Heya, gang! (And L’Shanah Tovah, as well!!)
I’ve been wanting to write this blog post for quite a few months now, and I actually have another draft of it that I had started on. But after a story recently inspired me to make a lengthy comment that would be applicable here, I decided to use that as a basis for a new version of the blog post. This is one of those situations where I decided not to let perfect be the enemy of good; I think it’s best I go ahead and get this published rather than letting a more detailed draft continue to linger incomplete for an indefinite period of time.
If you’ve listened to the early episodes of my podcast, you already have an idea how I feel about the idea that creatives are just across-the-board exempt from being held accountable for the messages they choose to put out. And I’ve actively taken on and spoken out against authors and stories that promote, romanticize, and normalize abusive, unhealthy, and unsanitary behaviors in the sexual & romantic sphere and steer people—most notably kids—in those warped directions.
Don’t think I’m abandoning those roots even with now being further immersed in a social setting these days where there are a lot of folks who practice and support and try to shield these things, and consider speaking out agaisnt such to be verboten.q
I’ve also made no secret of my disdain in particular for the sheer hypocrisy, arrogance, and narcissism of those who play the game of being oh-so racially aware while making a game and mockery and fetish out of things like slavery and rape, absolutely spitting on the graves of those who have spent so many years—in some cases centuries—being subjected to these nightmares in real life at elevated rates.
The example from years ago of this teenage girl making a master-slave interactive roleplay book, complete with an auction-block chapter and a torture-chamber chapter, remains a favorite memory of mine in that regard.
And the fact that some of these authors use characters of color as their canvasses for utterly demeaning schitt that just furthers the abuse-justifying stereotypes that such people ALREADY have to deal with—yeah, you take your pretend enlightenment and Goddarned shove it. In the end, the stuff these folks claim to be so worried about is secondary at best to their fap fixations and their desire to cater to that for themselves and other people, and I would rather they not add insult by making those empty gestures like they deserve some Goddarned credit and actually respect Black people, Indigenous Americans, and others in between their acts of extreme disrespect and disregard for the same.
Though in a way, I do think it’s very succinctly and beautifully emblematic in capturing the difference and dynamic between these groups and the situations they deal with. The staggering nightmare Black people have dealt with for centuries is something that White people (though also definitely some non-White people! We have words for that, though…) from various countries (including all these oh-so liberal ones like the United States and Canada) have reduced to a freaking game to be indulged in for fun and twisted sexual satisfaction.
The very fact that you would DARE tread on this ground in such a disrespectful manner says so, so much in terms of entitlement, lack of respect, lack of consideration/acknowledgement (because it at best suggests the outrageous horror and disrespect of what you’re doing didn’t even occur to you), and the fact that an environment exists where you can get away with this. It’s interesting how people will get canceled and blacklisted and dogpiled on for minor incidents and comments made years ago, yet such leniency and protection are granted to those who show extreme levels of disrespect and perform such a great disservice to numerous categories—to males and females of all races and ethnicities, to assault and trafficking and forced servitude victims (slavery very much to continues to this day; its forms have simply changed somewhat), and in particular to racial minorities who have suffered at a particularly acute level.
I mentioned in the preface to a poem of mine how Native American women continue to be subjected to elevated levels of sexual violence, for example.
And I largely see things getting worse and worse and more utterly insane and bankrupt of character, logic, and consistency alike as time goes on.
Seriously, the same porn-brained generation who thinks playing around in human feces is wonderful, sexy fun and uses terms like “boy p**sy,” demeaning females’ bodies and equating our actual reproductive anatomy to literal schittholes, acting like people are just random collections of orifices to cram stuff into if physically possible, never mind the negative health impacts of such behavior, which they’re at best ignorant of and at worst either don’t care about or even celebrate, for all the bloody talk about being kind, nice, and compassionate (choose kindness!…as long as it doesnt intefere with making someone else suffer and bleed so you can have an orgasm via totally unnecessary means, I guess)…this same generation thinks the normal body hair that females gain during puberty is gross. Feces? Sexy and welcome (yeah, totally go ahead and lecture and grandstand to other folks about disease spread and cleanliness, though)! Not having bare skin that makes you look more like a prepubescent girl? Revolting, apparently (for the record, my issue is not so much with shaving—and the scale of that varies anyways—or folks’ having their individual quirks about disliking body hair but rather with the idea that it’s become a larger expectation, and that it’s part of the larger picture of the warped and unrealistic and inaccurate and unhealthy views and expectations people have internalized when it comes to human sexual/romantic behavior and function).
Where does this even end? Skin color, identity as male and female, and historical atrocities have all been treated like skin suits you cosplay as, and the folks getting the raw deal are only even “allowed” to protest some of it and be validated in that.
I think I’ll have to make a short follow-up post to address this, but quick note here: I get really aggravated by seeing all this talk of “inclusivity” from some of these folks.
A. Conflicts of interest are real. And so far the choice I typically see made favors racist and otherwise demeaning ish over the people being screwed over by it.
B. These same folks proceed to exclude different categories of people themselves in the very next or same breath. You’ll literally talk about how people who oppose this or that type of content are not welcome. That is not remotely some kind of complete inclusivity and “everybody’s welcome” shtick.
I actually don’t believe in those vague blanket concepts of “inclusion” myself, which I’ll explain in a later post (though, quickly: No, your White-supremacist fetish carp is not welcome with me, and it’s even less welcome if you have the unmitigated gall and narcissism to try and make folks feel guilty for making you feel bad about it…what freaking logic is that??? “How dare you make me feel bad about my graveschitting!” The fact that this is even a thing is very representative of how twisted culture has become, and how topsy-turvy things and the way priorities have become skewed). So I don’t inherently fault you for having limits to what people and behavior is and isn’t welcome with you—that’s more a case-by-case matter. What I absolutely DO fault you for is the hypocrisy, dishonesty, pandering, and cowardice of trying to claim and play like any and every one and thing is welcome when you absolutely don’t mean or practice that. Grow the fudge up and have some honesty about yourself and your intent!
Anyways, before I share the comment I made, as well as links to the fic that prompted it, I do want to make a quick note for now: I’m aware some folks make the argument, with the regards to both real-life and fic stuff, that it’s somehow beneficial to real-life abuse and assault survivors. I’m aware of the links between sadism and the rest of its neighbors and having gone through sexual trauma. That’s the biggest reason I do have a degree of patience and sympathy here, despite how much I despise abuse and the normalization of warped sexual behavior, especially in circles where kids are gonna be exposed to and influenced by it.
But here are a few questions for such individuals to chew on:
A. What about all the fellow survivors who find this stuff abhorrent and offensive and worry about its impact? (Again, there’s that conflict of interest when it comes to trying to say you’re choosing everybody here.)
B. What about the folks who aren’t direct survivors, but have relatives or other loved ones who are? How about the people who have deep historical roots of being affected by this kind of thing, as I highlighted earlier in my post?
C. Two Wolves time, baby: Is this stuff actually helping? Are your mental health and your perspective on the trauma(s) and your sexual behavior improving with consuming this content? Are you de-escalating when it comes to negative stuff?
Or are you escalating? Are you feeding traits of sadism and narcissism and objectifying and devaluing other human beings? Justifying mistreatment of them for a hormonal high? Are you becoming more inclined to defend and promote the sexual-exploitation industry, like the dude acting like he and others like him are doing a GOOD DEED by taking advantage of impoverished women’s desperation to provide for their families? Are you seeking increasingly violent and otherwise extreme content versus actually tapering off? Is consumption of things like legal content that romanticizes and fetishizes CSA actually preventing and deterring you from committing illegal acts or collecting illegal materials, or is it actually making you fixate more and desire a more intense and visceral experience?
Are you saying whatever sort of material you’re consuming or behavior you’re engaging in helps when all it’s doing is just deepening your addiction to toxicity? That’s how it actually tends to work, truth be told. Generally speaking, you don’t weaken and decrease a drug dependency by indulging MORE in the substance you’ve been abusing. Sexual behavior, both more direct and more vicarious, tends to go the same way. You just become inured to the milder stuff and it feeds a desire for escalation. The main exception I’m aware of in going down holes like this is that sometimes you’ll abruptly end up at a place pretty far out of your depth and it’s enough to shock you into a Come-To-Jesus (or Moses or Muhammad) moment because you find yourself wondering how the fudge you got here and what on Earth has become of you (been there, done that, lovelies. I’ve been into some really twisted, vile schitt and I’ve witnessed how much that warped me into a person I didn’t remotely believe in or want to be. And I still struggle with stuff to this day, but I’m happy and grateful as fudge that I was able to get out of the pit at all and that I didn’t cross more lines before I did so.)
Are you becoming more and more inclined to see rape as a positive thing or something deserved? To promulgate the idea that some folks “want to be raped”? Oh, yeah. I’m going there.
Hauntingly enough, I had the experience recently of witnessing someone who said he or she (I believe he) was a survivor of multiple incidents of sexual trauma, and fetishizes rape content. And he went on to justify what had happened to him—that maybe he had done something to deserve it, especially since it kept happening to him—and to also suggest the same was true of other survivors and to question the idea that they didn’t somehow deserve and cause what had happened to them.
Promoting concepts like this and undermining the refusal of consent in this manner is one of the most genuinely terrifying things I’ve seen. Major kudos to someone in that thread who was able to respond with such compassion and patience and love, though. That individual honestly reminds me of Anne C. Miles, because she also had that amazing ability to show compassion and see past the fudged-up behavior and exterior to see a hurting, wounded person within.
I’m more on the fiery side of calling folks out on their bullschitt, especially from my the standpoint of being willing to call out my own stuff, so thus being willing to call other folks out on theirs (plus being aware of the bull and self-deception that can go on). And I still very much embrace that side of myself, but I was also in awe of Anne and had and have a genuine desire to channel more of her spirit, as well.
And please note that as an author myself and someone who addresses dark topics and also incorporates humor as part of that, this whole topic applies plenty to me, and I plan to touch on that some in later posts.
Well, I think that’s more than enough preamble, so the rest of the post will feature that AO3-born material.
My comment does contain spoilers for the story itself, so I highly recommend reading that first. It’s less than 3k words, so not a big time commitment. And it’s an excellent and truly intriguing piece.
I may come back later to make this more concise, but for now I’m going to use the information block Ao3 provides automatically, albeit with some minor tweaks by myself.
all the men and women merely players (2306 words) by IzzyMRDB
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Batman – All Media Types, Batman (Comics), Red Robin (Comics), Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne, Tim Drake & You
Characters: Tim Drake, Jason Todd, Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Damian Wayne, J’onn J’onzz, The Readers, The Writers, the audience, You
Additional Tags: One Shot, Angst, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Whump, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Tim Drake-centric, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, Tim Drake is Not Okay, Tim Drake Has a Bad Time, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Fourth Wall, self-awareness, Self-Sacrificing Tim Drake, Inspired by Fleabag (TV), Inspired by Deadpool, What if a character knew they were just a character, Inspired by Nope (film), Yes this is a critique of how we as readers engage with pieces of text, NOT a self insert or reader insert
Series: Part 32 of My slowly growing collection of One-shots
Summary:
Tim first noticed Them when he was three years old.
It was his very first time on stage, after all, so he could be excused from not noticing Them before.
But he played his part. He followed his script, all while looking straight at the camera.
AKA
Tim knows he’s just a character in a comic book. He wishes They treated him as human.
Comment: This was magnificent. It really struck a note for me, because I’ve had a feeling for a good while now that some of the lack of empathy and detachment from reality that I see in people, especially the younger crowd, is partly due to how they’ve become excessively inured to violence and suffering, as well as having a more generally warped impression of how things actually work—with both issues being partly attributable to the influence of the media that they consume.
One particular thing I feel is that it’s important to balance media consumption by having stuff that actually portrays violence and suffering and death for what they are, the pain and the horror and the ugliness, and doesn’t gloss over it.
There’s a particular movie that sticks in my head for this—Lonely Place to Die.
It was a very grounding thing to watch, and I felt it really captured the sense of tragedy in the individual deaths. I tend to juxtapose it against movies like John Wick—which I utterly adore! But if we’re going to have one (material that glamorizes and/or minimizes death and violence), then I deeply feel we also need the other in order to counterbalance it.
In kind of a related note, I get really frustrated and aggravated as a creator myself when people use the “It’s just a show/movie/story” cop-out. Because while that’s true to and extent and it’s important that individuals have a healthy perspective when it comes to fiction and the inaccuracies and unrealism and questionable messages present in it, it’s also false and at best uninformed to claim or act like stuff as a whole has no impact and influence merely because it’s known to be fictional.
As someone astutely pointed out in something I read years ago, when Hollywood is having its yearly circle-jerks, they have no issue bragging about how meaningful entertainment media is and talking about the impacts it can have on the audience.
And when folks have this or that agenda in mind, there’s no issue either praising or complaining about fictional works and talking about what should or shouldn’t be done, what the audience ought to see.
And there’s a reason that propoganda exists, and that fictional media is and has been used for it. Hades, The Birth of a Nation was used as a recruiting weapon for the Ku Klux Klan.
It’s a very complicated and nuanced subject and as I said before, I think it’s a balancing act. And I’m definitely aware of situations and behavior where folks take their reactions and relationships to fictional media and events way too far, and I understand why that would drive a certain resistance of responsibility as a backlash to that. An artist has ever reason to draw the line when dealing with people who’ll pull schitt like threatening self harm over story events they don’t like (and using self-harm or the threat of it as emotional blackmail—or acting like that’s a valid behavior and should be obeyed and that it’s the pressured individual’s fault if they don’t indulge it and the blackmailer follows through on the threat—is another thing I take MASSIVE issue with).
However, the blanket use of “It’s not real” or “It’s just a story” to just utterly absolve yourself of responsibility as a creative is not realistic or honest, and the things that have played out in reality essentially make this claim a form of revisionism that I very much do not appreciate. And honestly, it’s a heck of a thing to see people who spend huge amounts of time and effort writing, and surrounding themselves with fellow readers and writers, being so dismissive sometimes of writing itself and its value, importance, and impact. It’s like a veterinarian, at a conference for fellow vets who’ve spent so much time and money and energy in their educational process and then careers, talking about how veterinary medicine doesn’t really matter. ☠️💀☠️
Those ending paragraphs were especially exquisite, by the way! The final 3 in particular.
“Well?” Tim said. “I’m your fucking host, so tell me…”
Tim looks at you. Straight at You.
Malice drips from his lips as he says the words: “Are you enjoying the fucking show?”
And as a side note, I’m so glad the other characters got to see by the end, because Tim already goes through way too much Hades without also having everyone else label him as crazy (again…) when he breaks the Fourth Wall and they finally notice. I was very hopeful when I saw J’onn in the character tags.
Funny thing is, I’ve never gotten around to it and still don’t know if I will, but I’ve had the thought in mind for years to write a short story where an author’s characters come to life and begin to rebel and seek revenge over the suffering he has inflicted upon them.…
