doomhamster | (no subject)

One of the things I just can’t understand re: antis and their ilk:

How can anyone NOT get that consuming or creating depictions of a form of trauma you yourself were the victim of can in fact be cathartic and comforting?

“I can be in control of an event that was wholly out of my control IRL. I can have everything come out so much better… or I can have my favorite character go through the same thing I did and end up totally broken, and that will make me feel a little bit less ashamed of how I broke when it happened to me.”

This isn’t DIFFICULT, folks.

And no, not all people work like this. Some traumatized people are indeed better off just never being reminded of their trauma or seeing it depicted. But here’s the thing: you won’t find darkficcers demanding that such people read our stuff, or write traumatic things into their own stories! We don’t tend to go around denying someone else’s experience based on “trying to avoid any mention of your trauma is not a valid coping mechanism~!”

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'zactly. The latest one I argued with on tumblr actually told me that "we have to focus solely on the negative experiences because those matter the most". Which just makes zero sense to me. How can you claim to be moral and "protecting victims" if you're not doing ANY weighing of potential benefits, just going "this harms SOME people so it shouldn't be allowed"?

Primus what? "This causes unavoidable harm on contact to some" is an argument towards filtering at best. (Which, like, outside of crass bad-taste jokes, I have NEVER found to be a problem except on sites where curating your experience of the whole is hard i.e. Tumblr, Twitter.)

(At least until shit that is perfectly above the board started being reclassified as darkfic/"gross", like, my "are we the baddies" moment came when I saw someone get called a pedophile for drawing the swimboys from Free kissing.)

Like ngl that sounds a lot like "I cannot manage my own negative emotional reactions and allow them to govern my life so I need other people to stop putting out negative signals so I stop feeling powerless."

Yes. Which, I can understand that to some degree, because many antis are quite young and young people ARE usually worse at managing emotions, and also keep being bombarded with the message that they are fragile and helpless and can't take care of themselves.

On the other hand I feel like... sometimes they WANT to think of themselves as powerless? Because it makes the bullying they inflict on others somehow all right, in their eyes. They're weaponizing their own and others' vulnerability in order to paint anyone who disagrees with them as an abuser and oppressor.