When Fanfiction Gets Serious...Sort Of.

[lucilleliu]

Earlier today I read about a girl's harrowing experience with molestation and assault at the hands of her stepfather from when she was a very young girl to a teenager. Understandably, the ordeal caused her to form PTSD, and she specifically mentioned fanfic that involves rape or sexual assault as triggering her PTSD.

Now to me fanfiction is a fun

Comments

[spicy_diamond]

Interesting stuff to consider.

And, it's totally right that as a writer you don't want to find yourself carelessly writing something that triggers someone else's PTSD. (Or, you hope that if you do you've at least written a warning label for the thing so that they didn't hit it blind.)

But, then, yeah... line straddling. Especially in something like Heart no Kuni where there's not a lot of overt consent going on and a lot of 'let's feel Alice up until she says yes'. (To the point where Quinrose parodied it with Blood in the Movie 4-Koma) Does that make it right? No. Is going to stop me from having a certain fond spot for character's like Ace who habitually jump that line? With a sword? Or from liking the Twins who sit amid an entirely an entirely different set of moral gray points on top of the hesitant consent thing?*shrugs* I like my characters with a side of 'S'. And, that's sorta the point of otome, isn't it? To be able to have the safety net of fantasy to do things that you'd never do irl

[kumiko_fuji]

The problem I have with rape fanfiction, is that when the also add the element of love into it, 99% of them do it in a really awful way. Not in the Stockholm Syndrome way, which is actually interesting to read about, more like the way otome games deal with. Example "my best friend raped me and now I'm pregnant, and I want to hate him, but now that I look at him I realize that I love him, so there's not trauma at all, let's get together and raise the baby". Usually without any paragraph spared to express and explore the conflicting emotions the victim should be feeling, nope it's just rape, cry and then fall in love and forget about it. Thats.not.how.it.works

[lucilleliu]

You said it better than I could. Which is why I'm never going to do a fic like that because

[kumiko_fuji]

Love and sex are almost always the worst part of any fic. With sex, a lot of it is rape, if it never means anything then the character is just promiscuous (and only exists to try and steal you lover, because someone who enjoys casual sex has no morality, and is always looking to ruin committed relationships and places no value on friendships), and if not, it always comes with the whole "forever and ever" thing. While it is something I hope to experience someday, the way the love is portrayed in those fics, you know it's impossible for those characters to ever have anything meaningful. Most "love" is rushed, the characters are already kissing each other in the second meeting at most, even if one or both parties are shy and conservative about such contact, they never really get to know each other, and the relationship is always filled with drama that'd make a normal person want to run away like their underwear was on fire. You almost never see a love bloom with time, if love happens between friends, then one is already in love with the

[nichollweza]

You were meant to blog. It has inspired me to start my own blog on barrie dentist

[lucilleliu]

Have fun, although I can't tell whether your post is sarcasm or not.

[harroe]

Did you take all your M rated fics off of fanfiction.net?

It's been a while since I looked through your list of fics, but I just noticed that none of the M rated ones were there anymore. I thought maybe it was because of this PTSD issue.

[lucilleliu]

Well, partly, but a larger factor is that I write original fiction now and I really don't want my past to come back and haunt me. My fam is now reading my original novels, and the last thing I need is them discovering my M-fics.

[harroe]

Yeah, I can see why you wouldn't want your family coming across them.

Is it too late to ask for a copy of those fic files then?