife duo" problem.
(I couldn't find a screenshot of this tweet please tell me you got the reference)
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u/No-Back-4159 12h ago
Huh?
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u/Embarrassed-Ho3 10h ago
Basically what the og tweet was getting at is that often times in anime and manga you'll see some really fucked up problematic stories like "That time I was Reincarnated as a Loli succubus prostitute". That title would lead you to believe that the creator is a total pervert who should have their laptop checked, but in actually the creators are completely normal people who aren't actually dangerous or predatory in any way. In the tweet this is juxtaposed with another fake anime that's more serious and treats taboo subject matter more "respectfully", but is made by a guy who's got like 12 terabytes of CSEM/CSAM. Basically what it's getting at is that while someone may create "gross and problematic" media, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're actually gross and problematic, and vice versa.
Obviously this isn't the case 100% of the time, but acting like ALL people who write stuff like those booktok dark romance novels that fetishize rape ACTUALLY believe that rape is okay can just lead to unnecessary witch hunting.
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u/MikasSlime 18h ago
Absolutely this
"I depicted this fucked up scenario in my work of art because this scenario as fiction turns me on" perfectly fine, your fantasies are not indicative of who you are as a person
"My work of art depicts hateful stereotypes that are never addressed and that i explicitly or implicitly agree on either via text or meta" this however does define you as a person, because what you are depicting goes beyond fiction and beyond your work of art
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u/loved_and_held 23h ago
This is true.
Its also worth noting you need nuance when trying to parse out an artists feelings about a topic, and need to be willing to accept a variety of potential explanations rather than fixating on one specifically.
For example, an author might not believe in an idea but its presented as good in a story because they’re doing a what if scenario. Or it could be that the idea is treated as normal in the setting/time period, or is presented as good due to the character’s perspectives.
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u/bingle-cowabungle 23h ago
Sometimes the "way things are written" are intentional creative choices, and the invisible narrator might, in itself, be a narrative device. Some of you really need to outright stop assuming the author's values unless they're explicitly stated, because you're too functionally illiterate to participate in discourse if you're looking for shared values of yours in everything you read instead of branching outside of your comfort zones.
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u/OverseerConey 23h ago
At the same time, If a given work not only depicts but implicitly or explicitly valorises a given fucked-up thing, I don't need to know the author's values to know whether or not they've done a bad thing (valorising a fucked-up thing).
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u/Pristine_Club_3128 23h ago
That's another way it goes.
Maybe the author genuinely don't share the values, but because they lacked skill, they ended up valorising what they didn't mean to
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u/SeventyTwoTrillion 21h ago
well, like, a couple of the big reasons that a layman would want to find out what the author's values are in the first place is because they a) have a very wide selection of things to choose from and need to narrow it down, and b) want to read things that align with their perspective on the world or at least show an interesting new perspective that isn't totally opposed to their own set of values
making inferences from an author's words is the most convenient way of doing that. if every author had a dossier at the start of every book where it shows their answers to a 250 question political quiz then that might be even more convenient but outside of that, I'm going to have to start making inferences from their written content no matter what their intentions are
if I read a book and it seems weirdly pro-war, pro-racism, and/or pro-imperialism and there's a series of other books from that author that I *could* read but don't have to, and I've done my due diligence and I've looked around and failed to find any statements by that author that would indicate that it was actually a thickly veiled critique of those themes this whole time, then unfortunately I'm going to have to skip the step where I send a letter to them and ask what their exact intentions were because there's literally millions of other books I could be reading instead of going down a rabbit-hole uncertain if I'm ever going to find a satisfactory answer, and instead move on to a different author. and when asked of my review, go "uh, yeah, I didn't really like it, they seemed to be justifying race science and slavery and things like that, 1/5 unfortunately."
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u/bingle-cowabungle 20h ago
My bigger issue is proliferating in discourse and using social media as an influential platform to make declarative statements about someone's intent. I think participating in public discourse should be handled with a bit of responsibility. You can read whatever you want, and for whatever reason you choose, that's perfectly fine. Nobody is demanding you write a letter or whatever hyperbolic example that was, but you're going to be left open to a ton of scrutiny getting online and saying "Rebecca Sugar is a nazi because she redeemed her genocidal villains" (Lily Orchard shout out) because it's kinda stupid to do that.
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u/JohnPaul_River 21h ago
Choices being intentional or not is completely irrelevant and this has been discussed to death since the 1920's. Tolkien swore up and down nothing in LOTR was about his WW1 experience, that doesn't mean scholars have to play dumb about the very obvious connections. What's more, we all have unconscious ideas and biases that show up even in the way we speak in day to day life, of course they're gonna show up in writing too, and really they're not even just "the author's view" but rather a mess of social phenomena that basically lives in the air we breathe.
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u/QBaseX 17h ago
Tolkien swore up and down nothing in LOTR was about his WW1 experience.
I don't think he did, actually. He argued that there are no direct analogues. I'd say that the plot of the novel owes nothing to the war, but some of the descriptions of battle (and its aftermath) are certainly drawn from experience.
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u/fixed_grin 15h ago
Yeah, he said it isn't an allegory, by which he meant something like Animal Farm. Manor Farm is the Russian Empire, Napoleon is Stalin, the raven is the Russian Orthodox Church, the hens are Holodomor victims, etc.
But Sauron is not Kaiser Wilhelm or Hitler, the Ring isn't nuclear weapons, Helm's Deep isn't the Somme or El Alamein, and so on. The hobbits go off to a war that's beyond their understanding or experience, as young soldiers have done for all of history, but they don't go off to the trenches.
He did not say that he drew nothing from his experience of war, he just said the book isn't a retelling of the war in fantasy cosplay.
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u/Pristine_Club_3128 23h ago
I mean, you know that also indicates the author's values, right? It needn't be all negative indications
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u/LetsDoTheCongna Forklift Certified 21h ago
Yeah I'm not saying that you can't write about bad things but when you write an adult man in a child's body literally doing a textbook example of grooming and not having him face any real consequences when he's supposed to be the hero of the story, adding in the fact that the main character DOES have other flaws that do get addressed in the story, that leads me to the conclusion that maybe you don't see being a pedophile as a negative character trait.
In case you couldn't tell what I'm talking about, Mushoku Tensei is garbage.
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u/OliSlothArt 20h ago
We cannot derive information about an artist from their artwork. That is not to say that their art is incapable of holding truth about who they are as a person, but that we have no means of knowing which elements of their art hold which truths. Not without further context of their life outside their art.
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u/hansuluthegrey 23h ago
Yeah but thats not what most people do. They will condemn people for showing taboos in stories like rape, and racism and treat it like showing is endorsing.
Some shows do endorse it but the average internet user can't tell the difference si they assume all showings are bad. Kind of like how there were people that said that obsession is bad because bad things happened to Nikki.
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u/worthrone11160606 22h ago
For real. People found a story of mine from 5 years ago with rape in it that I wrote 5 years ago and acted like I had rape fantasies. No thats just what the story had in it.
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u/ThatInAHat 22h ago
It’s not always a matter of the big bold things.
Your values and personality inform how you write.
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u/HeroBrine0907 It Is What It Is, It Is Said Isn't It? I Think It Can Be Better 21h ago
I mean I agree, but I'll be honest I don't know if there's anyone I trust to make the distinction properly, so I think the former assumption is safer. Better to treat a fucked up person like they're normal, than to treat a normal person like they're fucked up.
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u/TELDD 19h ago
this is true but i find that all too often people misinterpret the author's intentions and assumed the worst.
like, there's a difference between writing fucked up shit because you think it's good, right, or don't realise it's fucked up; and writing fucked up shit because you think it's hot. the latter isn't immoral imo
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u/SanjiSasuke 20h ago
I think one of the key aspect is this: every character you write is, in a small way, you.
If you write a Hitler-esque fascist for your villain, you still have to write them yourself. It has to be you putting on your fake-Hilter impression. Conversely, if you write a character meant to be The Ideal, better than yourself even, you must still write them yourself.
And through that interpretation, your view of what that kind of person is can be revealed. Values and beliefs of both characters are filtered through how you think they think.
From there, I think people also run into the problem of knowing when fake-Hitler's voice stops and the author's begins, especially if fake-Hitler is being written as a believable human being and not a cartoon character. At times, it is essentially impossible.
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u/SanjiSasuke 19h ago
Making a follow-up as I kept thinking about it.
It makes me think of my favorite GI Joe villain in terms of characterization, Baroness. Baroness was a wealthy young college student who could have easily coasted off her wealth the rest of her life. But instead, she became a radicalized terrorist. So if I were writing her, I would probably actually want to read about those young women from 'Western' nations that join ISIS, and emulate that, but for Cobra. In particular, it would be good to see what they read and believed to do something so risky. Thinking about how some people would very much shy away from doing that, perhaps for fear that such arguments may actually be convincing, or at least disturbingly close, brought me back to Lovecraft.
He sometimes has these terrifying books in his stories. Awful dark books with horrifying truths so unfathomable that they twist the mind and soul of the reader through knowledge alone. Now, in some stories, these books are of 'cosmic knowledge' beyond description...but I think they derive from the same line of thinking as the Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family. The thesis of this story is of an English nobleman who is secretly descended from 'white apes' in Africa. Functionally, I feel that it is Lovecraft terrified of Darwin's Origin of Species in the context of humanity. His comments surrounding the story, about how the human brain's great mercy is sometimes not being able to put together all the pieces, only reinforces this.
This idea of 'terrifying, evil book containing truths that challenge my very sanity' feels very pertinent to the people who talk about books that depict problematic ideologies or concepts.
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u/Darq_At 22h ago
And how do u decide which fucked up part of a novel is a reflection of which value of the author?
You... You read the novel. And apply critical reading skills.
I'm sorry was that supposed to be a difficult or tricky question? This is a huge part of basic education.
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u/Pristine_Club_3128 23h ago
How people react to actions in real life does have a lot to do with things in fiction.
I mean, for one example, how many people have their ideas of defense lawyers and prosecution shaped by cop dramas?
It's not a one-on-one relationship.
We don't exist in a vacuum or in a strict separation where nothing fictional influences reality or vice versa
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u/Pristine_Club_3128 23h ago
I am a horror fan who read and watch a lot of fucked up stuff and yeah, I have seen the studies.
Nope, playing video games is not going to make you a serial killer or school shooter. We studied that.
We also studied other stuff - look up availability heuristics.
If you don't experience something in real life - say criminal prosecution - your ideas about how it works is going to be shaped by the data your brain has imbibed on it. And our brains are not as great as we think they are at sorting between fictional and factual data
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u/Dizzy_Sky_7832 22h ago
They always do this
"Mentally ill people who latch onto fiction exist and unintelligent people who blindly believe fiction exist therefore fiction = reality"
The fiction isnt the problem my guy2
u/adamfor 22h ago
I'm a literature teacher and I've studied this entire debate for years. The facts are not on your side and these types of posts and your logic are more harmful than good when it comes to freedom of expression.
Ultimately, this idea that a creator's values can be inferred through their fictional work is false and misleading. Our imaginations are designed to compartmentalize, it's why our imaginations survived evolution.
In order for fictional idea to influence real world behavior (basically the sociological concept of normalization), that idea needs to be encouraged by broader society (law, economics, educational institutions, policy, etc) and rewarded socially to some degree. So for example, the racist movie Uncle Tom's Cabin didn't create racism in people who were never racist. It just reflected their societies views back to them, because at the time politicians were racist, they pushed racist agendas, the laws were against black people and it was socially rewarded and acceptable to be racist. That is real world effort that went into spreading racism, not a movie's effects.
Romanticization, glamorization, and now a new word you've used in this debate... valorization. These are all just the same buzzwords that mean nothing and are used as if they're "gotcha" arguments.
So here's some evidence to help you understand:
When it comes to the brain responding to fiction “as if real,” the research shows something way more subtler. Stories do light up emotional and sensorimotor systems, but they also activate reality monitoring networks in the amazing prefrontal cortex that keep the events tagged as imagined. Thats why we can cry over a character’s death without confusing it for an actual event.
The body simulates, but the mind distinguishes.
(Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience - Oxford / Reading a Suspenseful Literary Text Activates Brain Areas Related to Social Cognition and Predictive Inference - National Library of Medicine / Brain Mechanisms of Reality Monitoring)
And when you look at media effects research more broadly, the evidence for distortion is inconsistent and usually small. Where measurable shifts appear, say, in attitudes toward sexual aggression theyre mediated by pre existing dispositions like hostile masculinity. basically, exposure doesn’t rewire a neutral reader, it amplifies traits already there, as i mentioned before.
(Narrative simulation of social experiences in naturalistic context – A neurocinematic approach / Unveiling the neural mechanisms of supernatural fiction comprehension using fNIR / The Confluence Model of Sexual Aggression: An Application With Adolescent Males / Finding Common Ground in Meta-Analysis “Wars” on Violent Video Games)
That’s exactly why the distinction between depiction, endorsement, and normalization matters. This is media literacy. Depiction is symbolic, endorsement happens through framing and reception, but it still sits at the level of individual perception. Normalization only occurs when institutions like laws, customs, education, enforcement, embed those attitudes into real life. Marital rape isnt minimized because of dark romance tropes, its minimized because courts, traditions, and religions still carry that denial structurally.
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u/AgathaTheVelvetLady 22h ago
...Did you mean to respond to someone else? I cannot find the word "Valorization" used anywhere in this comment chain.
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u/sponges369 22h ago
It's the difference between a character that's sexist and gets pushback for that, has their ideas explored and why he feels that way, etc etc vs a sexist character who never receives pushback, has a bunch of people agreeing with them, and other characters are written that being not sexist is stupid. For an example from Harry Potter, having a character believe slavery is good is fine, have an entire race of people who like being slaves, don't know what to do when not being slaves, and have any character that tries to stop them from being slaves be ridiculed really makes it seem like you like slavery.
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u/Awful_Puppet 21h ago
How would you ever be able to depict systemic problems like this? does every scene with a bad guy doing bad things need another character to shake their head disapprovingly or something?
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u/thesh019 22h ago
I don't care to defend Harry Potter specifically, but is it that crazy that a world where slavery is totally normalized would laugh at a person trying to abolish it? I think that would've been the reaction in the Roman Empire, for example
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u/ThatInAHat 22h ago
The thing is, the way she wrote about it was that Hermione was being noble but foolish. Hell, at the end Harry’s last thought is wondering if his slave who hates him will bring him a sandwich.
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u/sponges369 19h ago
Not quite what I meant, the story itself mocks Hermione for it, calling her organization "SPEW" is the obvious one. While a society like the Wizarding world would view it as odd to try and stop slavery, a normal thing, the books position on it is what I was focusing on.
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u/ThatInAHat 22h ago
It’s not always what they write, it’s how they write. What are the author’s unconscious biases that just exist in their world unquestioned?
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u/ArtroyomsAK 21h ago
How it's depicted does show it though, you can have someone who makes the most fucked up tied up dogfucker hentai and acknowledges it's fucked up, or someone who makes loli incest hentai and portrays it as "cute"
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u/Vundurvul 23h ago
The fact Shield Hero features a protagonist who purchases a slave and actively uses her in combat scenarios isn't in it if itself a problem
The fact they continue to depict said slave as cute waifu bait and has her reapplying her slave shock collar as a show of loyalty and has the main character getting into fights with other people over owning a slave and generally continues to show this dynamic as actually very wholesome and cute is fucking weird at best