weird take about fiction: sometimes, actions that would be abusive in real life, hit different in a story. and sometimes i see people react very very strongly to those actions, and i totally get it, because like, that can be extremely triggering and ymmv on whether its handled well or not, but it always makes me a bit. hm.
like, i think the most obvious one is slapping/hitting. in real life, there is basically no situation where that is acceptable, unless you’re actively defending yourself/someone else. but fiction is inherently larger than life, its about how it feels, subjectively, over what actually happens, literally. sometimes a character who has never before been violent will hit someone, and it’s intended as like, an indicator of how fucked up everything is. that shit is going down. or, a character will trash a room, throwing things and destroying everything in their path. and then its never mentioned again, everything just continues as if they HADNT destroyed their own and other people’s property in a frankly terrifying display, because it was just a cathartic moment to represent the storm of emotions the person was feeling. and when i see people like ‘this character is an abuser, the story needs to address this,’ i think maybe its actually okay for fictional characters to do shitty things and not have it framed as shitty, by the story itself or even on any sort of meta level, with the intended audience reaction. sometimes the point is just to resonate with your emotions, not to dissect the literal sequence of events.
like obviously ive been on the 'you can portray whatever you want in fiction, its all a pretend game’ train forever. but i think the important thing to me here is that, you can also defend bad things in fiction. not just 'they did everything wrong and i love that,’ but even 'they were 100% justified when they did [thing that would be extremely bad irl].’ cause its like, ok, they did do that, but like it was the only way to tell the story well. dont worry about it.
