None of Us Are Free from Sin

[rynling]

Tumblr has gotten to the point where I see this sort of thing on my dash all the time, almost always from people I least expect to post it (by which I mean people who otherwise don't participate in The Discourse). The cognitive dissonance is such a mindfuck, because these are usually adults over the age of 25 who write about and draw pictures of children under the age of 18. It's like, Surely you must understand how creepy it is for a person in their twenties or thirties to write sexy stories about or draw sexy pictures of, say, Link in Ocarina of Time, who is canonically "aged up" to be seventeen while still retaining the mind of a ten-year-old boy.

I mean, I don't actually think it's creepy. I think this is just how art and fiction works; and, to be honest, I don't really think about this sort of thing much at all. I'm just saying that it doesn't do any good for people in fandom to start pointing fingers concerning whose ships are "legal" and "not wrong."

As a case in point, I recently made a post on Facebook about how, while I usually don't go into works of literary fiction looking for slash, I found the newest Murakami novel to be very No Homo. It was a very good shitpost (if I do say so myself), and I expected people to leave comments about that specific novel or about how sometimes literary fiction written by male authors is just Like That or about books in general, so I was surprised when I got a bunch of people swarming in to say that they hate slash and BL because Raep!1!! One of these people is a prominent blogger who reviews yuri manga, and she was all, "I have very serious concerns about the preponderance of rape and non-con in BL," claiming that it leads to real-life abuse and misconceptions about "the queer community."

This is distressing because it's rude to hijack a silly post by bringing up things like "rape and non-con" on someone's Facebook wall because this person seems to have no idea that she herself is a common target of discussions related to purity politics in fandom. Like, how disgusting! That a grown-ass woman!! Is so obsessed with Japanese stories about 14-year-old girls touching each other that it's her entire life and professional career, as this obviously promotes real-life abuse and creates misconceptions about the queer community.

I really and truly do not care who likes what fictional characters, and I don't have a horse in this race, but I have to admit that I don't understand who benefits from the rhetorical violence associated with the unrestrained use of words such as "illegal," "abuse," "rape," and "pedophilia" that frequently get attached to these conversations.

Comments

[runicmagitek]

It makes me genuinely concerned the more I see people equating fiction to reality. And it's difficult, because I do find there to be value in representation in media and that's a step in the right direction with helping end some toxic bullshit in our society (like can we just have fluffy queer shit every now and then? no angsting over identity or bullying or what not as a baseline? I say this and have a 100k+ WIP that discusses just that, BUT ANYHOW). But fiction shouldn't be morality by default. It's art. I always stand by the idea that art should encompass life, whether it's "pure" and "wholesome" or dark and outright messed up. Saying what's ok to depict in art? That's censorship, kiddos, and I will angrily defend every last library and museum if it means preserving that.

Then again, maybe it's because I grew up with a healthy relationship with my mom and she was 200% open with sex talks and what's ok in an actual, for reals relationship vs fantasy land. My mom was also a librarian, which now that I think about it, explains a lot in regards to my opinions about this. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[lassarina]

I agree with most of this comment. It's tricky because there is something to be said for media normalizing certain abusive behaviors (for a recent example: I just watched Gone with the Wind for the first time, having read the book 25 years ago Jesus Christ what the fuck how and seeing how the interactions between Rhett and Scarlett became what we now call Old Skool dynamics in romance novels, and how those are only now really beginning to actively work at moving past those tropes and interrogate consent and harmful implications of the "traditional" style, and even that is only happening with authors who primarily e-pub instead of Big House Print pub.

so like. That's an important conversation to be had, but it's also a conversation of nuance, and good holy fuck but people seem so bad at nuance now in a way I don't remember happening when I was younger? Surely there's a middle ground where we can interrogate harmful trends and also understand that media isn't reality??

[runicmagitek]

Totally agree. For me (and probably a lot of us older folk in general), I get tired when some people treat fiction as a step-by-step IKEA manual on How To Do The Romancing And Whatever. Like you said, it's super tricky and nuanced and ugh... yeah :\ maybe one day we'll find that middle ground!