All right, we’re doing this.
We’re doing it live guys, right here, right now, because my Tumblr experience has been a low-level trash fire for months and at this point I’m getting high-level exasperated. Because to be in any fandom, to be safe in any fandom, there is a golden fucking rule we all need to live by:
There is a line between fiction and reality.
There is a line between fiction and reality.
There is a line between fiction and reality.
That isn’t to say that fiction can’t affect your reality. It’s perfectly reasonable to read a work of fiction and feel inspired by it - or afraid of it. It’s reasonable to say “my god, that’s too close to home, I can never read again”. It is NOT reasonable to say that a work of fiction is responsible for your behavior in real life. You are a human being. You are the star in charge of your destiny. It’s you. If you read a murder mystery and learn how to stab people with casino chips, it’s your responsibility not to become Serial Poker.
There is a line between fiction and reality.
Likewise, reality can absolutely affect fiction. Humans write stories for all kinds of reasons. To teach. To inspire. To caution. To feel heard. There will be times where some authors write things that horrify you, and it may not be a good story for you to read. That does not mean it’s not good for someone. It does not mean an author is evil for producing it. Again, ideas versus actions: if I write a murder mystery, I killed a couple pens. I didn’t stab anybody and leave them on a craps table.
There. is a line.
And lastly, there’s nothing saying fiction can’t be criticized. You can talk about themes in a work that are fucked up or unrealistic; you can even talk about how it was a bad story for you personally to read. But you cannot jump from reading a fictional work to divining that an author does these things in real life. I got some dark places in me, yeah. We all got some dark places in our heads. But I am not a god, and my imagination does not truly turn the floor to lava. If my fic burns you, then please - leave me concrit, or even just protect yourself by unfollowing or clicking the back button. I am not obligated to write what is safe for you. You are not obligated to pay attention to me.
There is a line between fiction and reality, and it’s everyone’s job to respect it.
You know Godwinning, right? I’ve long wanted fandom to adopt a similar rebuttal to all these “this darkfic makes you evil” things, a simple term with which we could encapsulate everything that’s said above. And I’ve come up with a term for it that I’ve been championing for a long time, and that’s…
The Agatha Christie Rule.
As in Agatha Christie. The Queen of Murder. She looks pretty evil, right? If she knew so much about poison and different ways of killing people, she must’ve had a backyard full of bodies, right?
Nope. She didn’t. The body count in her books is absolutely ridiculous, but she wasn’t a murderer. The same way Stephen King isn’t possessed by supernatural powers. Probably.
So, basically, can this be a thing? That whenever you’re too tired to dig out all the posts like these to point out to the young and the impressionable that yes, it is in fact, possible to read and/or write evil dark murderous wicked fiction and not be an evil dark murderous wicked person–you just call “Agatha.”
Say it with me. “Agatha.”
Simple as that.
The fact that any of this needs to be said is just fuckin sad.
It sorta ties into “the umbridge effect” people came up with a while ago, Where people who are obsessed with everything being light and fluffy and kind are usually the ones with the worst skeletons in their closet. Especially when they demonise people for being into what they consider unethical or immoral.
Liking bad stuff in a fictional setting doesn’t make you a bad person. Treating people badly over fictional happenings does.