There are times in which "irresponsible" writing bothers me, though. I have a masochistic need to watch "7th Heaven"
Oh, I know just what you mean! And really, I would never say people are wrong for criticizing a story for handling a topic in a way that seems fake or trite because that's part of good writing. TV has given us such a formula for this stuff and the "very special episode" is just such a nightmare--although for some people that's probably being responsible because they come up with the right conclusions. One of the things that drives me really crazy on TV is the way they handle drugs or alcohol--you know, if somebody looks at a joint one week by sweeps he'll be doing heroin and his friends will be worrying over him and arranging an intervention with guest star Mackenzie Phillips. If the idea is to educate kids about drugs, this seems completely useless and dishonest--not to mention just plain lame.
A friend of mine in college once wrote in her blog something that referenced her having been sexually molested as a child, and amazingly people wrote back and called her a liar--based solely on the fact that in other parts of the blog she'd referred to her boyfriend, and "if she had [i]really[/i] been molested, she wouldn't trust men and would never want to have sex."
I've done some volunteer work in death-penalty abolition, and met victims' family members who didn't ask for the death penalty for their loved ones' murderers, and lots of them have gotten hate mail or media coverage suggesting they didn't really love the people they had lost. People can be really threatened when our psychological mythology is bucked.
These examples are so frightening and I believe both of them completely. I remember feeling that came up a bit on some of the other threads, too, where there was this one way people were supposed to act and one right thing people were supposed to respond to and it's just such a lie! We can't agree on anything trivial in this fandom--why would we all have exactly the same reactions to big things that happened? And the fact that people then attack the person in question really does show how screwed up it is. I know that's happened to me sometimes in fandom discussions where people just refuse to believe that you honestly feel differently about something than they do, when you'd think this wouldn't be a controversial idea. But when people start judging it it really drives me crazy--like if you've been raped or have lost a loved one you have the duty to perform correctly for other people if you want any sympathy!
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Date: 2005-05-24 07:36 pm (UTC)Oh, I know just what you mean! And really, I would never say people are wrong for criticizing a story for handling a topic in a way that seems fake or trite because that's part of good writing. TV has given us such a formula for this stuff and the "very special episode" is just such a nightmare--although for some people that's probably being responsible because they come up with the right conclusions. One of the things that drives me really crazy on TV is the way they handle drugs or alcohol--you know, if somebody looks at a joint one week by sweeps he'll be doing heroin and his friends will be worrying over him and arranging an intervention with guest star Mackenzie Phillips. If the idea is to educate kids about drugs, this seems completely useless and dishonest--not to mention just plain lame.
A friend of mine in college once wrote in her blog something that referenced her having been sexually molested as a child, and amazingly people wrote back and called her a liar--based solely on the fact that in other parts of the blog she'd referred to her boyfriend, and "if she had [i]really[/i] been molested, she wouldn't trust men and would never want to have sex."
I've done some volunteer work in death-penalty abolition, and met victims' family members who didn't ask for the death penalty for their loved ones' murderers, and lots of them have gotten hate mail or media coverage suggesting they didn't really love the people they had lost. People can be really threatened when our psychological mythology is bucked.
These examples are so frightening and I believe both of them completely. I remember feeling that came up a bit on some of the other threads, too, where there was this one way people were supposed to act and one right thing people were supposed to respond to and it's just such a lie! We can't agree on anything trivial in this fandom--why would we all have exactly the same reactions to big things that happened? And the fact that people then attack the person in question really does show how screwed up it is. I know that's happened to me sometimes in fandom discussions where people just refuse to believe that you honestly feel differently about something than they do, when you'd think this wouldn't be a controversial idea. But when people start judging it it really drives me crazy--like if you've been raped or have lost a loved one you have the duty to perform correctly for other people if you want any sympathy!