I do not have the time or patience to respond to attacks on my character that stem from ignorance and emotionally charged thinking. My position on shaming in fandom is this.
- Fictional characters are not real people
- People, even fictional ones do age with time. If you write a fic set years after canon, the character is no longer the same age they were at the end of canon.
- Fanworks and fiction are an instrument where people of all ages can explore issues they face in reality in a manner that doesn’t hurt anybody. The following are examples … there are endless possibilities for why people create or consume fanwork content.
*A rape survivor can explore rape in a fic where they are able to be in control and process their grief, can find empowerment. The fictional characters are not injured in the process. Fanfiction does not become canon .
* A young person living in a homophobic family can explore their sexuality through fanworks without coming out and risking judgement by putting fictional characters through the paces of what ‘could’ happen.
* A person who has extreme depression can process their feelings and experience with it by writing a fictional character with the same issues. They can put distance between their reality through fictional projection and sometimes find the ability to resolve a truth about themselves they couldn’t see when it was all them and reality.
- Shaming people for writing anything about FICTIONAL characters is uncool and harmful. It is much better to avoid reading works that squick you and to accept that your lived experience is not everybody else’s lived experience. Who are you to judge what you do not (CAN NOT) understand?
- Smut in fanfiction read by underage people or written by underage people is a safe alternative to having actual real life sex when a person is underage. It also allows those who are underage, who do have sexual drives, to explore those urges, fantasies, or even the messy repercussions that can result from them, without ACTUALLY fucking up their lives by bringing real life repercussions down on themselves. It is a SAFE alternative to sex.
- Sex is NOT bad. Sex is a normal part of biology and shaming that or denying that is why we have real life predators, why we have rape culture, why so many people are ashamed of their emotions. Fiction is a safe and wonderful alternative to exploring ‘what ifs’, to growing as a person, to learning about how other people live and what experiences they have.
- It is vitally important to tag fanworks with appropriate tags. NSFW, underage, violent content, trigger warnings, etc… so that the people who do not want to view such content can avoid it. But demanding that it be suppressed because it offends you is a very narrow-minded viewpoint. Understand that fanworks creators come from a rainbow of lived experiences. Cultural differences, Different sexualities, Survivors of a plethora of experiences. The fact is that the writer writing a fic about rape, might be a survivor of rape and find the process therapeutic… You can not know that. A writer of underage smut may have been a teen who was pressured into it young and the act of writing about it, normalizing it, is their therapy to no longer carry guilt and shameful feelings about it. You can’t know that.
- If you don’t like something, do not read it/view it. Simple.
