I’m Sorry Friends, But “just Google It” Is No Longer Viable Advice. What Are We Even Telling People

I keep seeing people saying things like, “If you like this you need therapy cause it makes me uncomfortable!!” And the most COMMON retaliation I’ve seen to this is, “Well you’re assuming everyone can get therapy/therapy is for everybody!” And actually I don’t think that’s the right comeback to that

I think the right comeback to that is, “are you saying you support conversion therapy?”

I’ve gone to therapy for YEARS. A good therapists job is not to make you “normal” but to make you the best version of yourself. There is a REASON that in order to be diagnosed with a mental illness it must cause some amount of distress and disruption to your life, personally. People don’t to go therapy just for being weird, they go because something about their life or their brain is making things difficult and upsetting for them, and they want to learn how to deal with that.

If your version of therapy is just “this harmless thing you like makes me, personally, uncomfortable, and therefore must be wrong - so you must go to therapy to become more like me” - than you don’t want people to be their best selves. You want them to go to conversion therapy, so they will be more like you, because you think that you’re the pinnacle of normalcy and anyone who is not like you must be Bad™️ and require Fixing™️.

tumblr people focus so much on a hyper-superficial understanding of fascism that they reduce “watching out for fascists” to looking for signs of Pepe the Frog and meanwhile endorse full blown fascist rhetoric like that “Culture isnt meant to be shared, culture is about tradition, family etc” post or engage in what amounts of unintentional apologetics like that post that said Nazis never burned nasty literary porn

you gotta be able to say "die"

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that's hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.

I decided this needed its own post, so--

Here's some context for ""The content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of its author."

and

"Your personal interpretation of the content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of it's author." 

You can't say, "Well it's okay to judge the morality of an author based on their fiction if you're correctly interpreting that fiction."

Because, my friend, every person who interprets a piece of fiction believes that their interpretation is the correct one.

The tumblr user who recently posted believing that Hayao Miyazaki had nationalist beliefs and made movies that supported fascism believed that their interpretation was correct, and judged Miyazaki's morals based on that assumption.

The people who think Nabokov wrote Lolita as an endorsement of child abuse rather than a work of fiction against child abuse believe that their interpretation is correct, and judge the author based on that assumption.

The moment you allow yourself to judge an author's morals based on your assessment and interpretation of their fiction–

➡️ you are opening yourself up to falsely judging victims who were writing about the abuse and injustice they suffered or witnessed, because you falsely believed you were supposed to root for the abuser.

➡️ you are opening yourself up to falsely judging people who were writing about the horribleness of crime and abuse, and injustice who fumbled the message or didn't portray it in a way that is clear enough for you.

Unless and until an author comes out and tells you why they wrote a certain thing a certain way, you cannot know for certain why they wrote it. You cannot judge their moral intent.

If someone writes a horrible dystopia and then in an author's note says "I wrote this because I think this is the world we should live in and aspire to you" please, please judge them.

If someone writes a book about child abuse and gives an interview where they say "I believe that this is the way we should treat children, this is good and just" please, please judge them.

But you can't know. You can't believe that you know.

You have to judge people on their actions in the real world and their words that they say they believe, not the fiction that they create.

I wanted to make this for a long time now XD

We're entering this strange era of fannish existence where we are simultaneously trying to censor everything into oblivion and also be as invasive as we possibly can to celebrities and people of interest.

Like god forbid someone writes smut fic about Henry Cavill on their silly little Tumblr account, but its considered normal that "insider sources" are selling telling you all about his private relationships and paparazzi are photographing him buying groceries.

I can't say 'sex' on TikTok but Daily Mail can take photographs of female celebrities half-naked in their own backyards and talk about their weight and their breasts and how appealing they are or aren't.

We are obsessed with consuming real life, often invasive content about real people, but god forbid we start creating our own so we don't rely on exploiting them and their privacy.

Wow... I was dead for a while, wasn't I? Anyways, have a Fran - art!

I... I don’t know what I’m doing...

"i hate love triangles" "i hate cheating" "stop writing about love triangles and cheating" people write about love triangles and cheating because complex emotions and romantic conflict are deeply compelling themes. get good.