I’m working on a fangame with elements of psychological horror and extreme choices. One of the optional routes explores a bond between two siblings that can lead to a very questionable relationship, but only if the player allows it. What are your thoughts on handling very dark themes in optional routes that don’t affect the main story?
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If I had a nickel every time someone asked about including incest in their fangame, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Joking aside, my general view is that as long as it’s handled tastefully, I personally won’t raise a stink about it 
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I only have drafts of the dialogues, I haven’t put any in the fangame yet.(Although I’m considering whether it should be adjusted or just removed most of it.)
Do it. For you, don’t let other police you. But what Lucky said. I think if handled well and or people get a warning about it either in the game or a description about such themes. It’d be fine. If anyone complains then you can’t say you didn’t try.
At the beginning of the game there is a content warning, however Other topics include:
(I know that several topics can be sensitive, so I would like your opinions on how to properly address them in the narrative, without becoming morbid or gratuitous.)
A character who had to resort to cannibalism in an extreme context
A heretic with conflicts of faith and remorse
A character who returns as a zombie boss, with emotional burden
A chapter gaiden where a protagonist is forced to fight in an arena, with a more provocative design, but where the narrative emphasizes humiliation and not fanservice.(It only happens if she die in a certain chapter.)
A secret character representing corruption after multiple deaths on the apocalyptic route(also the character is from another game)
How do you see the approach to these themes in a fangame? My intention is to handle them respectfully, as narrative elements of horror and decadence.
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My thoughts? Handle it however the hell you want… as long as you’re honest about what you’re trying to say with these ideas.
Dark themes aren’t the problem. Shallow execution is. If you’re using shock just to poke the player and yell “look how edgy I am,” then yeah, it’s going to fall flat or piss people off for all the wrong reasons. Like a Chara jumpscare out of nowhere. But if you’re actually exploring horror, trauma, or moral decay with intent, then you owe no one an apology for where that takes your work.
This obsession with “handling things perfectly” is creative paralysis disguised as ethics. Trying to write stories with clean, focus-grouped messages that offend no one and “represent reality perfectly but also positively” is the death of anything bold worth remembering. Fiction is not a TED Talk. It’s allowed to be uncomfortable, ambiguous, ugly. That’s the entire point of horror, psychological or otherwise.
Arcane worked because it didn’t stop to explain Jinx’s diagnosis in neat DSM-V terms. It trusted its storytelling to communicate chaos, loss, and fragmentation without hand-holding. If they’d spelled it out, they’d have sterilized the entire arc. If they said Shimmer was made with a real-world drug, the story would be critiqued lazily for “getting medical facts wrong”. Because Arcane doesn’t do that, we have to grapple with what the fantasy drug means, what it says about power and desperation and corruption and agency and change.
So if you’re writing a route about something taboo like incestuous implications or cannibalism or emotional corruption, go in. But go in with purpose. Make the horror mean something. Make the choices reflect the player’s values. Let the discomfort be the point. That’s what optional routes are for: exploring the roads you wouldn’t walk in real life, seeing where they lead.
Some examples that do this right:
- Sanji (One Piece) - The cannibalism backstory is brief, brutal, and leaves you haunted, not because it’s graphic, but because it matters. It explains everything about who he becomes, what he understands, why he feeds starving men who cannot pay.
- Yuna & Tidus (FFX) - A beautifully bittersweet portrayal of doomed love and spiritual duty in a world where Godzilla attacked an underwater footballer. The narrative doesn’t judge the characters, it lets them break your heart naturally, it makes the typical “JRPGs end with you killing a god” cliche matter. Final Fantasy Tactics goes there, too.
- Zombie bosses with emotional baggage? Think of Lisa: The Painful or NieR. These games let horror and sorrow exist side-by-side without ever apologising for it.
- Arena humiliation? Remember, a character’s degradation isn’t titillating, it’s tragic. If you frame it through her perspective, with agency and consequence, you’re doing it for more than fanservice. Also look at Rebecca from One Piece. She’s taking on all this burden. All this hatred. And the arena where she has to win and play Doflamingo’s game makes her dress like that. Remember, she’s not doing this because she wants to. It’s forced on her. Even when the crowd cheers, someone the audience cares about should hate it. Star Wars did it for a brief moment. One Piece made you feel something over it.
- Oh, hi, Chara (Undertale). But also look at Spec Ops: The Line or Pathologic, games that use player complicity as a thematic sledgehammer. Spec Ops stumbled when it made the bad route with the bad ending the only route besides turning the game off. It should have had more “Invisible Choices”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HZuSzlN2eI
Bottom line: You don’t need a permission slip to write uncomfortable things. You need vision, respect for your audience’s intelligence, and a spine. That’s it.
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I think when it comes to stories with dark themes, the best way to go about it is to still make a story with those themes, but make sure the audience knows that under no circumstance are these themes “right” from a moral/ethical standpoint.
Asking for opinions is a wonderful way to start. It’s a way to gauge the potential reactions that people who have no idea what your story is about. Use those reactions to help you craft the story with the respect it deserves when handling more risqué topics like those. Perhaps those that give you the reactions may be willing to help you refine it, you never know.
Another thing to consider (and perhaps this should be the first thing to consider IMO): This is YOUR story. If people are shocked by certain things and/or appalled by them, that’s good because it shows our humanity, but never let someone tell you that you SHOULDN’T make a story with those elements. Remember: Just because you’re making a story with these specific, darker themes doesn’t mean that you approve of those themes or are glorifying them.
The content warning is always good. Whenever you have the hack in a playable state and you make a thread about it, it wouldn’t hurt to throw a disclaimer there too as well as actually in the hack.
Using the topics you provided, from my own view point, this is how I see it.
- Cannibalism: Dark topic, definitely warrants a content warning. Makes sense
- Heretic: Don’t exactly think this a dark topic, but I don’t know all the circumstances behind the potential heresy claim. My goat Ramza was denounced as a heretic, and he quite literally did NOTHING wrong. (But I must remember not all heretics are like Ramza from Final Fantasy Tactics)
- Character that returns as a Zombie boss: As someone who likes Deadlords and is implementing his own version of them in a later hack, I don’t exactly SEE the dark topic here unless you plan on making their sprite EXTREMELY gory. But, one could possibly consider potential emotional manipulation, again I don’t know all the details you have in mind.
- Character forced to fight in a provocative design: Could be a dark topic, could not be a dark topic. However, seeing as you emphasized the outfit as humiliation rather than fanservice, yeah that could be a dark enough topic, especially if it’s more or less minor slavery at that point.
- Secret character representing corruption: Could be a dark topic, could not be, depends on how fucked up you make it. With something like that, I think of Oersted/Odio from Live A Live, but I don’t exactly know what you have in mind.
Long ramble aside, as I see I’m not the only providing suggestions, at the end of the day these WILL be dark. You’ve explicitly stated that, and you may accidentally slip up here and there. It’s natural with storytelling, and even more so when writing about uncomfortable things. In the end though, this is the story you want to tell: You shouldn’t be afraid to tell the story YOU want to tell. If someone doesn’t like it, then it’s just not for them and that’s alright. For every one person that may not like it, you’ll have many who do like it and understand that you approached these topics with the respect they deserve to the best of your ability.
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I’ve already gone on at such extreme lengths about this before, so let me give the short version.
Nobody can literally physically stop you from including dark themes in your work and dark themes aren’t inherently bad. All the hand-wringing about “don’t be afraid! don’t let anybody stop you! be the master of your own fate!” is so useless and people on this forum do it literally every time. “Do it tastefully” is not an answer for “how do I do this tastefully,” and “who cares what about people think?” is a useless statement in a medium like writing that is literally about how people think. Please don’t do this shit.
(Credit where it’s due, Jason thank you for updating your argumentation from the last time this topic came up.)
Anyway, as always, the answer for how to handle dark themes is “don’t unless you have a good reason to.” Including dark themes for shock value or aesthetics is bad, not because it’s immoral or makes you a bad person or because it offends anybody’s sensibilities, but because any plot element included carelessly is bad and because people are very used to media using a hardcore edge to try and add bite where it’s unearned. It’s an eye roller, in the exact same way that it would be if a main character loudly announced that they have the power of friendship on their side. Tired, played out, cliche, boring.
If you’re playing with a dark theme then, ideally, you have something to say with it, and it serves a utility for the plot that could not be swapped out for another equivalent plot point. If you don’t have a reason to play with a dark theme, then nobody can stop you from doing it, but you’re risking making your story worse. If you don’t care about your game’s reception and just want to write some edgelord shit bc it’s fun, then literally go for it - I know edgelord has negative connotations but genuinely, have your fun dude, it’s your free time. But people are not obligated to enjoy your work just because you enjoyed making it, and a lot of people will be able to tell when your edgy plot point was included for shock value, or for indulgence, or “the author’s barely disguised fetish,” or whatever else. You’re not obligated to care about that, but you should be aware of it when you release work for public consumption, and the people suggesting you ignore any and all consideration of participants in your story besides yourself are bad writers encouraging you to write badly.
Now I might be sounding a little presumptuous, but that’s because I raise a serious eyebrow when I see a post asking about dark themes to put in a romhack and one of them is incest, one of them is sexual violence, one of them is a horrible desperate act of cannibalism, and then the other three are very typical fantasy tropes. A character risen from death who has thoughts on it is simply not on the same level as “the female protagonist is sexually humiliated as punishment for player failure,” and when I read somebody place these things on the same list as though they’re equivalent, it tells me that they don’t actually understand the severity of the ideas they’re playing with and need to take several steps back in terms of evaluating what is and isn’t tasteless to include.
Flatly, even some of the most sexual horror games of all time written by some of the best writers in the medium have played it extremely safe when it comes to implications of sexual violence, leaving things generally abstract or metaphorical or implied. You are not writing Silent Hill 2; First evaluate whether you need to do these things, and then if you know for a fact you do, then consult the kinds of people who are going to be sensitive to these topics first and foremost and ask them, directly, how to go about it tastefully. Don’t just wing it.
Also please remember what medium you’re using to tell your story. This is a fire emblem hack posted on a fire emblem forum, if you have 3 chapters of a mostly typical fire emblem hack and then suddenly a surprise bit of sexual violence to really heighten the stakes, then content warning or no, you will have created a disastrous tonal dissonance and failed to manage your audience expectations. Your visuals, sound design, and gameplay are all also tools to tell your story; use them, and use them early, such that people understand what they’re getting into, and then by the time they get to the shocking stuff, they’re in that horror genre mindset and prepared to handle such things.
But seriously if nothing else just make sure you have a point. If you’re including this because it’s shocking and “I’m writing a dark story so I should include some dark things,” please just don’t, unless you are perfectly okay with people taking your work at face value as tasteless shockbait. If you care about your writing, you will care about how your audience will receive these plot points, and that means sometimes you don’t get to do every edgy thing that sounds fun to do and have to pick your battles for the ones that are actually meaningful. It’s the exact same as any other bit of writing you choose to include or not include, except that the stakes are higher because a misstep doesn’t just mess up the plot, but it also might just make a player quit your story on the spot if you end up stepping on their toes too much.
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Reception aside I honestly think it’s kinda hard to write anything too dark in a fire emblem hack format.
Like the themes you list are enough material each for a whole novel and there are definitely novels that could discuss about them well.
What you have is this, you need to fist accept that some players won’t even think too deeply about the story. What I mean is the audience for fe and fe hacks are split to people who care about the story a lot, a hybrid or some that mainly wants to just play the hack
And that’s a big factor too, you’re trying to convey these ideas in a limited frame because you are competing with the gameplay. I think that’s why a lot of more darker themes in fe games are subtle and only come up in supplementary materials like supports.
For example edelgard and lysithea technically carry the “human experimentation” plot but those aren’t explored TOO deeply if you don’t support with them.
I think it’s much better to kinda stick with a theme and have things happen to the characters that represents those themes, like my hack focuses on an allegory for oppression, so my aim is to have that feeling and theme infused to what happens to my characters in a way that makes sense.
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Considering 99.9% of optional romantic supports/relationships in the FE series are awkward at best and, imo, completely unnecessary and tone-deaf, I don’t think a “questionable” relationship unconnected to the main storyline that optionally occurs as a result of certain choices is that big of a deal in comparison.
Still, given the FE GBA medium, I would aim to portray dark themes as indirectly as possible. Having an audience infer something rather nefarious is generally much more effective than being directly told/shown by FE GBA portraits/graphics/music.
One other game that I feel also puts a twist on this is Persona 3.
Spoiler for the game and maybe most of the Persona stories
As is, the game also ends with the tragedy of the main character dying to save the world, which ends up giving grief to the rest of his teammates and loved ones, especially Aigis and Yukari.
And even the part of you killing god isn’t really done fully straight. Rather, the MC instead seals the entity to prevent it from killing off humanity, because as the story repeatedly tells you, you cannot kill Death, yet you can stop it from destroying the world. As such, it remains the only main threat in the Persona series to still be around, and likely will be for a very long time, instead of having been permanently defeated in their respective story (at the very least, it’s been sealed off, so the world is able to be still living).
Anyways yeah, the thing is that introducing dark themes in your story can and will be a pretty difficult thing to do, no mincing words about it (fittingly enough). One of the main reasons why is it so is that it could be easily manipulated to bring shock value, which will only get more grating and annoying the more it ends up being done.
Even if that wasn’t the real intention, showing a pretty dark moment in full detail out of nowhere might disgust some of your readers, not only because of it being overly gratitous, but because it might feel like you just wanted it to show it without seeing if it was correctly done.
Then again, you could do still do moments like these, and as long as you give some meaning to them, then it might work. There is an audience out there that likes dark works, but imo the best ones are the ones that don’t rely on just using shock value (saying as someone that strays away from works that only have downer endings or bitterly nihilistic ones, especially if they’re not done in a comedic way. Not my cup of tea, I know. Judge me all you like).
I’d like to say more, but for now this is all I have. My main point is that, you’d have to balance the dark themes in your story so that they don’t end up feeling underworked or overdone to death. Just as most people might groan at stories that openly talk about the power of friendship, love, and end up being too optimistic for their own good, like sparing people that shouldn’t actually be spared, like genocidal monsters (even indulging in something called “Glurge”), most other people, hell, even the same ones mentioned before, will end up feeling frustrated (and not in a good way, if frustration was even meant to be viewed like that) at stories that just like to be dark, ones where most sides are completely unempathetic towards anyone other than themselves, bigoted, moronic, prejudiced, the characters that are the most sympatethic will end up constantly failing at achieving anything that’s good (even if they’re actually competent and not placed on the camp of “Good is dumb”, meaning, just because they’re good means they should be total losers) while the villains will always win, no matter how irritating and stupid they may be, and the “lesson” just ends up being “the world you live is a total mess, and our lives have no meaning at all, so why bother?”
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not really a good writer perse, much less actually one at all, since I haven’t actually done a romhack nor published any type of story anywhere (one of the stories that I have in mind at doing is one of my more darker ones so far, if not my darkest one, one that mainly talks about tragedy, loss, corruption, and why one shouldn’t give in to any of the deadly sins, no matter how hurt you were by others or yourself), but at the very least I can give some advice, no matter how incomplete or short it might be. Even if it doesn’t actually help, well, at least there was the intent, right?
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Thanks to everyone who responded. I read each comment carefully. They made me think a lot about the approach and responsibility I take when addressing certain topics, and I recognize that some points made me better understand what can and can’t really contribute to the project. I’ll continue to carefully review what I include and how I do it, so that the story is impactful, but also coherent and well-told.
Thank you for your time and honesty.
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I forgot to mention it earlier but there are people who call Toph Bei Fong from Avatar The Last Airbender great representation for blind people and there are people who call her terrible representation. You can’t please everyone, so focus on making something with artistic value to yourself and those you want it to reach and resonate with.
As someone who is handling themes about dissability in my fangame. In my opinion the “you must handle it well” idea can end up being toxic.
Yeah, of course something can be badly handled and of course if you want your story to be serious putting dark themes “as a joke” (wich isn’t the same thing as the characters themselves treating it as a joke or “not a big deal”) or cheap shock value is the worst way to handle it. But perfection doesn’t exist, so handle it the way you feel it should be handled if you genuinally feel it is a good way to do so because in the end different people have different opinions.
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Personally I love these especially the zombie boss.
Only one that’s questionable is the arena one but if you do it very well and make the character recover from it or have it as part of their arc - and not fan service-y it could be amazing.
A lot of people here are making art with these games and stories even if it sounds weird, it’s emotional writing and that can be weird sometimes but I think just do it tastefully
I guess I get what people are saying here, but I also feel people nowadays just take fiction too seriously, and react to certain topics too sensitively. If you want to include a “dark” theme in your story, it’s fine. And whatever reason you want to include it for is fine too. Even if it’s just something you like. This idea that you need to handle it in a specific, “tasteful” way with a “point” just kind of baffles me. What does that mean? And, I’m also sure it means different things to different people. Writing is not a science; “good” and “bad” writing a construct.
If reception is something you care about, try to read other pieces of media that use the same topics you’re trying out, see how they portray them, and how various audiences reacted. But, and I’ll have to disagree with some others here, it’s your art. It’s personal to you. If you’re focusing so hard on what other people think, and appealing to their tastes, and not your own, it will not feel as good to make, it won’t feel personal to you anymore. And I think that’s the most important thing about any art form.
Here’s something from a different artist that I think shows some lovely points about art and why we make it. Who are you really creating your art for?
though honestly if I ever do make a more complex hack I probably won’t even bother showing it on this forum, based on what I like writing and what people’s tastes are here
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Well, I used Silent Hill 2 as an example, so let’s use that. The protagonist of that game has a lot of very complicated hangups involving his late wife, many of them sexual in nature, and so the game plays with a lot of heavy sexual imagery, especially with the character of Angela. The story is, primarily, a character study of James, learning about his guilt and its many sources, and as such these sexual themes, while often very uncomfortable, serve the role of furthering our understanding of who James is, why he feels so guilty, and what he’s struggling with - the dual temptations of being true to his late wife, Mary, or embracing the superficial sexual love of her doppelganger, Maria, representing his similar struggle to stay true to his wife while she was ill and the self-loathing borne of having to contend with such thoughts in the first place.
Despite being a horror game filled with blood and viscera and disgusting horror-sexualized monsters, the game handles these sexual themes with a very light touch, preferring to imply wherever possible and, when the themes are brought to the forefront of the horror with Angela’s subplot and its conclusion, leveraging it for one of the game’s most devastating emotional beats. It isn’t used to shock and disgust the viewer, despite so much of the game being shocking and disgusting. It has a point. There is a purpose to its inclusion beyond “the writers thought it’d be fun to include,” and by writing with purpose, they created one of the best games ever made and arguably the best horror game ever made, so I think it’s safe to say they made some good choices.
I hear this all the time and it’s just so obviously not true if you actually stop and think about it. There is absolutely such thing as good writing. You can very easily prove this by abstracting out far enough - if an entire story is written via dialogue like “im larry. im going save world.” “lary uou are fool im to deafeat you” “no,” and there isn’t any kind of point or cohesion to why it’s being written this way beyond a basic lack of competency, then it is worse than if its writer had the competency to construct their dialogue in a way that actually serves their plot. This principle still holds true for less extreme and less obvious aspects of the writing process as well.
One’s ability to write well will impact their ability to tell the story they want to tell, for it to have the impact they want it to have, for the audience to take away the understanding the author is trying to impart. There would not be university courses on how better your craft if there was no such thing as writing “better” or “worse,” and any writer will gladly tell you the ways they’ve improved upon prior works of theirs.
Why?
Like people say this so often, but genuinely, why does including your audience in the equation of the art you make suddenly make it lose its artistic purity and soul? Writing is literally about communicating ideas to your audience, you cannot write without considering how your audience is going to receive your work, because coherency is a lot more important to this artform than it is to most others. Even in something extremely abstract, writing requires far more tangible throughlines than an equally abstract painting might, in much the same way that very abstract music is still almost always going to stick to a lot of the language of music, if only so that the ways that it plays with that language can be more obvious.
You aren’t playing game dev tycoon, there isn’t a slider you’re manipulating between “writing for me” and “writing for other people.” You can still write a story that is extremely personal, feels great to write, means a lot to you, and is something you can be proud of, while also not writing something incredibly indulgent with no regard for how your audience is going to consume it. I’ll be very blunt, this is exactly what I mean when I say the advice along these lines is coming from bad writers: If you are not able to understand the relationship between an author and a reader, then you are a bad writer. That’s not a bad thing - this is a game development forum, not a writing forum, after all - but it does mean you shouldn’t be telling other people how to be good writers.
I write professionally, about things that are extremely deeply personal, and I make controversial decisions all the time. The fact that I consider how my audience is going to feel about my work is what allows me to write that controversial stuff in the first place - if I wasn’t aware that I was in controversial territory, then I wouldn’t be able to put as much emphasis on sticking the landing. The fact that I consider how my audience is going to feel is what allows me to communicate such personal ideas to them - it’d be easy to write my ideas out in a way that I understand, but to convey those ideas to an audience in a way that’s dramatic, satisfying, and impactful requires some amount of understanding of the audience as I work. I’m not talking out of my ass here; I would not be employed if this were not the case.
Pardon me for being more than a little terse, but almost every writer I know has “That Story,” where they were super edgelording it up without a care in the world and then at some point reached the competency level where you begin to understand why you shouldn’t do that, and now they’re deeply ashamed of That Story and try to bury it. This is the kind of writing experience that is easy to impart to other people such that they don’t need to make their own That Story to learn the lesson, and so it’s frustrating when people who haven’t had that experience yet make very definitive statements about what gives writing its incorporeal soul, as if this is a moral argument about what’s true and pure and not a question about how to improve at one’s craft.
Sidenote, but it’s a little frustrating to be in a writing advice thread giving practical advice while somebody else is gesturing towards the idea of “undefined artistic purity.” This is really common in writing discussions, in a way that it isn’t for other artforms it feels like. Would one accuse an artist conceptualizing how the audience’s eye is drawn to specific focal points in their painting as sacrificing the soul of his work by worrying about what other people might think? Silly.
This last bit’s petty, but
??? Are you writing for the people who don’t give a fuck about your story? Do you even give a fuck about your story? Why are we in a thread about the art of creating fiction saying that people should just care less about fiction? The author of the thread clearly cares enough to ask questions in order to improve, and you clearly care enough to try to influence their opinion, so what the fuck are we doing here??
This is what I mean by useless advice, people using this topic as an ideological battleground because their actual opinion is “I don’t like that snowflakes might get mad at me if I write whatever I want” and then they try to transpose that onto a writing advice thread where the moral handwringing about whether or not we should kowtow to these hypothetical oppressive whiners is just entirely irrelevant.
Like yeah, some people will just be offended by anything you write or will read malice into stuff where it isn’t, that sucks, kind of annoying, probably not worth worrying about it - this thread mentions public sexual humiliation, there is extremely good cause to tread lightly, not for the sake of not offending people, but because scenes involving sensitive topics break extremely easily and stick with the audience a lot more. It is far more important to stick the landing with those scenes than it is with most scenes, and making sure it has a good reason to exist is an important part of sticking the landing. People create and consume controversial, challenging works all the time, and it isn’t an issue. The reason why is because the people making those works are aware of what they’re doing and treated it seriously.
I wonder if one day I’ll reach 100,000 words on incest threads alone.
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Sharing the Katawa Shoujo anecdote might illuminate what you mean about writing essentially being a sort of abstract dialogue between writer and reader lol
I hear this all the time and it’s just so obviously not true if you actually stop and think about it.
I have thought about it and like, writing is an invention of humankind, that only humans do. Everything considered good and bad is just widely agreed upon opinions, and it changes over time. What was taught in universities before has changed as society has, and will change again as society changes further. It just… isn’t an exact science, or one at all, it’s art.
There are too many subjective and different ways to think about it. What’s good to one person can be awful to another, someone might understand something clearly while another doesn’t. Is one of these people wrong? Because they take away different things from a piece of art? Is “Death of the Author” wrong too? Is seeing something in a story that may not have been intended wrong? Why is there a right way to do this? If a story made me feel or think a certain way about it, but it wasn’t the intended reading, am I just wrong for not interpreting art correctly? The joy of art for me is how many different ways we can express and read into things, even if they break the “rules”.
Why? Like people say this so often, but genuinely, why does including your audience in the equation of the art you make suddenly make it lose its artistic purity and soul?
I don’t think it loses “purity and soul”, as I am not sure how to define those things. I think that while we live in this world where we constantly have to uphold societal standards and be what others want us to be, that art such as writing can be a freedom from that. I’m not sure how to put this into words… It’s like an abstract form of truth, rawness, emotion without being so literal.
I’m around a lot of artists that aren’t worried about “objective” quality, just making whatever weird, dark, horny stories and drawings they want, and other people relating to or “getting” it is a bonus, it’s not the main reason for creation. If I was thinking constantly about what would be the most appealing or make sense to everyone, it wouldn’t feel the same. I believe the most beautiful art is indulgent and it’s sad to me that’s seen as a bad thing.
Olivia, you’re a professional writer, who is, correct me if I’m wrong, writing for money. This makes our circumstances different, as commercial art has many different standards from hobby art. Writing commercially is usually trying to appeal to as many people as possible, the majority, and usually to “normal” people. To some extent it has to be cleaned up, sanitized, palatable to enough people. I understand that because I studied graphic design, which is often times also commercial. Advertising, package design, etc.
I just don’t think that every piece of art needs to be that. I don’t think that a rom hack being made for free out of passion needs to be that. One reason I gravitate toward Japanese art is that, even in things being sold for money marketed towards a lot of people, there will be things that seem to be there just because someone working on it liked it. As well as having a history of creating art that was considered obscene, innapropriate, transgressive.
What I was trying to say in my post was that the author can include the topics they want, and there isn’t a correct way to write it. They don’t have to meet everyone else’s standards, but if that’s what they want, then to see how other people have reacted to other depictions in the past. I don’t know how else to say it, I am not always good at articulation. But I wasn’t telling anyone how to be a “good” writer. If anything I guess I was giving advice on making something that satisfies the artist.
As for taking fiction too seriously, I guess you just haven’t been on some parts of the internet. I keep seeing many instances of people getting bullied or chased offline for shipping, or including taboo topics in their artwork. People insisting that what you enjoy in fiction is indicative of what you enjoy in real life, that not condemning something in a story that is bad in real life means you support it in real life. I don’t really want to go into it very deeply here, but these kinds of things have been increasing in the past decade, and in that respect I do think people take fiction too seriously and I think it affects how people tend to react to someone wanting to include topics considered “dark” in their work. If this thread were made 25 years ago I don’t think it would be nearly as much of an issue.
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I think you think there are more antishippers in the world than there actually are. Most of the people I see actually pissing themselves over darkfic or whatever partake themselves lol
Which is… another issue, but I’m not trying to bring in bits from my Discord persona on here
Like, you need to take people who supposedly take fiction too seriously less seriously. It’s derailing you from your true goal of creating things to share
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