sorry if this is a loaded question, ofc you don’t need to answer! what’s your take on the argument that dark content is harmful to reality, and that it romanticises traumas? personally i like reading some dc, but when i see posts about how it’s harmful to both survivors and readers (smth to do with psychologically normalising it) it kinda makes me feel guilty, like i’m doing something wrong? when i know i can distinguish between fiction and reality?

hey! so i’m going to keep this under a read more to avoid upsetting anyone - also because this is literally - and i mean, literally - an essay LMAO. i had a lot to say!

any anon hate will be deleted and blocked, but you’re free to engage me off anon (and kindly on anon) if you want to! anon, you’re also free to come chat with me in dms if you want to speak more freely about this :) 

warning for rape mentions, murder / mass murder mentions, dub / noncon mentions.

so, i want to preface this by saying that i don’t think that anyone is obligated to like or be comfortable with dark content. it truly is your prerogative not to be interested in it and you are valid if it makes you feel uncomfortable. so nothing i’m saying here is to convince people that anyone should like it or is wrong for not liking it.

but i don’t agree with the argument that people should be shamed for liking or writing it, that it romanticizes trauma, etc. i understand why people feel that way 100%, but i don’t agree.

sometimes, it feels arbitrary. “dark content” has become a pseudonym for dub/non-con fic, but is the the only type of dark content there is? dark stories can include murder, horror, gore, etc. yet, despite us knowing that murder (for example) is a crime and morally wrong, most people don’t bat an eye when a chara in a fic does it and is still protrayed as attractive or is the reader’s lover. we go crazy for mafia aus where characters kill and show power --- we love those characters, those scenes where they kill and go take their lover all covered in blood. i mean, even in the jjk fandom, one of the most popular characters is a cursed spirit whose first words in the series are about massacring women and children. and we love him. more than that, we love the gory, arguably dark world he comes from - we hypothesize about these characters, we sympathize with them, and we lust over them.

so it’s hard to reconcile that with telling fans who write dub/noncon that they are impacting people’s sense of reality. we’re all experiencing this series together - if written fan fiction is what desensitizes morality, what about the images from the anime and manga? would we make the same argument for banning it? would we say that the people who like sukuna are romanticizing mass violence or that gege is normalizing it for us psychologically by making the character who does it hot and engaging or showing/referencing it so much in the manga?

i just don’t think we would. i think we all understand that those things are wrong and like him knowing that, and can readily say he’s a villain or that the things we’re seeing is wrong. so, i don’t think there’s a black-and-white argument that seeing x in media will make you think y is a-okay or make you more comfortable with it in real life.

i do get that there’s a difference here: a big part of this argument is the sexual aspect of non/dubcon - it’s hard to feel like it’s not normalizing rape when people find a scenario like that hot (whereas no one is like...lewding a mass murder scene, haha). but i think that, at the end of the day, brains do what brains do and people just have dark fantasies. like it’s really as simple as that. rape fantasies in particular are common and talked about by psychologists all the time and i have never been able to find a common thread of them condemning people having them or even writing about them. what they DO talk about is the fact that consent is actually key to the fantasy - that the person fantasizing is the person controlling the situation, that the fantasy, despite being “dub/noncon”, is inherently exactly what they want because THEY are creating the situation, and that, in the end, it’s the absence of actual danger that makes it. ultimately: there is a difference between real life rape and an imagined fantasy or roleplay. so much so that it might not even be fair to call them “rape” fantasies at all.

“It’s crucial to recognize that real-life rape is anything but erotic for a woman. Being at the mercy of someone who’s so outrageously violating your will, holding you down, threatening you with bodily harm (or even death), and physically forcing himself upon you induces arousal all right. But not that of sexuality, but of utterly petrifying anxiety and panic. Contrast this to most imagined rape scenes, which are so electrifying precisely because they’re expressly designed by their female creator to stimulate the illusion of danger—which can, in fact, be positively arousing.”

>  from this article.

to me, this is ultimately what dub/noncon fic is. people writing out those fantasies for people who share those fantasies to process those fantasies.

you can make the argument that that it’s harmful to survivors, but that has its own issues when doctors have reported that some survivors have rape fantasies or find comfort in acting out those rape fantasies (and writing, in my opinion, is a form of acting that out). like are they not valid victims because they are contextualizing their trauma into something that they can control and can process on their own terms? i think the issue there is that the argument uses survivors as a monolith to make an argument on their behalf; but every individual survivor is valid in what they think about this because no two survivors process what happened to them in the same way.

i myself am a survivor and have no real issue with dark content (obviously). i don’t read it often and only write it now because of sukuna; but when i do read it, i draw the line at certain things because i personally cannot stomach it. but would i demand that person delete it from existence because of that? no, i wouldn’t. because again, at the end of the day, that’s the entire basis of the fantasy. i control what i’m fantasizing about, and if something that i do not want to happen to “me” as the reader occurs, i do not read it. i don’t consent to that experience or that fantasy, so i stay away. but at the same time, that other person’s fantasy isn’t mine to control or infringe on and it doesn’t make me a better person than them for not sharing the fantasy.

SO ALL OF THIS TO SAAAY: i don’t think you should feel bad for enjoying dark content. i don’t think the argument about whether or not you’ll know how wrong it is in real life anymore really applies because you could make the claim that any type of fiction runs the risk of distorting people’s perception of reality and making them desensitized to something. and i don’t think that’s what people’s struggle with this is. 

what it boils down to, to me, is that people can’t understand why anyone would find dub/noncon arousing, and think that they condone rape because of it. which, again, is understandable. rape is a horrible fucking thing to experience - it isn’t sexy, it isn’t hot, it isn’t arousing and it’s hard to see any nuance when you see “noncon” and “wow this was so hot” in one post. but based on the way psychologists talk about “rape” fantasies, i think the two things (the fantasy and the real life act of violence) can typically be distinct for people, even survivors, and it just comes down to whether or not it’s a fantasy you share. if you don’t, completely your right! block the tags, block the writers, do whatever you have to do to protect your peace and your limits! but the discourse about it always seems to go into the realm of shame or arguments about someone’s moral compass, which i think is unfair. 

hopefully this helps and wasn't an annoying thing to read! like i said, don’t mind talking about it more if need be!

you know I’ve been like “man I love xbc2″ lately but then I think about me playing through the game and laughing not because the jokes were good but because the game is genuinely fucking stupid

rant below I couldn’t fit it all in the tags LMAO

this is gonna be messy sorry

I’m gonna be honest I could not take this game seriously until like.... the last quarter maybe... the sci-fi switch blew my mind but like this game is so shounen that it hurts

all its characters are so obnoxiously tropey and anime esp zeke and rex and to🤢tor🤢🤢toRA🤢🤮🤮🤮🤮

WHY THE PERV NOPON I HATE THESE CHARACTER TROPES SO MUCH..... I liked his “i don’t need aptitude to be a driver” thing but when it came to poppi. fucking *dies from cringe* frog FOR REAL... kill off these master roshi characters man it’s just bad taste

on the other hand i genuinely enjoyed zeke as a character and i appreciate that hes like not chuni 24/7 and is serious during story beats. but hes so obnoxiously loud during battle that I occasionally switched languages so I didn’t get a headache from his voice clips LMAO

AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON REX he was endearing sometimes but i only liked him during heart to hearts and story filler. he was so generic during the main story generic shounen

“NIA I LOVE YOU TOO I LOVE YOU AND ALL YOU GUYS””

WE’LL BEAT THEM. WIHT THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“JOIN!!! MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

im laughing typing these out holy shit

I get why a lot of people dropped this game esp after xbc1. the story has such a slow start and the gameplay.... im gonna be honest the gameplay in the beginning is horrendous. you can’t get into the complexity of the battle system until like the end of chapter 2 which is ALMOST 10 hours into the game... tutorials are poorly explained and aren’t even reaccessible... its just so anti-user friendly it makes me really sad

Also this bothered me less as I went through the game but the character designs almost made me not pick up this game. actually

The only characters in the main cast that I liked design-wise were ***DRIVER*** nia, dromarch, morag, and mythra with the melee aux core. everyone else looks too cold the girls are all ass out they will catch a cold and get ass frost bite

like i will never not rip on pyra’s booty shorts. WHY?? I DONT WANT MY ASS TO BE PINCHED UP 24/7 THTA LOOKS LIKE IT HURTS. and the STRAPS. GIRL HAS GAMER HEADSET INDENTS BUT ON HER HIPS. put a sweater on her and some leggings idc fireblade or not girl looks cold but thats what u get when a hentai artist designs da game. man why couldnt nomura stay for the whole game WHY

like i really liked this game in some aspects.... the combat system is honesty one of my favorites of all time it is so much fun when you get into it. but when i need a 10 minute chuggaaconroy video guide to know how to build up combos, your game isn’t doing it’s job... I really don’t understand where monolith wet wrong because xbc1′s tutorials were perfectly comprehensible?? and they were reaccessible??? what went wrong

the story wasn’t bad or anything and it was a little refreshing for me because it was just a simple coming-of-age story... not a stand-out but enjoyable enough for me but then again im very easy to please lol. i adore the world building tho. I also think the game shines the most with character interactions BARRING TORA!!!!! I loved seeing the characters goofing off in heart-to-hearts, they felt really close and the relationships with the drivers and blades make me so warm. esp zeke and pandy they’re so soft in the ending cutscene in the world tree. man 🌊🐴

but at the same time theres so many things in this game that make me laugh in questionable ways... character designs, cringe dialogue, weird eng va (i fucking love it though its so funny it made me cry laughing like 5 times), etc.... I love this game man but I’m not sure if it’s in an ironic way or because of genuine enjoyment lol