I remember when I was a miserable teen, and would wallow in fantasies of being raped, horribly abused, tortured and humiliated in the worst ways imaginable, suffering from Anorexia and being a victim of all the most horrible things I could think of. I loved those fantasies, because in them, I was justified in feeling as depressed as I did in my real life, I had real reasons to. Later on, the fantasies would change slightly, I would still be the victim of the worst cruelties of mankind, but the point of the fantasies was the righteous anger I would feel afterwards, leading to a terrific revenge. ;D And yeah, there's is no doubt in my mind that many of the fanfics you're describing here stems from the exact same impulse. The writers deal with their own pain in their fics, but they want the characters they're writing about to feel justified in their misery, something they may not think they are in their own. Fanfic is, afterall, often a way of daydreaming/wishfulfillment and I imagine that many people -writers too- go through a phase of feeling that their own issues, anxieties, lives, heck themselves, are simply not interesting, or otherwise qualified, enough to get anyone else to care about them, to validify and justify them.
However, it's not only badfic that deals with for instance rape in an "irresponsible" way. Otherwise good fics can portray a rapist as being "justified" in raping, and have the rape victim fall in love with the rapist etc, and I personally find that much more disturbing then when a badfic does the same thing. I guess I do because badfic in general sort of strikes me as uncencored, printed fantasies, rather than something the writer has consciously thought through, but when I come across a well-written story with a essage I have a hard time to swallow (which, of course happens in published literature, movies, TV shows all the time, for instance I remember a Spanish movie where the protagonist raped his love interest in the middle of the film, and she forgave him and married him at the end of the movie), I find that disturbing, because I have to wonder "what is the author trying to say here?"
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Date: 2005-05-24 01:49 pm (UTC)However, it's not only badfic that deals with for instance rape in an "irresponsible" way. Otherwise good fics can portray a rapist as being "justified" in raping, and have the rape victim fall in love with the rapist etc, and I personally find that much more disturbing then when a badfic does the same thing. I guess I do because badfic in general sort of strikes me as uncencored, printed fantasies, rather than something the writer has consciously thought through, but when I come across a well-written story with a essage I have a hard time to swallow (which, of course happens in published literature, movies, TV shows all the time, for instance I remember a Spanish movie where the protagonist raped his love interest in the middle of the film, and she forgave him and married him at the end of the movie), I find that disturbing, because I have to wonder "what is the author trying to say here?"