Well, anon, you had me in the first half, that’s for sure. I agree with you about blocking and ignoring people you don’t like.
But here’s where you get it wrong.
but at the same time, depicting certain topics in fiction just for the sake of depicting them without saying anything about the subject matter or the very real suffering victims experience, using the abuse for nothing more than shipping fodder, is vile, and i think if you need that explained to you, you don’t have the critical thinking skills to be interacting with the internet”
Let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right (I disagree, but for the sake of argument), “depicting something without saying something about it, and using it just for shipping fodder is vile.”
Let’s imagine for a second that’s true.
How do you know, for sure, what works are attempting to say something artistically about abuse and suffering and which are “just shipping fodder”?
You think you “know it when you see it?” (This is the same rule that is from obscenity laws that allow any pornography to be criminalized if it doesn’t make an artistic statement.)
How can you say, for sure, that something that you think is vile and glorifies abuse, isn’t written by a victim of that abuse trying to portray the suffering that they went through? Do you demand them to disclose their trauma to you?
How do you say for sure what is art about suffering or harm or mental illness, and what is something “just made to get off to.”
More to the point, who do YOU trust to decide between the two?
Who do you trust to go through every work about dark topics and decide which ones are art and which ones are just smut?
Is there anyone you actually trust to put in authority to do that?
How would you arrange that? How would you make sure that this theoretical governing body stayed pure through the years and wasn’t corrupted into an authoritarian body censoring all uncomfortable depictions of suffering, abuse and mental illness?
You can not.
You just can’t.
No one can.
All art is art, anon. All art has something to say. You can’t assign a judge to decide what art is saying something and what isn’t.
For example, I could argue that Cinderella uses abuse as shipping fodder, especially the schmoopy uwu versions that ~pure, sweet~ Tumblrinas love most. With the exception of one scene where she cries about a particularly big setback, there is absolutely no mention of the lasting harm that abuse does to a person. The abuse is just there to catalyse the love story and then create an obstacle that temporarily keeps the two lovers apart. Should we now ban every version of Cinderella and every derivative of that story? Or is it fine because the story doesn’t show the prince putting his willy in her hoo ha? If someone wrote a fanfiction that was exactly the same but had a sex scene, would that now be Bad Evil Smut? Would the kind of sex make a difference? Would it make a difference if it was Ella and a princess? Or the prince and an abused man? Or if one or both of the two were trans? What kind of works are allowed to use abuse as shipping fodder and what kind aren’t?
