I don’t like the idea that fiction has to condemn bad behavior in the text because then the John Wick movies would all have a 90 minute epilogue where John goes around doing therapy and apologizing to people

“Listen man, when I shot you, punched you in the neck, reloaded, shot your friends, and then shot you again exactly on beat to a pounding techno soundtrack...that was really problematic of me. I’m really sorry. I’ll do better in John Wick 2.”

I dunno man. I agree that we gotta be careful what messages we send/receive with art, but some things should just get to be bad. Scarface doesn't need a moral because the plot is "a bad dude comes to a bad end as a direct result of his choices and actions."

I listen to rap music and watch crime movies. As a kid, it definitely had a negative effect on me. But we're adults here...and Flockavelli is exquisite workout music and The Raid is the ultimate evil landlord movie. It's exciting when bad things happen to fake people ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I was listening to BIG & Eminem's Dead Wrong yesterday, which is full of both of them saying stuff that'll make you go, "Dang, if this was real, I would definitely want them guillotined and thrown into the sun." But the song is called "Dead Wrong." The ugliness is the point

(Em's verse on Dead Wrong is like if R. Crumb did Watchmen or something. Hilarious levels of "Bro you can't say that, that's awful...but you said it in a really artful way..." The Marshall Mathers LP was similar. Super ugly, but dang, this guy has talent.)

I think fans/viewers/readers/listeners/consumers are way smarter than some people give them credit for. Grand Theft Auto was never moral instruction. At its best, it's stress relief/transgressive catharsis. (Lately, it's "Remember this Scorsese movie?!" but that's another convo.)

With all that said though, I do think it's important to find your limits and interrogate what you consume. I listen to a lot less misogynist rap these days, and torture in film/TV is a huge turn-off. But I still play a lot of video games where it's you and a gun against the world