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yvannairieThe more I think about how the whole... new wave of moral purity and wank about dark content in stories came about, I feel like can be traced back to a lack of proper culture of criticism outside of very surface-level consumer-advocac-ey Is It Good-ery.
There's an expectation that a story (or its author) will justify itself -- an expectation that if a thing exists for reasons other than broadly Being Entertaining (i.e. giving you a nice distracting Good Feeling when its over) either the text of the story needs to explain why it's like that, or for the author to come out and explain why they chose to tell the kind of story they did.
If we had a stronger culture of criticism, where criticism was understood to be its own art form that elucidates and comments on existing fiction to create a new text with a merit unto itself, and fiction was treated as a thing To Be Thought About, to be broadly contemplated, then maybe people wouldn't be so quick to jump into thinking that the reason Bad Fiction exists is because Bad People exist to write/facilitate it.
I think a lot of, like. Bad takes on why someone would engage with (I'm not even gonna say consume -- the idea that people uncritically consume everything in fiction, I've come to believe, represents an edge case that is a necessary part of the emotional and psychological development of people, and a wholeass adult will understand that their phase of uncritically absorbing everything that was put in front of them was just a phase) are founded on the idea that fiction doesn't exist for its own sake, but rather as a vehicle for the values and attitudes of the author, instead of values and attitudes being a pretext the author chooses (somethimes unthinkingly) for their writing.
Also, I can't believe I would be the only one who grew up scared to express any opinions on the fiction I consumed because I kept getting called "pretentious" for not taking things at face value. This tug of anti-intellectual war on criticism has been going on at least since whenever it was I became aware of myself as a participant and an audience member, and my worst bouts of brainbad about fiction were the direct result of thinking I need to not think so hard about it.
So, in many less words, because criticism is now more about whether Thing Bad or Thing Good instead of What Thing, we're in a mess where people think fiction can directly have the kind of consequence actions do.
There's an expectation that a story (or its author) will justify itself -- an expectation that if a thing exists for reasons other than broadly Being Entertaining (i.e. giving you a nice distracting Good Feeling when its over) either the text of the story needs to explain why it's like that, or for the author to come out and explain why they chose to tell the kind of story they did.
If we had a stronger culture of criticism, where criticism was understood to be its own art form that elucidates and comments on existing fiction to create a new text with a merit unto itself, and fiction was treated as a thing To Be Thought About, to be broadly contemplated, then maybe people wouldn't be so quick to jump into thinking that the reason Bad Fiction exists is because Bad People exist to write/facilitate it.
I think a lot of, like. Bad takes on why someone would engage with (I'm not even gonna say consume -- the idea that people uncritically consume everything in fiction, I've come to believe, represents an edge case that is a necessary part of the emotional and psychological development of people, and a wholeass adult will understand that their phase of uncritically absorbing everything that was put in front of them was just a phase) are founded on the idea that fiction doesn't exist for its own sake, but rather as a vehicle for the values and attitudes of the author, instead of values and attitudes being a pretext the author chooses (somethimes unthinkingly) for their writing.
Also, I can't believe I would be the only one who grew up scared to express any opinions on the fiction I consumed because I kept getting called "pretentious" for not taking things at face value. This tug of anti-intellectual war on criticism has been going on at least since whenever it was I became aware of myself as a participant and an audience member, and my worst bouts of brainbad about fiction were the direct result of thinking I need to not think so hard about it.
So, in many less words, because criticism is now more about whether Thing Bad or Thing Good instead of What Thing, we're in a mess where people think fiction can directly have the kind of consequence actions do.
