Rant: Darkfics, mindfucks and warnings.
Dear Fandom/Internets at large,
Let me tell you a story;
Once upon a time in a land not so different from this one, there was a little girl that couldn’t read. Although, didn’t want to, would be more accurate, why should she learn to read when her mother would read out loud to her? Only, her mother stopped reading to her, bought her the next book in the series and refused to read it. For weeks, for both the girl and her mother were just as stubborn as each other. Then the little girl, desperately wanting to find out what happened to her beloved characters next, tentatively picked up the book and began to read.
It wasn’t as hard as the girl imagined and she soon learnt to read properly, without asking her mother what this word or that meant, and found that she loved reading. She didn’t have to wait for someone to read to her, she could pick up a book whenever she wanted! And over the next few years, the little girl devoured any book she could lay her hands on, regardless of genre.
Some she liked, some she didn’t, some were forgettable and some still terrified her later when laying in bed.
Some books, she liked the flights of fancy, knowing that unicorns and dragons and princesses trapped in towers didn’t really exist. Some she liked because the characters had to overcome so much, no matter how scary and heartbreaking, and some she liked because the characters didn’t quite ever manage to overcome everything, and she liked those because there was something real about them. The ones that scared her, made her cry, the ones that made her laugh out loud or heart swell at all the warm fuzzies in the books.
But like all little girls, she grew up and didn’t have quite as much time to read as she once did. So she became more picky, found authors she liked and read everything they’d written, found series’ by multiple authors and devoured those. She liked the ones that would stay with her the most, the ones that would make her think or leave her on edge even after she’d put the book down. The scary and the fantastical, King, Pike, Pierce, Rogers, Pratchett, Shelley, Harris, Koontz, Barker, Rice, Stoker, Lee, Smith and Hamilton, ranging from laugh out loud funny to downright scary-twisty.
And the little girl grew up some more and then even more and eventually, at seventeen discovered fanfiction and slash. It really wasn’t such a big leap and look! Here and here! Fantastically long novel length stories about her favourite characters and there was barely a word out of place. The girl soon discovered that there were some types of fanfic that she didn’t like, didn’t want to read; the badly written and poorly executed ones that made no sense to her and she avoided these if she could and found writers that she did like and trust.
She devoured fanfiction as much as she’d devoured any published book, preferring some genre’s or pairings over others but using the warnings as guide. Sometimes, sometimes though, she would come across warnings and summary’s that would chill her to the very bone, that people would dare to write something so…disgusting about characters that she loved. But the girl was a curious sort, and clicked and read these stories too. Maybe it was luck, or fluke, or fate, but these stories, these subjects that should have disgusted her, did in fact disgust her as she read, were so well written and executed that it was impossible for her not feel for the characters. It made her uncomfortable that she was reading this or that without being outraged, as much as she loved the ones that made her cry, or the ones that still scared her in bed later.
So the girl looked for more of these stories, the dark, the twisted, the mindfucks, because the feelings they conjured, the reactions they pulled from her, weren’t all that different from the books she had read growing up.
~ ~ ~ ~
Yes, the little girl is me. And really, there is a point to this as I’m sure a lot of people have picked up on already.
I like Darkfics.
I like mindfucks. I don’t mind squickfics. If I ever had a line, it’s probably long gone.
This does not make me sick or twisted or wrong in the head. I may be sick or twisted or wrong in the head, but that’s a whole different story and has very little to do with what I like to read and write.
A well written dark/mindfuck fic for me is something that will stay with me after I’ve finished reading, something that will bounce around my head later and make me think. I like that feeling, I like the feeling of reading something and getting to the end of a fic and literally being lost for words because…because there are no words to properly convey the jumble-mix of emotions that’re tailspinning in my head.
Or the feeling that I shouldn’t be reading something, shouldn’t be liking it anyway or finding it pretty but it’s so well written I can’t help but find some beauty in it.
I love the ambiguous endings, the…’holy fuck. But…but…but is the clown real?! What happens next?!!?!?’
I read, and loved, the deathfic that no one saw coming because despite the warnings, the premise and the summary the author distracted and lulled everyone into a false sense of security so absolutely perfectly that the ending was devastating.
I like exploring outside my comfort zone, through reading or writing and I don’t see it as hating the characters to put them through some really, really bad things. Y’know what, sometimes they survive and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes a bit of realism is just as good as the flights of fancy. I like that this goes both ways, I like the balance. Hell, I don’t even dislike fluff half as much as I sometimes portray, it’s kind of like my dirty little secret, heroin-like-fluff addiction and I know exactly where to go if I want the kosher stuff.
But back to the darker stuffs. Exploring comfort zones and engaging readers or some such.
The world is not made of cotton candy and rainbows. People are not made of sugar and spice. Art imitates life imitates art and so on and so forth.
So while yes, there is a place for cotton candy, rainbow, sugar and spice fic. I want there to be a place for the totally not cotton candy, rainbow, sugar and spice fics too. Sometimes escapism is good, and sometimes I want gritty and realistic. Swings in roundabouts I guess. But people have dark sides, not everyone’s good, and lets face it, there are some fucking twisted people out there, so…why not occasionally have a fic about it?
Not everyone is going to like it, not everyone is going to like everything. It's subjective and there's no blame or shame there, but...just because I dislike foodsmut and 90% of fluff fics? Does not mean I want people to stop writing them or want them to go write them over there and out of my way.
Am taking something I’ve said before and expanding on it here too:
Darkfics, mindfucks, etc etc all resonate a little more deeply within me just purely because of their nature. I have a morbid fascination with mental illness and darker side of human nature and those are showcased better in darker stuff, they get more room to grow and expand. I like reading gritty things, and I tend to find darker stuff more...meaty? More plottier than most other things and my teeth sink a little more deeply into them because of that.
I like seeing the bar raised/pushed back, I like seeing how people think character A would react under darker circumstances, when they're pushed, and sometimes they come out of it unscathed, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes things have happy endings and y’know what, sometimes they don’t.
Mind fuck's are usually dark and I fucking love the feeling when a writer pulls the metaphysical rug out from under my feet. I love finishing a fic and sitting back and just being absolutely stunned for whatever reason because the twist or whatever was just that fucking good. The way they'll play around in my head, teasing and taunting and just, yeah, the fics that get right up under your skin and don't go away for weeks. *adores*
Writing's...I don't think there should be limit's to what can and can't be written just because the subject matter is disturbing or taboo. Writing does not, or shouldn't always, reflect the writers own morals, desires or mindset. So if I write about Character A being tortured, raped and dying? Doesn’t mean I don’t like character A and hope that he gets raped and murdered. Really, it doesn’t. (I love Character A, he’s always been my favourite). It's that the idea came into my head, I liked where it was going and went with it. Sometimes, sometimes you build up a character and a premise so absolutely that there is very little way you can change the ending because it’s purely driven by the characters and they don’t want happy-ever-after.
And there is no sodding way I’m pushing characters into an ending that they don’t want. That doesn’t fit. Because likelyhood is? It will mean completely overhauling characters and making them OOC compared to what I’ve already written, and I’m sorry, but no. I’ll stop writing long before doing that.
I tend to view darkfic/mindfuck writing as a skill in the sense that the writer can step that far outside of their own head, innate morals and upbringing. That said, I can understand why people don’t want to read things like this, can understand why people don’t want to see them, don’t understand them or don’t see any creative/artistic merit within them, but that does not make the fics or the writers wrong or sick or twisted. It makes them different.
So long as everything is warned for correctly, it is then up to the reader to choose whether or not to read and blame or shame cannot be left at the writers doorstep if the reader finds something they dislike in that respect. Don’t like, don’t read is often thrown about, and often-in my opinion-wrongly thrown about too, but I do believe it relates to warnings. If the warnings are correctly used anyway, which they should be.
If I warn for heterosexual incestuous necrophilia, I mean that there is heterosexual incestuous necrophilia within the fic. So if you dislike heterosexual incestuous necrophilia or any one of those, be it necro or het or whatever, you probably shouldn’t read. I understand the curiosity to do of course, suffered from it myself and is probably why I’m so damn hard to squick now, but don’t blame the writers, kthnx? Just because you don’t like something, does not make it wrong.
If we cut out everything that anyone ever found distasteful; dark fics, mindfucks, sickly sweet ‘I love yous’, crying, gay sex, any sex, tongues, foodsmut, creative license of any kind, etc etc, you know what we’d be left with?
The End.
/rant.
Let me tell you a story;
Once upon a time in a land not so different from this one, there was a little girl that couldn’t read. Although, didn’t want to, would be more accurate, why should she learn to read when her mother would read out loud to her? Only, her mother stopped reading to her, bought her the next book in the series and refused to read it. For weeks, for both the girl and her mother were just as stubborn as each other. Then the little girl, desperately wanting to find out what happened to her beloved characters next, tentatively picked up the book and began to read.
It wasn’t as hard as the girl imagined and she soon learnt to read properly, without asking her mother what this word or that meant, and found that she loved reading. She didn’t have to wait for someone to read to her, she could pick up a book whenever she wanted! And over the next few years, the little girl devoured any book she could lay her hands on, regardless of genre.
Some she liked, some she didn’t, some were forgettable and some still terrified her later when laying in bed.
Some books, she liked the flights of fancy, knowing that unicorns and dragons and princesses trapped in towers didn’t really exist. Some she liked because the characters had to overcome so much, no matter how scary and heartbreaking, and some she liked because the characters didn’t quite ever manage to overcome everything, and she liked those because there was something real about them. The ones that scared her, made her cry, the ones that made her laugh out loud or heart swell at all the warm fuzzies in the books.
But like all little girls, she grew up and didn’t have quite as much time to read as she once did. So she became more picky, found authors she liked and read everything they’d written, found series’ by multiple authors and devoured those. She liked the ones that would stay with her the most, the ones that would make her think or leave her on edge even after she’d put the book down. The scary and the fantastical, King, Pike, Pierce, Rogers, Pratchett, Shelley, Harris, Koontz, Barker, Rice, Stoker, Lee, Smith and Hamilton, ranging from laugh out loud funny to downright scary-twisty.
And the little girl grew up some more and then even more and eventually, at seventeen discovered fanfiction and slash. It really wasn’t such a big leap and look! Here and here! Fantastically long novel length stories about her favourite characters and there was barely a word out of place. The girl soon discovered that there were some types of fanfic that she didn’t like, didn’t want to read; the badly written and poorly executed ones that made no sense to her and she avoided these if she could and found writers that she did like and trust.
She devoured fanfiction as much as she’d devoured any published book, preferring some genre’s or pairings over others but using the warnings as guide. Sometimes, sometimes though, she would come across warnings and summary’s that would chill her to the very bone, that people would dare to write something so…disgusting about characters that she loved. But the girl was a curious sort, and clicked and read these stories too. Maybe it was luck, or fluke, or fate, but these stories, these subjects that should have disgusted her, did in fact disgust her as she read, were so well written and executed that it was impossible for her not feel for the characters. It made her uncomfortable that she was reading this or that without being outraged, as much as she loved the ones that made her cry, or the ones that still scared her in bed later.
So the girl looked for more of these stories, the dark, the twisted, the mindfucks, because the feelings they conjured, the reactions they pulled from her, weren’t all that different from the books she had read growing up.
~ ~ ~ ~
Yes, the little girl is me. And really, there is a point to this as I’m sure a lot of people have picked up on already.
I like Darkfics.
I like mindfucks. I don’t mind squickfics. If I ever had a line, it’s probably long gone.
This does not make me sick or twisted or wrong in the head. I may be sick or twisted or wrong in the head, but that’s a whole different story and has very little to do with what I like to read and write.
A well written dark/mindfuck fic for me is something that will stay with me after I’ve finished reading, something that will bounce around my head later and make me think. I like that feeling, I like the feeling of reading something and getting to the end of a fic and literally being lost for words because…because there are no words to properly convey the jumble-mix of emotions that’re tailspinning in my head.
Or the feeling that I shouldn’t be reading something, shouldn’t be liking it anyway or finding it pretty but it’s so well written I can’t help but find some beauty in it.
I love the ambiguous endings, the…’holy fuck. But…but…but is the clown real?! What happens next?!!?!?’
I read, and loved, the deathfic that no one saw coming because despite the warnings, the premise and the summary the author distracted and lulled everyone into a false sense of security so absolutely perfectly that the ending was devastating.
I like exploring outside my comfort zone, through reading or writing and I don’t see it as hating the characters to put them through some really, really bad things. Y’know what, sometimes they survive and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes a bit of realism is just as good as the flights of fancy. I like that this goes both ways, I like the balance. Hell, I don’t even dislike fluff half as much as I sometimes portray, it’s kind of like my dirty little secret, heroin-like-fluff addiction and I know exactly where to go if I want the kosher stuff.
But back to the darker stuffs. Exploring comfort zones and engaging readers or some such.
The world is not made of cotton candy and rainbows. People are not made of sugar and spice. Art imitates life imitates art and so on and so forth.
So while yes, there is a place for cotton candy, rainbow, sugar and spice fic. I want there to be a place for the totally not cotton candy, rainbow, sugar and spice fics too. Sometimes escapism is good, and sometimes I want gritty and realistic. Swings in roundabouts I guess. But people have dark sides, not everyone’s good, and lets face it, there are some fucking twisted people out there, so…why not occasionally have a fic about it?
Not everyone is going to like it, not everyone is going to like everything. It's subjective and there's no blame or shame there, but...just because I dislike foodsmut and 90% of fluff fics? Does not mean I want people to stop writing them or want them to go write them over there and out of my way.
Am taking something I’ve said before and expanding on it here too:
Darkfics, mindfucks, etc etc all resonate a little more deeply within me just purely because of their nature. I have a morbid fascination with mental illness and darker side of human nature and those are showcased better in darker stuff, they get more room to grow and expand. I like reading gritty things, and I tend to find darker stuff more...meaty? More plottier than most other things and my teeth sink a little more deeply into them because of that.
I like seeing the bar raised/pushed back, I like seeing how people think character A would react under darker circumstances, when they're pushed, and sometimes they come out of it unscathed, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes things have happy endings and y’know what, sometimes they don’t.
Mind fuck's are usually dark and I fucking love the feeling when a writer pulls the metaphysical rug out from under my feet. I love finishing a fic and sitting back and just being absolutely stunned for whatever reason because the twist or whatever was just that fucking good. The way they'll play around in my head, teasing and taunting and just, yeah, the fics that get right up under your skin and don't go away for weeks. *adores*
Writing's...I don't think there should be limit's to what can and can't be written just because the subject matter is disturbing or taboo. Writing does not, or shouldn't always, reflect the writers own morals, desires or mindset. So if I write about Character A being tortured, raped and dying? Doesn’t mean I don’t like character A and hope that he gets raped and murdered. Really, it doesn’t. (I love Character A, he’s always been my favourite). It's that the idea came into my head, I liked where it was going and went with it. Sometimes, sometimes you build up a character and a premise so absolutely that there is very little way you can change the ending because it’s purely driven by the characters and they don’t want happy-ever-after.
And there is no sodding way I’m pushing characters into an ending that they don’t want. That doesn’t fit. Because likelyhood is? It will mean completely overhauling characters and making them OOC compared to what I’ve already written, and I’m sorry, but no. I’ll stop writing long before doing that.
I tend to view darkfic/mindfuck writing as a skill in the sense that the writer can step that far outside of their own head, innate morals and upbringing. That said, I can understand why people don’t want to read things like this, can understand why people don’t want to see them, don’t understand them or don’t see any creative/artistic merit within them, but that does not make the fics or the writers wrong or sick or twisted. It makes them different.
So long as everything is warned for correctly, it is then up to the reader to choose whether or not to read and blame or shame cannot be left at the writers doorstep if the reader finds something they dislike in that respect. Don’t like, don’t read is often thrown about, and often-in my opinion-wrongly thrown about too, but I do believe it relates to warnings. If the warnings are correctly used anyway, which they should be.
If I warn for heterosexual incestuous necrophilia, I mean that there is heterosexual incestuous necrophilia within the fic. So if you dislike heterosexual incestuous necrophilia or any one of those, be it necro or het or whatever, you probably shouldn’t read. I understand the curiosity to do of course, suffered from it myself and is probably why I’m so damn hard to squick now, but don’t blame the writers, kthnx? Just because you don’t like something, does not make it wrong.
If we cut out everything that anyone ever found distasteful; dark fics, mindfucks, sickly sweet ‘I love yous’, crying, gay sex, any sex, tongues, foodsmut, creative license of any kind, etc etc, you know what we’d be left with?
The End.
/rant.