#i started rambling in response to that post about gothic lit and it just kept going

[bombshellsandbluebells]

there's a really fun intersection of ideas coming together to affect how people engage with fiction and stories right now and all of them are bad

any story that contains harmful/problematic subject matter supports and condones it, therefore it is always bad to have any kind of problematic or harmful subject matter in any story. also, the author probably does those things themselves if they're writing about it. so they must be an evil person

any story that has conflict is bad because conflict and bad things happening is upsetting and that means it's harmful and I can't handle that and so no story should ever have conflict or sad endings or upsetting things. yes, even when I'm going to genres that literally promise those kind of things happening. what do you mean people died in this post-apocalyptic show? what do you mean upsetting thing happened in this horror novel? inexcusable

every single story must cater to Me and My Wants and what the creator intended or even what other people can get out of it doesn't matter. it didn't give me what I wanted and therefore it is Bad

canon = only what is directly stated in a story, unusually only through dialogue. therefore if a character doesn't say something, it's not true. or if a theme or message or idea is not directly stated, it's not there. the only thing that matters in a work is easily stated plot points, the summary of events. and also the ship, of course. (subtext only really matters when it's about proving a ship is canon)

and it's leading to a point where the only kind of story some people can engage with are conflict-free, sanitized, shippy, fandom-style romances where everything is filled with cute tropes and nothing bad really happens and the couple gets together in the end and it's not interested in looking into any kind of deeper or more complex themes or questions

there's a serious problem with media/literature literacy right now - the ability to analyze a work for deeper meanings and draw conclusions not directly stated in the text or engage with it beyond shipping two characters together (and that's not solely the fault of fandom and shipping/fanfic culture) but then that is intersecting with this rising purity culture that wants to scrub any mention of something "impure" or "problematic" (defined, of course, subjectively) from art

so we have audiences who can't engage with dark subject matter and actually look at how the text uses them or what it's saying or why it's there (sometimes just because fiction is a reflection of the actual world we live in and those things happen) and instead just labels anything with dark subject matter "evil/problematic", anything that is sad or upsetting (to them personally) "bad writing", and wholeheartedly makes statements like "this horror novel is bad because it has dark subject matter" or "tv shows are supposed to always be happy, so it's bad that you the author wrote something sad"

and I don't know where I'm going with this other than being frustrated. I know that I'm in a different position when it comes to media than a lot of people in fandom spaces; I was an English Literature major with a minor in Film Studies and I work in film - I'm literally more trained to be able to analyze literature and media and I genuinely think there is a huge problem with how media/lit analysis is taught right now that leads to a lot of people having a warped understanding of it (my god, I have Thoughts on the whole "the curtains are blue" or "red = passion" type analysis)

but it is extremely frustrating as someone who doesn't even particularly like fluffy, happy, no conflict stories to see people argue that those are the only acceptable stories, or to see people be bold and entitled enough to tell creators what/how they should write (and I critique what I find bad writing all the time, I recognize that, but the criteria for bad writing should not be "made me sad" or "i didn't like it personally")

or to see people harassing horror authors for putting upsetting subject matter in their horror stories or going on moral crusades because a story had problematic things in it without even stopping to look at HOW those things existed in the work (like is it actually a work steeped in hateful rhetoric reflecting the author's harmful views or is the bad thing literally portrayed as a bad thing that happened in the work)

and that's not even stepping into the whole media/lit literacy issue of every single idea being spoon-fed to audiences now, of 50 "(Blank) Ending Explained" videos the minute any new show/movie comes out, regardless of whether those works are incredibly straightforward and you only need to watch the media to understand the ending (Ted Lasso Ending Explained?? Really?? not a subtle show) OR if those works are a lot more metaphorical/abstract and there actually ISN'T any direct explanation for what happened / what it means (discussing the ending of Annihilation should be a lot more about what the work is saying, what thought it leaves you with and why it ends there, not some kind of plot breakdown - a discussion, not a summary)

and perhaps this is a message to myself as well. a reminder to go back to engaging with deeper films and new novels and analyzing what I take from the work and a little less time just pulling ship/character details that would make for a good Tumblr post out of a story with a fandom following.

but it's also me going, please, please, please. for the love of god. accept that stories that have bad, upsetting things in them, that have sad or bittersweet endings, are valid and good and ok to have. we have had them since the start of humanity, because stories give us a way to explore those things.

and sometimes, stories also just give us a chance to go "wouldn't it be fucked up if" and that's okay too.

#i don't know what this is #i started rambling in response to that post about gothic lit and it just kept going #a lot of my frustrations with the kind of media/lit analysis you see online all spewed out at once #didn't even touch on my frustration with the rise of “fix-it fics” #and the way the description is used in the sense of "the work had an upsetting ending so it needs fixing #not fic exploring what if this didn't happen #but fic writers going it's a Problem that this happened it was bad writing I have to fix it by making everything happy and fluffy #regardless of what the actual intention of the work was