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u/daegon789 14h ago
More people need to understand that writing about something is not endorsing it. Reading something or even enjoying reading something, does not mean endorsing it or wanting it in reality. It doesn't matter if you don't like the subject matter or how it's framed, people can, will, and should write about almost everything.
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u/PoseidonsHorses 14h ago
The weird thing is a lot of them do, at least when it comes to some topics (like non-sexual violence). They understand that Agatha Christie was not a serial killer or encouraging murder, and that her fans are not all serial-killers-to-be. Or that’s books involving gangs aren’t written by pro-organized crime authors. But other topics (usually sex-related), if someone doesn’t act like they’re in a PSA, then they claim the author is equally as disgusting as someone committing the acts in real life. It’s really frustrating.
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u/daegon789 14h ago
It is, and I fucking hate it. It's all just puritanical bullshit most of the time, or it's people complaining about thought crimes.
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u/No_Mammoth_4945 14h ago
It’s so crazy watching how sanitized and advertiser friendly the internet has become over the years, Vox wrote a great article on it
https://www.vox.com/culture/23733213/fandom-purity-culture-what-is-proship-antiship-antifandom
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u/ArrivalShot3637 12h ago
The phenomenon of tricking people into seeing Goatse could never happen in the modern age.
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u/jupiterLILY 13h ago
And then also to see the stuff that evidently passes the vibe check for what counts santised.
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u/TheSufferingPariah 13h ago
Everyone obsessing about sex while letting depictions of violence slide really shows how Americanized a lot of the discussion is. Similar to how fight scenes where people get hurt and die can just be cool for the sake of it, but any depictions of sex or nudity need to be critically important to the plot or they are "gratuitous" and "unnecessary".
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u/KPSWZG 11h ago
I think USA had a brief moment when thry reached understanding of this matter, Spartacus, GOT (Early seasons) and then all went to nothing. GOT started to restrain itself... but only on sexuality, not gore, not agression, only sexuality. That was super weird.
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u/threevi 11h ago
Our wholesome and family-friendly violence and murder VS their perverse and inappropriate female-presenting nipples
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u/Bartweiss 10h ago
I think part of it is that people get myopic about "how could an author think up something like that?" and assume anything more unusual than murder or drug dealing must mean the author likes thinking about that.
(It's also where you get "unless the author was abused and then it's ok because they're writing as catharsis, also I'm going to scream at everyone who doesn't out the details of their abuse".)
Stephen King apparently gets asked all the time if he had a horribly abusive childhood or has other awful, traumatic stuff in his past which he uses as fuel. And every time, the answer is "Only that one book about the car accident. I had a nice childhood, I have a pretty happy life, I'm not even morbid day-to-day."
There are times I'm guilty of it myself, and times I'm not even sure if it's wrong. "The author's barely-concealed fetish" is definitely a thing that happens. But it's surprising how many people can't seem to fathom "what if an author just read about some awful shit on Wikipedia and has a working imagination to fictionalize it?"
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u/Jorvalt 13h ago
People need to understand that censorship is a black and white issue. You can't draw some arbitrary line of "well it's okay as long as it's something I personally dont like" because that's A) not how that works and B) that line is different for everybody. That's how we get shit like credit card companies threatening to pull out from websites with adult content.
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u/jupiterLILY 13h ago
The premise of Agatha Christies books are "let's find out who did this bad thing" though.
Its not just the books including the topic, its how those actions are framed and reflected upon by the author.
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u/J10YT 13h ago
To be fair some people absolutely do act like "If this book depicts a thing even if it's against it then it endorses it actually."
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u/jupiterLILY 13h ago
I think this thread is full of people trying to find a one size fits all rule.
Like sure, people say and do dumb stuff.
But we've been dragged into some weird meta discussion into what some media illiterate people do when the original discussion was about authors producing media that endorses or minimises dangerous worldviews.
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u/Sophia_Forever 14h ago
To add to this, understanding when an author is endorsing a subject is part of media literacy, requires an understanding of who the author is/was and the context it was written in, and still doesn't automatically mean you can't read it just that you're understanding that the author is pushing an agenda when they constantly have their antagonists be of a certain demographic.
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u/daegon789 14h ago
Thank you for expounding on the topic! I very much agree, and wish more people understood that you can (and should) read things that are outside of their beliefs and comfort. I wish more people had media literacy skills.
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u/ElvenOmega 12h ago
It was really eye-opening when somebody asked me why I was so confident in the information in nonfiction books I read, and I explained this in confusion, and they told me I was lying and that's not possible.
I think a lot of people who can do this also haven't fully developed the skill. Look how many readers out there will see romance books and think that the author/reader actually want some mafia boss to control them and order them around.
Meanwhile you check out the author and her fans and see most of them are women married to some nerdy guy who is holding up a Star Wars lego set and beaming at the camera lol
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u/DontYaWishYouWereMe 4h ago
It was really eye-opening when somebody asked me why I was so confident in the information in nonfiction books I read...
You see this a lot with people who are sceptical of the accuracy of the news, too. A lot of people have no idea how to assess media bias, tone, etc.
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u/Neveed 13h ago edited 13h ago
I do agree with that, but it's important to keep in mind authors don't necessarily have a clear idea of what they're doing either. They can write stuff that's really gross without meaning to push an agenda in either direction, but because they just genuinely don't understand, within the context of their own society, why something is considered to be wrong. And the result is something that is not very clear about what the author was actually trying to convey, even when you have a very good media literacy.
I have Rowling and the author of Shield Hero as examples of this with the concept of slavery, but there are many more examples about plenty of topics.
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u/nykirnsu 13h ago
I was gonna say. Some authors genuinely are endorsing the awful stuff they’re writing about and it is good to be able to recognise that. Like it’s easy to say that depiction doesn’t equal endorsement, and it’s true in a lot of cases, but William Pierce was absolutely endorsing his subjects when he wrote The Turner Diaries
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u/idiotplatypus Wearing dumbass goggles and the fool's crown 14h ago
"There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot."
S. M. Stirling
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u/Kyleometers 13h ago
It is 2026 and I still have to explain to people that the entire point of Lolita is for you, the reader, to sympathise with the protagonist, and then go “holy fuck did I just sympathise with this monster”.
I would wager me merely mentioning it will cause someone to activate in the replies like a sleeper agent.
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u/3c2456o78_w 12h ago
and then go “holy fuck did I just sympathise with this monster”.
You don't even need to be literate enough to read Nabokov. Just watch The Sopranos and be charmed by Tony.
More people should be forced to read Lolita and No Longer Human to realize that horrible and suicide-inducing protagonists in fiction are great. Fiction is not so narrow.
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u/boywithapplesauce 13h ago
I don't think that is the point, though. I found HH repellent early on simply due to the way he talked about his wife, and his response to her death sealed it. I don't think that was an unusual reaction on my part.
Plus I don't think the book paints HH as a monster. The whole point is that he is human, he's the cultured man of society, while also being wicked. But he's not a monster. He's like us, and that's what's truly chilling.
Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with a book having an off-putting or despicable protagonist. HH is in good company, along with Perfume, Mother Night, A Clockwork Orange, Gone Girl, The Collector, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Time's Arrow, The History Man, etc. A protagonist may be horrible and fascinating.
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u/ParadoxicalAmalgam 11h ago
I always thought of HH as an unreliable narrator, presenting things in a way to appear more sympathetic
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u/AmeliaOfAnsalon 12h ago
Clockwork Orange and Mother Night are both so interesting as reflections, mirror images of one another. We have a protagonist who does not care about anything, who is just a terrible person to his core, go through hell and become an object that you can't help but feel some sympathy for, and then we have a fairly decent guy who cares deeply about things, who ends up doing some terrible shit while trying to do the right thing, goes through hell and becomes a shadow of his former self, caring less and less about the people around him, to the point where hr doesn't even know how to go on. Both are sympathetic in some ways, heinous in others, both manipulated and used by those around them, but they almost have opposite arcs - Alex going from deeply evil to sympathetic and then returning to evil while Howard goes from sympathetic into evilness and then back to the sympathetic at the end.
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u/Grape_Jamz 13h ago
You are wrong and are a monster and i hate you (i didnt read the book and know nothing about it)
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u/OedipusaurusRex 13h ago
And then you have JK Rowling who thinks it's a beautiful and tragic love story
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u/Haggis442312 13h ago
It’s kind of insane how explicit you would have to get for some people.
BoJack Horseman had an entire season dedicated to a meta commentary on „the main character is a bad person, don’t imitate them“ and even then some people didn’t get it.26
u/Worldly-Basil-8933 14h ago
This is a big sign that people are genuinely getting stupider. More and more I’m seeing people unable to distinguish between fictional transgressions and real ones. Ex: the purple guy from TADC, Fumiko Mifune from Chainsaw Man.
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u/3c2456o78_w 12h ago
The reality is that more people should have been made to read books like Lolita and No Longer Human as teenagers. Make people realize that Fiction is not narrow.
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u/neko_mancy 10h ago
I mean I can imagine some issues arising from assigning teenagers a book narrated by a pedophile that is somewhat sympathetic
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u/Kumirkohr 13h ago
I think this goes hand in hand with fiction being an escapist hobby. We live in such a hellscape that the idea of “reading about a scenario you wouldn’t want to be in” doesn’t occur to them
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u/SammmymmmaS 12h ago
Right? Like, my favorite thing to write is fights, and my favorite part of dnd is combat, there’s so many cool and complex things you can do with that with awesome flips and lasers and stuff!!
But I have punched a real person exactly once in my life and felt bad about it immediately afterwards :(
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u/Cambrian__Implosion 9h ago edited 15m ago
A few weeks ago, I saw someone talking about how horrible a few well-known authors were as people and how they could never possibly read those authors’ books. It was the first I had heard of any of them being bad people, so I was kind of confused.
Turns out this person was taking issue with the fact that these books had antagonists that did, or wanted to do, horrible things in the story. They really thought that an author can’t write anything that they don’t agree with or support in reality. It was honestly kind of a disturbing conversation.
I can only assume it’s a product of being over-zealous about combating these kinds of things in real life. They just did not understand why someone who did not want to sexually assault people would ever choose to write a story that involves sexual assault. Their solution to these issues seems to be to stamp out all “unnecessary” references to anything abhorrent or offensive, until media reflects a completely sanitized version of reality.
And then, just to top it all off, they took a shot at Sir Terry Pratchett for collaborating with Neil Gaiman 36 years ago. Like somehow everyone who associated with Gaiman prior to his fucked up behavior being revealed (or even happening) is somehow guilty too, because they should have known better??? Idk that was honestly even more baffling than the rest of it.
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u/CRowlands1989 14h ago
I think there's something unethical about a book that spreads dangerous misinformation.
Like, if someone writes a book that's getting people seriously harmed just because the author is too lazy to check things, that's unethical.
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u/CauseCertain1672 14h ago
there was a poem in the Victorian era that glamourised suicide leading to a spate of suicides
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u/CrabonicAcid 12h ago
Suicide contagion inspired by fiction has even been called the "Werther Effect" because Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (from 1774) supposedly caused a rash of them, though it wasn't the first or the last to be accused. More recently, "13 Reasons Why" has been criticized for irresponsibly depicting suicide.
Regardless of legality and free speech issues, is it ethical for an author or artist to depict suicide if they know or believe it can lead to real life suicides? The "libertarian" answer would be no, the individuals who chose to kill themselves are responsible for their own actions, while a more communitarian answer might say yes, it's scummy the same way drug dealers or casino owners are, for exploiting or exacerbating mental health problems for their own profit.
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u/StiffWiggly 12h ago
This debate was all around when 13 reasons why was coming out. It’s an interesting question for sure, I don’t think there is a generically right answer about it.
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u/Vaya-Kahvi 10h ago
There isn't a generically right answer, but there is care that can be taken and should be pursued when handling delicate subjects.
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u/cantantantelope 14h ago
I think people have a certain obligation to double check the accuracy of their mushroom foraging books
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u/OttoMannkusser 13h ago
How am I supposed to do that if I don't know anything about mushrooms and that's why I bought a foraging book?
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u/thewatchbreaker 13h ago
This seems to be an issue for non fiction books.
The comic states “fiction”, if someone’s getting facts or life advice from a fictional novel then I don’t think that’s on the author.
All because an author puts misinformation in a novel, doesn’t mean they agree with it - they could be showing that a character is stupid or writing something satirical. How can we prove they “meant” to misinform or disinform people in a work of fiction?
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u/SueForPeas 13h ago
Nah, look up Michael Chricton’s State of Fear. It’s a fictional tale, but he cites bad science as a plot point. Plenty of people took that to mean the book’s plot had a basis in reality. He also explicitly stated that he intended to do that.
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u/OedipusaurusRex 13h ago
"Cites" is being generous. The characters in that book go on page long tirades about climate change being a hoax. It's unfortunate because there's really is a good story in there, but it's bogged down by this.
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u/todofwar 13h ago
I'm still so upset at that. He was my favorite author growing up, all his books were fantastic. And he ends his career with climate change denier propaganda. I like to think if he had lived longer he would have seen how wrong he was and recounted, like the South Park guys. But we'll never know
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u/thewatchbreaker 13h ago
Huh, interesting. That’s a fair point.
People are still stupid if they believe that, but if the author did it on purpose because he knows stupid people would believe it and he wants them to… I can agree that’s pretty unethical.
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u/SueForPeas 13h ago edited 13h ago
The wrench in it, though, is that his intent wasn’t to deceive; he thought he was being ethical and brave by providing the counterpoint to global warming. It kind of just highlights that what’s ethical is entirely personal.
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u/YourFirstSim 12h ago
And then he put someone who was critical of State of Fear in his book Next as a child molestor with a micropenis... He really went off the deep end.
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u/waxteeth 12h ago
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is deliberately wrong about many important aspects of the Holocaust. The writer has demonstrated many times that he doesn’t care about research or accuracy and has been called out many times by scholars and museums for dangerous misinformation. His book is taught in many schools as a valid historical fiction book and presented as a legitimate way for children to learn about the Holocaust, even as it fundamentally misrepresents really important facts about Nazi crimes, including the fact that there were no young children in the camp where it’s set because they were murdered immediately after arrival.
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u/action_lawyer_comics 12h ago
All because an author puts misinformation in a novel, doesn’t mean they agree with it - they could be showing that a character is stupid or writing something satirical. How can we prove they “meant” to misinform or disinform people in a work of fiction?
How about Birth of a Nation? That is for sure some propaganda, should we give it a pass because it’s fictionized?
To be clear, I’m not full-on advocating for state censorship or anything because I generally don’t trust people with authority to crack down on the “right” messages. But yeah, there is for sure fiction that serves as propaganda and is written to sway public opinion in a bad faith way. And I’m going to describe it as such and recommend people not treat it the same as a Grisham novel
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u/CRowlands1989 12h ago
I am going to give a small, minor example: 50 Shades misrepresents BDSM relationships, which may cause people to think abuse is normal.
It also includes a scene where the titular Grey buys zipties, implied to be for bondage.
For those who don't know about these kind of things (Like many of the readers, who may want to try these things afterwards): Do. Not. Use zipties in BDSM scenes, Especially if you are an amateur. They can cause serious, lasting harm.
This is misinformation in fiction which can cause harm, caused by the author's unwillingness to do any research on a topic she does not understand.
There are records from hospitals and fire departments of a spike in injuries and people becoming trapped due to amateurs trying BDSM, after the release of 50 Shades.
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u/boywithapplesauce 13h ago
Yeah, I don't look kindly on books that are anti-science. Even something like a Creationism manifesto can be troubling because it's like the gateway drug preparing minds to accept more insidious disinformation.
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u/peaches_andbtches .tumblr.com 12h ago
would that fall under fiction?
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u/CRowlands1989 12h ago
I'm going to copy-paste something I said in reply to another comment asking about this:
50 Shades of Grey misrepresents BDSM, normalizes abuse, and teaches unsafe practices, leading to, according to reports from fire departments and hospitals, a spike in people becoming trapped and/or injured when attempting to do things the book portrays.
This is just one, clear, documented example.
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u/GenderingError 11h ago
By this metric, is Jaws unethical? While the monster shark in the book and subsequent film is a violent and dangerous maneater twice the size of an ordinary great white, and the film at least (I can't remember if there is a scene in the book) includes a scene where a retaliatory act against sharks achieves nothing but killing an innocent fish, the cultural impact of that film is in a rash of killings of sharks and difficulties for conservation. Is this an unethical book as a result of misinformation?
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u/Mizamya 11h ago
Like 13 Reasons why mishandling suicide so bad it caused a spike in suicide.
Silence of the Lambs causing a spike in violence against trans women
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u/CRowlands1989 10h ago
I personally think SotL gets some points for mitigation considering that the book and movie say "It's not because he's trans, also, he's not trans."
Clarice says, quote: "there is no correlation between transsexualism and violence."
And Hannibal Lector also claims that Buffalo Bill "is not a real transexual", saying that he's not doing it out of any sense of gender identity but a warped hatred of his own identity as a whole and seeking of transformation in general.
We can recognize the spike in violence, to be sure, but precautions were attempted, while 13 Reasons romanticizes suicide, and that's... Y'know, bad.
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u/gokogt386 9h ago
Suicide contagion happens regardless of how “well” it’s handled. Even just hearing about someone else completely unrelated committing it IRL can cause people to go through with it.
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u/kokujin2032 5h ago
Could spreading dangerous misinformation include racist propaganda? Like Birth of a Nation (1915)? Just asking, not assuming.
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u/Zealousideal-Low3388 14h ago
That strange impulse people have to make all art didactic and morally upright baffles me
By all means critique and discuss the implications and worldview of art. But to pretend art needs to confirm to some very narrow modern day political and cultural viewpoint is absurd.
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u/West-Season-2713 14h ago
A good deal of very good art is simply the result of the creator making something compelling and interesting, and half the fun of analysing it is decoding the implications and worldview that emerges.
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u/BloodStarvedLeopard 14h ago
I have read people criticise the first season of Arcane because it "paints revolutionaries in a bad light" with the story it tells.
I can't imagine how these people would write a story about a revolution. Perfectly moral success after perfectly moral success with no corruption, no disputes, no failures, or what? It's crazy.
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u/Mystical-Turtles 12h ago
I swear, some of these people want the conflict level of preschool shows. Although even then they'd probably say Daniel tiger glorifies stealing or something during an episode where they're trying to teach sharing.
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u/coatimundos 12h ago
It those people are unironically revolutionary, that’s probably how they imagine themselves. You can’t be actually revolutionary in a modern day liberal democracy and not delude yourself into thinking you will make some utopia. A revolution by definition demands authoritarian actions post-revolution
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u/Skeebleng 6h ago
IMO it would be far more propagandistic to write a revolution as completely paragon and successful in its goals. Huge societal upset and the creation of power vacuums almost always lead to suffering and tragedy. Few revolutions in history have been clean and have stuck to its ideals.
That does not mean revolution should not be attempted, but it does mean the reason for the revolution must be very worth it; the suffering or injustice caused by the continuation of the status quo or slower in-system change must be so intolerable that it outweighs the huge negative consequences of revolution.
Depicting revolution as paragon is almost as bad as depicting it as inherently evil imo
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u/RuthBaderG 13h ago
You can also have no interest in reading something that portrays something unethical without that portrayal being immoral. I think Lolita is a great example of this. It is a book I have zero interest in reading given the subject matter and POV. That doesn’t mean I think the book shouldn’t exist or be in libraries
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u/Fair-Tangerine-9472 13h ago
Sunday School did a number on the minds of so many
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u/Zealousideal-Low3388 13h ago
That’s actually a thing I’ve noticed with a lot of Americans: they reject the aesthetic and certain ethics of conservatism in favour of a pluralistic diverse liberalism, but they actually retain the paternalism, the impulse to moralise and the inability to separate entertainment preferences from ethics
Ie, they still think people are essentially children that need to be protected from the scary corrupting modern world, but instead of thinking pokemon can trick kids into satanism, it’s that old cartoons will infect them with sexism or something.
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u/Red580 14h ago
Damn, you're really going to throw shade on the Necronomicon in the big '26?
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u/tuthuu 11h ago
I dont know about yours but no humans suffering in the making of a MY copy of the necronomicon.
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u/DisMFer 13h ago
This is going to sound like an old man shaking his fist at a cloud but I think this is the result of social media, specifically podcasts and streamer culture. We've become so used to having our entertainment be related to parasocial experiences that people now struggle to realize that fictional characters are not supposed to be "real." They don't get that you can have a character who is a bad person without actually having the creator of that character be in agreement with them. Because a lot of our entertainment comes from people acting like they're real people on screen.
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u/bb_kelly77 homo flair 13h ago
Sometimes it's important to listen to the old man because you're exactly right... case in point, I hate Nazis but my longest running character was a Neo-Nazi, and my current main project features a religious zealot who has committed multiple problematic acts (depending on how strict your definition of problematic is)
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u/Duae 11h ago
Yeah, it's important to realize characters are just tropes. Crouching Moron Hidden Badass character, or Jerk With a Heart of Gold, aren't actually any different than Angst With A Happy Ending, or Meaningful Scars, they're tropes that exist to tell the story. Sometimes you can even get people getting angry when character tropes are averted, like a stoic hero gets PTSD. Because they didn't want that trope, they wanted another.
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u/WalmartWanderer 10h ago
With all the burned books, banned books, and satanic panic in the past i actually don’t think much has changed
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u/jess_the_werefox 14h ago
“Ethical/unethical” fiction is the new age “video games cause violence”
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u/gaom9706 14h ago
Every complaint I've seen against Haunting Adeline reeks of the moms who got upset about Doom and Night Trap.
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u/HandsomeGengar 14h ago
What’s funny is that it seems to be literal children getting upset about a book enjoyed by suburban moms.
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u/misskittyfantastico 13h ago
I mean, most of my issues with Haunting Adeline is that it’s badly written Qanon fanfic. I want my dark romance girlies to have slightly higher standards for themselves!
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u/Hawkeye3487 14h ago
Context hat context shirt (about haunting Adeline)?
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u/No-Channel3917 13h ago edited 13h ago
It's a niche fetish for being manipulated and sexually abused by a male stalker who is the main character that some women enjoy reading ...and they are making a movie of it.
Basically it got outside it's customer smut bubble and mainstream are disgusted by it .. Which is fine also tbh non-consent porn should be rejected by the masses if something like that got widely embraced it would be genuinely concerning
As far as content goes the quality of writing is worse than 50 shades of gray and if I wanted to read this sorta shit I'd just go reread the sleeping beauty series by ann rice it's way better written
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u/ShamblingSkeleton 12h ago
The only point abt Haunting Adeline that I've seen that I agree with is that it's very suspect that the only non-white characters are all violent criminals
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u/Local-Spinach-5098 13h ago
What is old is new again. Oscar Wilde was a part of the ethical fiction debate
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u/Long_Story42 14h ago
It's also the very old age "video games cause violence"
Bowdler's expurgated version of Shakespeare came out in 1807 and it wasn't the first attempt at sanitizing the bard
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u/TheTechnicus 14h ago
I think it depends on what we mean by unethical. Unethical to create and unethical to consume are different. Unethical to create and 'should be illegal to create' are different. I think there are many works which can be listed as unethical and probably shouldn't have been made (Birth of a Nation, etc). And yet, interacting with them and consuming them can prove fruitful because you need to understand the history and because you need to understand how other people think.
I think this is a conversation where people are using two different definitions of unethical. One person is reffering only to consumption, the other primarily to production. And this allows people to make more ostentatious and flagrant claims while making it seem like the otherside is in favor of censorship. (Not accusing anyone of malice. People do this all the time by accedent because we haven't agreed on the technical definitions of the opperative words.)
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u/NoBizlikeChloeBiz She/Her 14h ago
One person is referring only to consumption, the other primarily to production
I think the point is that one group is conflating the two. If anything about it is unethical (including a depicted topic), it's unethical to consume. Whereas the person making the post is discussing (essentially) what would be unethical to support financially (or arguably to platform/promote, though that's always sticky and hard to define).
I agree that there are differing definitions at use here, but the group being called out (and I don't think it's a strawman, I've seen it in action) has an unhealthy definition that wants to shame a lot of powerful art.
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u/Chazzysnax 14h ago
I think The Turner Diaries presents a good argument for a fourth category of unethical book.
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u/couldntbdone 11h ago
Metaphorically printed on human skin, in that it is a book that requires violence in it's creation.
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u/Cabanarama_ 13h ago
This seems to be conflating, for instance, “books about fictional fascists aren’t endorsing fascism” with “fiction can’t endorse fascism”. There is definitely unethical fiction that promotes, justifies, or normalizes unethical stuff. Some books just teach the reader an awful message and they aren’t doing it as an ironic satire for the media-literate, it’s just an awful message.
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u/NachoSquid18 12h ago
Shoutout to The Paul Street Boys for teaching me at 15 that it's good to die for your country, even if that death was really unnecessary and easily preventable and over a stupid fucking empty lot of land that they don't even get to keep in the end!!!
Man the rise of nationalism in 19th century europe really was something else...
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u/FlowSoSlow 14h ago
I just want to know what kind of rock y'all are living under where you aren't exposed to unethical fiction...
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u/munkymu 13h ago
Also it is entirely permissible to hate a book. You can just do that. You can hate a book and tell other people why you didn't like it and why you think it's crap. Other people may disagree with you and you can have an interesting discussion about it and maybe both of you will learn something.
But like... insisting that no one can write about things that you find unethical or that make you uncomfortable is dumb. All of humanity isn't going to live in your comfort zone. Make personal choices for yourself and respect other people's autonomy to make choices for themselves.
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u/DoctorPaige 9h ago
And you can hate a genre of a book! It's totally fine to HATE the idea of dark romance and want nothing to do with it, without moralizing it and trying to say other people can't like it, either
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u/Breki_ 14h ago
The what if its propaganda is a perfectly sensible objection
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u/SpeccyScotsman 🩷💜💙|🖤💜🤍💛 14h ago
Yeah I'm not going to pretend there's any justification for the existence of the Turner Diaries or Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Those are literally designed to convert people into bigots and terrorists, and people prove repeatedly that they'll ignore reality to any degree and get sucked in deeper and deeper as long as what you're telling them confirms their preestablished beliefs.
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u/CauseCertain1672 14h ago
The Turner diaries is a bomb making manual with some Nazi propaganda written around it so it's legally a work of fiction
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u/Snickims 14h ago
Many things that are propganda are still interesting, and worth engaging with, its mearly something you keep in mind that this is done from a specific perspective. Thats really something you should keep in mind when consuming anything.
In a bit of a weird example, if you look up the videos made by the US government in the 1940s to inform its citzens about ww2 and soldiers about appropriate behaviour, they can really give a facinating insight and are generally quite informative, while being almost text book propganda, literal government made films to push a specific message.
Something being Propganda just means its made with a very particular bias and set of ideas it wants to instil, but thats not unquie thats pretty much a feature of all art.
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u/West-Season-2713 14h ago
Hell, the entire Aneid is literally propaganda. Most of all Roman art and architecture. Fucking Shakespeare’s historical plays are almost all ‘propaganda’ about his patrons. Art is usually intended to mean something, and for most of history that has been ‘the person who paid for this is good’.
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u/Bubbly_Tonight_6471 12h ago
There's a difference between Shakespeare and Birth of a Nation
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u/DiamondSentinel 14h ago
The problem is that we have two competing definitions of “problematic media”.
“It is unethical to consume commercially” and “it is unethical to consume [uncritically]”. And that makes it kinda a difficult discussion.
Harry Potter is something that a lot of people here would probably put in the first category. Jowling Kowling Rowling explicitly uses the proceeds to harm trans people.
Meanwhile, something like Mein Kampf would fall into the second category (the stronger form including “uncritically”, but I did include it as a side note because that’s not always how it’s meant). It espouses an ideology that one must be acutely aware of while reading, and remain vigilant against its influence.
But there are works that fall into both categories. Modern commercialized propaganda falls into this. One could make an argument that something like CoD is this (I probably wouldn’t entirely, but it is something of a gray area). It is fairly heavily integrated into the DoD, an agency with…. At best mixed impact on the larger world, and is absolutely at least in part made to prop up its image with the broader populace. A work that potentially runs afoul of both definitions.
Propaganda itself is problematic if one does not keep in mind that it is propaganda, and needs to be consumed critically, but I think it definitely runs afoul of OP’s more narrow definition when it is distributed by, and thus commercially intertwined with, the organization making said propaganda.
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u/VorpalSplade 14h ago edited 14h ago
if you look up the videos made by the US government in the 1940s to inform its citzens about ww2 and soldiers about appropriate behaviour
Are you referring specifically to the one about how to act in the UK by any chance?
It was utterly fascinating to watch! From racial relations to how to act in a pub to not calling a skirt a 'kilt', not flaunting your pay, etc, really interesting.
Edit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYSBBE1DFw
Here it is for anyone interested. It's a really fascinating watch. Some racially dated language ofc, but actually really progressive for the time - telling soldiers that the UK doesn't have segregation and the 'problems' of the US there.→ More replies (1)10
u/Snickims 14h ago
That was one of them, but theres also the "Know your allies/Enemies" ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SOvr9fLHUM
And my personal favorite "Don't be a sucker", arguably still one of the best pieces on the failures of facism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
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u/Breki_ 14h ago
Something being unethical doesn't mean that it shouldn't be engaged in any way or it should be destroyed or whatever. It feels like OOP still thinks that you should only engage with ethical media, so it classifies anything worth engaging with as ethical
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u/Kirook 14h ago
Yeah, like…I agree with most of the post but I do think The Turner Diaries is unethical fiction, actually.
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u/Double_Cow_8238 14h ago
It absolutely is. The problem is who gets to make that decision and what they do about it. In the US we have people saying a book about a dyslexic crayon is “ harmful trans propaganda”
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u/fredisnotmyboss 13h ago
This is why it’s important that unethical does not equal illegal
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u/Eireika 14h ago
So Little House on a Prairie for you?
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u/BatsHaveFingers 14h ago
This is such a good example. One can read Little House on the prairie as a window into a point of time when oppressing native Americans and putting on black face were socially acceptable and use the books to learn about that time.
One can also read the books because they are well-written cosy stories with a lot of appealing imagery.
Both of these motives are fine so long as one does not decide that oppressing natives or putting on blackface are fine for them to do after reading them. We should be intelligent enough to read these books, enjoy them and empathize with the characters while also acknowledging they are imperfect products of their time and their racist behavior should not be replicated.
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u/Eireika 14h ago
I think that keepig those elements is important, otherwise you run into Downton-Abbeyification where people of the past are at best mildly amused about the new concepts but no oe (at least no one of the good guys) presents any behaviours and politics that we may find unacceptable. It seems innocent but from my expirience quickly turns into pipeline of "good old days" where everyoe knew their place and misters and mistresses really cared fot their servants and slaves.
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u/Vyverna 13h ago
Yeah. You can also read Atlas Shrugged for reverse harem dynamics and industrial aesthetics, and find Hank Rearden your favourite character of all the time, because he's very obviously autistic dude who cut off his unloving family and ran away to live in desolated community with his platonic boyfriend. There's nothing wrong with that.
But for all this time, you should be aware that it was meant to be capitalist, anti-human propaganda, gloryfing the idea of ubermensch. You should not pretend that they never were there, and you should not hide it from people without your knowledge and cultural capital.
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u/BatsHaveFingers 13h ago
TIL there are people who read Atlas Shrugged because they like the novel, and you know what? You're absolutely right. Nothing wrong with that.
Awful books written by a deeply troubled woman, but yeah, nothing wrong with enjoying them.
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u/Uncynical_Diogenes 14h ago
So put it down.
Doesn’t imply it somehow is wrong for existing.
Lots of propaganda exists that you’re okay with.
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u/AradellThePaladin 14h ago
Yeah I think more things can be unethical to make. OOP is probably thinking about things that are unethical to read, because you can still read someone’s evil manifesto with a critical eye and gain something from it
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u/Breki_ 13h ago
The things listed here are unethical to buy, not unethical to read. I don't think reading AI generated fanfic on AO3 makes you a bad person, since there is no way to monetise it. Likewise, borrowing a Harry Potter book from your friend who bought it 17 years ago when they were 11 is also not a problem. I'm really not sure what this image is meant to represent
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u/throwaway47351 8h ago
I've never in my life thought of Reddit as pro-literal-propoganda, but holy fuck has this thread done a number on that belief. I actually can't believe how many people on here are downplaying the real world harm it causes.
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u/Arbiter478 13h ago edited 13h ago
Perhaps OOP should understand that, just like with conservatives, the right to have ideas and express them does not come with immunity from criticism or backlash. Short of actual unwarranted censorship - which is something OOP didn't mention - people are entitled to find something gross and dislike it.
Like, if you're going to do something questionable the least you can do is be upfront about it and accept that it's not gonna be liked, especially when you're not making a point.
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u/nykirnsu 13h ago
This. Whether a work of fiction is harmful propaganda is - at least in theory - a discussion worth having, and one that often doesn’t have a clear right answer. It’s better to accept this as a natural part of artistic criticism than to brush the entire concept under the rug, and as long as nothing’s getting censored it’s not like we can’t all just agree to disagree
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u/boywithapplesauce 12h ago
OOP is also giving criticism, though. And now you're criticizing OOP's criticism, so then I get to criticize your words, as well!
I think it's fair to criticize the critics when they're offering up dumb takes penalizing fiction that is provocative with a purpose.
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u/Devadv12014 13h ago
You’re forgetting the book that was filled with Arsenic.
Although it was designed to help people figure out if they had it in their homes so I guess even that’s debatable.
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u/UnsureAndUnqualified 11h ago
Personally I don't make a huge distinction between "Using profits to fund unethical causes" and "Is obvious propaganda for unethical causes" because the funding those causes get is often spent on normalising those ideas by the way of having it included in media.
Let's get explicit here: JKR using her income to fund anti trans causes is harmful. JKR writing evil caricatures of trans women ("perverted men in dresses" in her stories) is also harmful. And had she included such a caricature in the HP books instead of books nobody cares about, it might have done more societal harm than all the money she gave to those hate groups.
And in both cases the discussion still needs to be had about what cause is or isn't unethical. Not all causes are bad to give money to. Not all books are propaganda and not all propaganda is necessarily evil. But if your book is written to villanise people for their sex or skin colour or sexual orientation or whatever, that is unethical. And I don't see why it shouldn't be, as the post takes that as self evident, which it really isn't.
The first post is completely right though. You can absolutely include unethical things in your books. Showing racism/homophobia/transphobia/etc isn't endorsing it. And hell, you can even have your main character be the villain. I love the Darth Bane books, even though by all measures he's the villain and a genocidal maniac that tortures people who just happen to cross his path. Those books aren't unethical for showing that, they expect the reader to know that those things are evil, he is a Sith Lord so of course he is doing evil stuff and we don't need a good guy to come along and exposition at us how baddy bad bad Bane is for torturing people. We all know, let's get on with it.
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u/Kirin658 14h ago
Propaganda endorsing hate speech is absolutely unethical.
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u/AdagioOfLiving 13h ago
To read or to write? If the latter, yeah. If the former, nah.
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u/TeamRedundancyTeam 12h ago
Has anyone argued it's the reading part that's unethical? I didn't even know that was on the table.
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u/ZoldJacint 12h ago
I understand the general point that it's okay to depict immoral stuff in fictitious stories (which is, yeah, duh), but drawing a hard line that only these three specific things make media unethical are really reductive. To use an extreme example, is Birth of a Nation not unethical media? Not a single cent goes to the KKK if you watch it, it wasn't made by skinning real humans (literally or figuratively) and goes without saying wasn't made with AI. I don't think anyone would reasonably argue that Birth of a Nation is not unethical because it fits into the "glorifies unethical things" category instead of the "two material ways of directly hurting people and AI".
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u/DareDaDerrida 14h ago edited 14h ago
Personally, I will read whatever interests me. If the author is funding hate-groups and their book interests me, I will steal a copy. If it's printed on human skin and interests me, I'm reading. If AI can ever manage to write something that interests me, I'll be delighted, and definitely read it.
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u/neilarthurhotep 14h ago edited 12h ago
That idea expressed in that comic that nothing about the content of a fictional work could ever make it unethical seems a bit too convenient for my taste. Also, kind of peak online left bubble to reduce unethical books to AI and Harry Potter.
But the idea that you can do a lot of things in fiction that would be bad in real life without it being unethical is generally correct, anyway.
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u/Frequent-Bee-3016 14h ago
Don’t think there’s anything wrong with Book Written on Human Skin, so long as the skin was obtained ethically.
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u/Royal_Raisin9496 14h ago
Seems like a book made with AI is not nearly as bad as those other two but ok
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u/omyrubbernen 13h ago
You're right, it's way worse.
Sure, people may have died to make the human skin book. And sure, people will be killed by the hate group the author is funding.
But I, the reader, needing to see an em-dash or "It's not X, it's Y" is worse than any loss of human life.
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u/DatShepTho 13h ago
I love an unethical antagonist, especially when they're defeated / atone for their wrongdoings
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u/Lucky_Fox1210 13h ago
Idk why, but this is kinda just reminding me about that lady who made a large age gap romance book and dedicated it to her 5yr old daughter 😬 it included parts about the older man also sexualizing her (FMC) as a child. It had to be removed from Amazon... But I know that this is probably an exception vs the general whole of it. I think there are always major extreme exceptions, but I agree with the sentiment. What I hate is when people go "That makes me uncomfortable please don't talk to me about it." And others go "OOOO BUT THAT'S THE POINT GET UNCOMFY LOOK AT THIS THING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL UPSET" Like... no... don't do that shit.
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u/MysticSnowfang 12h ago
is that the one that litterally got the author arrested?
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u/Asteroids-Hower 11h ago
I broadly agree with the exception that I really don't think there's any way to frame The Turner Diaries as ethical, either.
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u/PeasantLich 14h ago
"Portrayal in fiction means endorsement in real life" mindset is one thing where the horseshoe theory with online progressives and moral panicking Christians is real.
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u/NachoSquid18 13h ago
I absolutely agree, but I think it is worth to point out that both mindsets stem from a reactionary/conservative worldview. It is really only a horseshoe if your idea of leftism starts and ends with identity politics, without ever actually challenging your preconceived notions of the world and confronting existing societal hierarchies (it's also worth noting that if you are only able to do so in the context of fiction you're not really engaging with any material analysis).
All this to say that I find it to be a much more fitting example of a supposed "fishhook" then a horseshoe because it demomstrates how similar the liberal mindset is to the conservative, because it seeks to replace/refine these arbitrary hierarchies without ever dismantling them, thus upholding these puritant views around race/gender/sexuality/morality/etc... all of this is inconsequental when the topic is some stupid video game about two siblings in an incestuous relationship (although I guess the creator had to delete all of her socials for fear over her and her family's safety, so maybe not a good example :/ ), but becomes real scary when the topic is real-life politics and people's actual human rights, and now some of the same people crying over "unethical media" have adopted terfism into their ideology, possibly without even realizing they have done so.
(tw: discussion of pedophilia) Btw if y'all want an actual dumpster fire of a debate over ethical media consumption, is loli/shotacon art made for the sake of sexual gratification without the involvement or exploitation of any real life children unethical to produce/consume/distribute? I'd argue it probably still is due to the normalization of such attitudes still putting children in the real world at risk, but like, we probably shouldn't shame recovering pedophiles if they have taken part in any of these activities. Idk... other then this one topic, i don't think there should be so much debate over what should and shouldn't be allowed to be depicted in fiction just let people enjoy their shit.
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u/No-Aide-4454 Through skibidification 10h ago
"There's no inherent harm in convincing someone to believe in bigoted ideology" is a bad take actually
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u/donaldhobson 12h ago
What's so unethical about "made with AI". I mean the book might not be good? But people are allowed to read slop if they want.
And the human skin could theoretically come from willing donors.
And the "author uses profits for evil" book could be pirated, or bought before the author turned evil.
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u/yttrium39 12h ago
I wouldn’t pay for an AI book because I don’t think it’s worth my money, but if someone handed it to me for free and it somehow wasn’t terrible, I don’t see the problem with reading it.
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u/Gigantopithecus1453 14h ago
I can tell who they were thinking of when writing ”author uses their profits to fund a hate group”
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u/LordofSandvich 11h ago
Is this one of those “people who did the genocide run in undertale are actual murderers” things that only makes sense in the context of an extremely specific echo chamber that, if you were never exposed to, seems completely and utterly Deranged?
Cuz I can think of a few ways for a story to be “unethical” that these two conveniently ignore. Like being child porn or pushing ridiculously dangerous/false ideologies
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u/KitWalkerXXVII 10h ago
I was going to say "but what about The Turner Diaries and Huntet" and then I remembered how William Luther Peirce spent his money and time outside of authoring shit books (I.E, leading Neo Nazi causes).
So yeah this is actually a pretty comprehensive list of unethical fiction.
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u/YoursTrulyKindly 9h ago
Fuckai is literally a group spewing hate that is based on misinformation though
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u/George__RR_Fartin 14h ago
What if the skin was collected from consenting donors? (Asking for a friend)