🌸yana🌸 :
i’m genuinely asking: where’s the justice when these characters ending up with their abusers and rapists? also, can we sincerely make the argument that fiction is completely separate from reality? i mean sure, people can tolerate things in media that they won’t in real life. but studies have shown that our brains react to fiction — at least on an emotional level — as though they were real events happening. that is why there’s a push for diversity in film, right? because being able to watch fictional characters of various races, sexual orientations, genders, etc. can make up react as though they are real people. that’s also why feminist critique of the portrayal of women in video games is so important. video games are consumed mostly by men and having good representation of women can be genuinely useful in changing certain harmful perceptions. we also see traces of authors, their beliefs, the audience they hope to cultivate, the society they lived in and the time period they lived in through their work. when we read, say, narnia, we can see what he believes about children and childhood, right? primarily that he thinks children are pure and he sees them growing up as a bad thing to happen to their inherent purity. contrast that with phillip pullman’s his dark materials series and we can see, through lyra’s character arc that he believes that children growing up is good. did 90s-2000s romcoms not contribute to normalising coercive behaviour in women? did the way native americans or black people were portrayed in old american films not contribute or at least reflect the views held by the majority at the time? and if an author today wrote a book, say, portraying a black people as criminal, lazy, sexual deviants who harass the main character who’s say, a white woman, would we not recognise that as playing into harmful stereotypes about black people? especially if the text doesn’t make a compelling case for why the black characters behave the way they do beyond them black? so why is dark romance above such critique?
2026-07-21 17:33:04