something irks me with how someone’s only connection or relation or empathy to someone else’s trauma is through a fictional realm,particularly in an online environment. things in fiction can be purposefully, unapologetically satirical or only talked about on the surface level. ->

the others that do talk about it deeply can no longer connect to those who have not gone through it, because of the stigma and environment created where someone draws the connection between one term and a piece of media that the author makes.

and more often than not, instead of seeing the piece of media as the satire it is like you normally would in a fictional realm, or as a critique of a concept in the real world, people look at the content and pin a moral value on that instead of the original intent of the

author, whether it’s purely subjective (ie therapeutic values), or objective (ie this is bad and characters are critiqued in the fiction for it and/or a victim gets support for the trauma they have gone through). something that doesn’t fit either but comes to mind the most is

1984 by George Orwell. one of the huge themes in there is totalitarianism, where everyone submits to a certain regime and are controlled through morals that are staples in a community. the environment is also one where, if you do not submit to this regime, you will

be outed by family and comrades and taken somewhere where you will be reeducated. looking at the theme only through the novel, and looking at the ending where the protagonist does get re-educated by the totalitarian regime, i know a lot of people on Twitter who would see

something like that, and because they haven’t seen how it can get in real life they would assume that Orwell supports totalitarianism himself. would you assume that, if you didn’t know that he uses themes like this to make critiques on our society in order to make sure that we

don’t end up like a totalitarianism dystopia? would you assume that, if you didn’t know that he vouches for democratic socialism and is entirely against the idea of totalitarianism? you know him, so of course you don’t assume that.

ive retweeted something like this before, but when it comes to fandom discourse like pro/anti discourse, there’s no nuance involved. we are in an online environment, and unlike an author of a book series, people are kept as anonymous as possible in a protection of privacy.

this has both helped and destroyed people. words on a screen can matter a lot to someone, yet someone’s words on a screen when it comes to denying accusations made based on conversations without nuance like this are thrown to the trash.

this is not a safe place for artists or writers who want to talk about topics in a way that feels right to them to be on, no matter what opinion they have on a topic. this is not a place where people look at a human being like a human being.

we don’t live in a perfect world. we don’t live in a perfect internet culture. heck, it got worse. i get that. but hoping to have more people who understand that they can find their own opinions on specific topics by looking at both the material and the source of that material...

human beings are complicated, and we’re only getting more complex with more opinions as more and more real life social issues are being talked about and discovered today. this is not the time to turn to stupidity to drive a point across - it’s to turn to conversations like this.

people ultimately want to do the right thing. they want to develop their moral compass. for that to happen, we ultimately also need to talk to people to talk about real world, real life, people-centered issues. i hope the point of this thread got across nicely.

this post explained it better than i did in fewer words, so go check it out if you do have the chance. i just wanted to present an example to hopefully explain my thoughts too ^<^ https://twitter.com/celifairy/status/1357151032745353217