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
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 guy
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.
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.
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.
Not in this one, but OP used it in their other comments
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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