it’s not dark fic that squicks me.

it’s comments made by readers or the writer.

it’s the people who victim blame. it’s the people who make excuses for their favorite character. it’s the ones who say “so what if they were drugged? X only touched them – it wasn’t really rape” and other equally terrible things.

we have endless posts where someone calls dark fic and everyone who reads it evil and people respond with some very thoughtful reasons why OP is wrong.

but I can’t say i’ve seen much conversation regarding comments. i find other people’s reactions more squicky or triggering than anything i could have read in the fic itself.

This.

It’s really bothersome to see the comments on darker works where people make any and every excuse to justify the behavior of villainous characters just because those characters and those ships are a person’s favorite. To be honest with you, it almost feels like gaslighting. I know that’s not what commentors are intending, but it feels like it. Because if you’re writing this thing that’s maybe or maybe not based on your own experiences and someone comes along to tell you that it’s not *really* XYZ… well… maybe what you experienced wasn’t *really* XYZ either. Maybe you’re a faker. Maybe you’re a liar. Maybe the problem was you. And that’s a really shitty feeling.

There’s a worrying trend I’ve seen friends in other fandoms talk about surrounding dark fic. Readers will insist that the clearly tagged and very dark shit they’re reading isn’t dark because it’s their OTP and how could their OTP ever be anything but good? Readers bend over backwards to justify it because if they don’t they have to face the fact that what they’re reading isn’t wholesome or happy. I don’t know if it’s guilt or ignorance, but I wish it would stop. If it’s ignorance I suggest readers take a good look at the tags again. If a fic is tagged rape, noncon, or dubcon, it’s equivalent to rape irl. (In terms of consent being not clear, freely given, and revocable.) Tags are there to be your guide. They tell you what the author’s understanding of the material is. If the author thinks it’s noncon, assume that it’s noncon. If it’s guilt, honestly, tell guilt to get bent. There’s nothing wrong with reading and enjoying dark content. You’re not a bad person and you’re not contributing to the social decay of the youth, or whatever. Enjoy it if you enjoy it, but don’t make excuses about how it’s not what it clearly is.

It just… it bothers me. Most writers know what we’re doing with our fics. Many of us agonize over our work and the tags on our work so we don’t accidentally expose anyone to a major squick or trigger they weren’t prepared for. We actually do care about our readers and how they handle our works, so maybe commentors can do some of that to. Maybe readers should think a little more about the way they phrase things and why they think clearly dark content isn’t that dark. Dark content is created and shared, a lot of the time, so that people who have things they want to express don’t feel so alone in it and comments that miss the point and victim blame do the opposite of that.

No, reading/creating dark fiction to deal with ptsd or other mental illness is not just re-traumatising selfharm

mob-zombie:

Apparently not typing this is costing me sleep because I can’t stand people being this aggressively wrong on the internet and actively harming other people’s treatment because they’re a fuck wit who thinks their feelings are more true than medical research and other people’s personal experiences.

1. I’m going to upfront state if someone’s re-traumatising themselves using dark fiction they are DOING IT WRONG.

This is why the variety of warnings exist. This is why tags exist. We’ve created a space in which the viewing experience can be more informed than that of the average book or tv show explicitly to protect people and allow them to inform their viewing experience. Hell we even broke down rape and sexual assault tags to cover multiple varieties of these things to make sure people were as safe as they could get.

While objectively rape, non-con and dub-con are all rape tags, it’s not about softening that it’s rape, it’s about classifying the type of rape or grade of content so someone can inform their viewing experience. Can you senseless fucks please stop insisting it’s claiming these things aren’t rape. Two seconds of googling the tags would tell you up front they’re all rape, they’re just differentiating the variety of rape so people can inform their viewing experience and not be triggered.

For people who claim to be fighting for victims you sure fucking love actively removing things victims have to protect themselves.

2. Shipping to cope isn’t just exposure therapy. God there’s a million fucking ways people can use fiction in recovery and only like two of those are forms of exposure therapy.

The more common usages are:

‘using fiction to break down the events that happened to you into a manageable set up’ because post abuse for a lot of people the thoughts, memories and understanding of the experience are a big old noodly jumble that gets tangled up and eventually fucks with the ability to move past it. By reading or writing about the experience the feelings and thoughts can be de-tangled and ideally turned into something manageable to process.

‘creating a fictional version of events of how you wish things happened’ which is simply a variety of wish fulfilment that can make the experience in the past less painful or otherwise lessen the effects of the trauma sustained.

Seeing a character you love experience what you went through and come out the other side of it possibly recovering or working towards recovery can help enable seeing yourself eventually doing the same. if you can’t conceptualise recovery or surviving, it’s very difficult to move forward, sometimes seeing a character you love doing it is the push needed to think ‘I could do this.’

Alternatively, simply seeing a character experience the same thing can just make you feel less alone.

Sometimes fictionalising the experience helps separate the experience from you.

Sometimes sexualising the experience makes the event less threatening to reduce the fear of future victimisation or take control of existing experiences. This doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the original event, it’s simply how the person chooses to handle this.

If you’re unable to express what personally happened to you, sometimes putting those experiences on a character and vicariously experiencing sympathy through the audience or the story can help.

And there’s so many more, this is just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. The fact is everyone recovers differently and there’s as many ways of utilising fiction in the process as there are people who’ve experienced some form of sexual assault. As long as they’re not hurting themselves (re-traumatisation), tagging correctly (preventing others from accidentally being triggered), and listening to tags on the fics they read (again preventing re-traumatisation) AND thus not hurting anybody else, it’s legal, it’s safe and it isn’t your business.

3. Not everyone is coping with victimisation. Specifically generalised anxiety disorders and OCD which is also an anxiety disorder are two obvious examples of mental illness that can be treated through fiction.

The biggest thing with an anxiety disorder is that they love to jam random intrusive thoughts into your brain, and it really isn’t as simple as just ignoring them or pretending a douche bag is telling you to do something.

In an anxiety disorder, trying to ignore it will make it worse. Worrying about it will make it worse. Trying not to worry about it, guess what? makes it worse.

Sometimes the only way to ditch a thought is to address it directly.

People who’ve experienced intrusive thoughts about how if they don’t perform the rituals they’ll murder their family, therapists have them write out plans about killing their family to prove that despite what the brain is telling them, they aren’t going to do it. Therapists have handed people knives to prove they can be trusted not to murder people.

With the use of fiction an intrusive thought can be assigned to a characters actions. Fiction can be used as a way to think about an intrusive thought without becoming anxious you might turn the thought into action and by having directly addressed the intrusive thought you can get rid of it.

If you’re anxious about an event, you can write about a character experriencing the worst case scenario to reassure yourself that the thing your scared of is fictional. Or you could write about what you’re worried about going well as supporting evidence you’ll be fine.

Again these are just examples, there are many many more ways people manage mental and physical illness with fiction just as fiction can be used and mental health upkeep after a traumatic event.

And hell, even if you’re not mentally ill and haven’t experienced a traumatic event, if you want to write about a dark scenario, you should. Because not everyone going through these things can write or draw and rely on others to provide content to manage these things.

On the Subject of Noncon Fanworks: Thoughts of a Reader, Writer, Survivor – Anarfea

porcupine-girl:

arkhamarchitecture:

out-there-on-the-maroon:

vmthecoyote:

rhodanum:

meeedeee:

For those who want context surrounding the debate whether women should be allowed to continue reading or writing non-con erotica. Additional context is also provided regarding fandom harassment of abuse survivors who write or read non-con fiction.

An excellently written piece, if rather hard to swallow for the crowd which believes fannish expression that includes dark kinks / sexual fantasies should be constantly policed.

However, it should be noted that the expression ‘debate if women should be allowed to continue writing non-con erotica’ makes my hair stand on end and typifies what I can’t abide in this entire thing. I didn’t come into fandom to be allowed or disallowed to write something or other. I came into fandom do straight up do so, there was no concept in my mind of ever giving someone the power of disallowing me to write the thing. Fandom was never about control for me, it was about solace, about joy, about pleasure, about deconnecting temporarily from the drudgery of a difficult and often unpleasant life.

I already live my life, as a woman, under a constant stream of being told what I’m not ‘allowed’ to do. I’m not allowed to be too harsh, too sharp, too abrasive. I’m not allowed to say I’m childfree and mean it. I’m not allowed to get a buzzcut (I’ve straight-up had hair-dressers who refused me!) I’m not allowed to continue being interested in video-games at nearly thirty, whereas with my brother it’s ‘eh, boys mature much more slowly.’ I’m not allowed to criticize street-harassers and gropers without being insulted for it.

And now it’s ‘I’m not allowed to explore my darker fantasies in the safe, secure medium of writing, without potentially becoming a target for Purity Culture Wank.’ Fandom was my refuge from all the ‘not allowed’ nonsense and I’ll be damned if I ever let it become filled with it!

I’m like, at most 30% woman, but my reaction to this was still try and stop me, motherfucker

“… I think this is true for many women and people who are sexual or gender minorities. We exist in an environment permeated by the threat of sexual violence. Some people cope with that fear by eroticizing it. Like the horror movie or roller coaster, noncon fanfic is a way of scaling down something terrifying until the fear becomes manageable, even, for some people, thrilling.”

An interesting essay. Long, but worth reading.

That was a long essay but god what a good one. Especially the part about how demonizing darkfic ultimately ends up creating spaces where people stop tagging for it because they don’t want to be demonized for it or because they’ve convinced themselves that since all noncon is bad and they’re not a bad person, the fic they wrote that is noncon must not REALLY be noncon because that would make them bad.

And of course, once people stop tagging their darkfic then everybody loses.

I know that most of my followers are not from the Sherlock fandom these days, but this is applicable to all fandoms. Especially because I see indications of OMGCP fandom going down some of the same roads that Sherlock went down two years ago (and that this essay was written as a response to). If you have seen those same indicators, read this essay.

If you read my response to a post a week or two ago, where I talked about how adults in fandom are not responsible for the experiences of minors in their fandom beyond tagging their content appropriately, I want to make something clear – I was not just talking about people who write unoffensive, vanilla explicit fic. I specifically said that I was talking about content that people decide could be dangerous to minors, and I did mean dangerous. There were some responses to me saying that “we’re not talking about people writing NSFW stuff that minors might find” and my response to that is, neither was I.

If you have ever labelled, or thought about labeling, someone who writes or reads underage fic, rapefic, or any fic that depicts an act that would be reprehensible in real life, as a “pedophile” or “rapist” or any other label that indicates that they condone those acts IRL, if you have ever thought that those people need to be “called out” or removed from the fandom, please read this essay.

Read the whole damn thing. I thought about quoting some of my favorite parts, but there are too many, and some are near the end. Even if you think there’s no way it will change your mind, you damn well better know what you’re actually arguing against.

And for those not in Sherlock fandom: Anarfea refers many times to events that happened at a con and in the months following, which inspired this essay. I think you can work out most of what happened if you read all of this, but if you’re confused, I was at the panel and had several friends (including Anarfea, whom I will not hesitate to vouch for as an awesome person) on the panel. Message me privately and I can explain it to you.

On the Subject of Noncon Fanworks: Thoughts of a Reader, Writer, Survivor – Anarfea