Thinking about how I relate to my fictional squicks

[alias_sqbr]

I've had a few conversations about this lately and feel like poking at it. I'm not sure where I'm heading with the poking, so hopefully it won't be too incoherent. I know I've talked about some of this before but I feel like talking about it again!

***Content note: ALL the main common squicks and triggers, pretty much. Also I vaguely go into some of my fictional kinks***


Note: I'm talking about the situation of JUST having a squick about a certain kind of fiction, but not thinking it's inherently bad. There's a conversation to be had about Inherently Bad Fiction etc, but that is not the topic of this post.

The three recent inspirations for this ramble:
-a conversation with a friend who's into incest fiction about how I can enjoy it, but only as a horror trope
-Some conversations I've had with deborah_judge, and her post On the ethics of 'problematic' shipping
-ranting about an annoying speech about 'problematic' romance novels and rape fantasy

Something that can make discussions of squick and squicky subjects complicated for me is that the stuff I'm squicked by has a lot of cross-over with the sort of subjects that gets held up as "morally bad" by opponents of "problematic" fiction: incest, rape, large age gaps, child harm, sexualisation of children. But also...zombies. It's actually useful being able to add that to the end of my squicks to make it more clear that these are squicks, not things I think are Objectively Bad In Fiction.

Similarly, I agree with the idea that people should be more comfortable with sexually explicit fiction and not treat it as inherently more "adult" than violence...but I am personally much more easily squicked by sexual content than violence, especially as a creator.

But I'm not always squicked by these things. And the stuff I am not squicked by is often especially 'problematic'. This isn't always very obvious, since the stuff I'm comfortable making is much more limited than the wider variety of things I'm into consuming, and also I am very self conscious talking about things like my taste in porn. But, uh, let's just say it's weirder than the stuff I make >.>

And so seeing people talk about how anyone who likes/consumes these things is Bad makes me feel pretty bad about myself! And I want to be able to talk about my squicks, and avoid them, without making anyone else feel bad.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately with fictional incest. A friend of mine is working on an incestuous romance, and they've been very thoughtful trying to navigate wanting to squee to me about the story they're excited about, and not wanting to squick me. It's been really interesting poking my brain going "Am I squicked yet? Do I have to tell them to change the subject?" and also learning about a genre of romance I've previously entirely avoided.

Especially since there have been stories with incest I've enjoyed, and I've quite enjoyed some romances with pseudo-incest or between relatively distant relatives.

And on an intellectual level, I think my friend's romance plot sounds really romantic, and the incestuous dynamic is an important part of why the story works. But it also squicks me.

My current theory is that incest is a horror trope for me, because of a basic lizard-brain horror at the concept for knee-jerk instinctual reasons. I mean I also tend to think incestuous relationships are bad in real life, but that's almost coincidental. I am perfectly capable of shipping relationships that I think would be bad in real life. But with incest there's this intense instinctual NOPE BAD HARMFUL entirely separate to how I feel about the specifics of the relationship.

Homestuck was a useful test lab for my incest squick, since it does all sorts of weird things with family structure. I am moderately squicked by sibling incest, but it turns out I can sort of handle "biological siblings who are the same age but were created in a lab and grew up separately". But I am super squicked by parent/child incest, and absolutely cannot ship "biological parent and child who are the same age and were created in a lab and grew up separately". I'm hard pressed to come up with any logical reason why the second is significantly worse. IT JUST IS (to me, but I'm fine with other people shipping it)

And the thing is: I'm one of these people where horror/fear/disgust is somewhat connected to sex and romance in my head. Too much incest-horror and a relationship feels too awful to contemplate, but add just the right amount and I ship it more.

Since I have a pretty strong incest squick, that's like...biologically unrelated step-siblings who didn't grow up together and only kind of think of themselves as siblings, a la Clueless. But in such cases it is definitely a feature not a bug.

Similarly, I can't handle rapist/victim as a romantic ship, but am super into certain kinds of dubcon. Some age and power gaps squick me, but others make a relationship interesting, and so forth.

And if a story isn't meant to be happy, but disquieting or horrific, then stuff I find squicky can very effectively add to the effect, though past a certain point and I am Too Horrified and have to go have an anxiety attack.

The line between enjoyable and squicky or even triggering is also really arbitrary and unpredictable, and can even change for the same work depending on my mood. I mean when I'm feeling especially sex averse even the most inoffensive sexual content can trigger me, including stuff I had previously enjoyed.

Also sometimes when a work goes out of it's way to be Unproblematic/non-triggering that actually makes it more upsetting. One reason I avoid contemporary romance is they either write the characters as being sexually conservative (which makes me feel bad as a somewhat sexual person who doesn't match conservative sexual mores) or they write them as sexually uninhibited (which makes me feel alienated as a sex averse, traumatised person who respects that mindset but can't relate to it) In general romances etc are most enjoyable for me when the characters either never mention sex at all (which is most plausible when they're younger, and then my sexualisation of children squick can kick in) or have reasons to feel conflicted about having sex without the narrative being anti-sex. So a little bit of something in-universe squicky like pseudo/borderline incest can make a romance less squicky for me, as long as the narrative wallows in the squick the right way. This is also one reason why I like xeno and robots and hateships etc. Because sex (and to some extent romance) is simultaneously appealing and disquieting for me, I can most comfortably engage with a sexual story if it's designed to be simultaneously appealing and disquieting. But only in the right way, or the disquieting parts just make everything worse!

And since (*cough* unlike a lot of people *cough*) I don't want to be a massive hypocrite, I try and be open minded about stories that go way too much into disquieting for my tastes. Since I know the stuff I like is too disquieting for a lot of people.

It's not just sex/romance/problematic ships etc, either. For someone who is squicked by zombies I am sure am into a lot of canons dealing with the undead, and even violent mindless corpses. And in general, I am someone with a severe anxiety disorder who has to be careful to not let myself get too scared by things...who also has a huge soft spot for horror.

The things that squick me about zombies are
(a) the sense of hopelessness, both for the individual person who's been bitten, and for the world in general as the zombies spread
(b) The disgustingness and inevitable worsening of rotting corpses, especially if there's a (semi)-sentient mind in it

I have been very effectively squicked by fiction which hit either of those buttons separately, eg stories about incurable and deadly diseases, or very vividly written necromancer stories.

But the reason I am squicked by those things is they hit hot button topics in my brain. I have a lot of intense feelings and Issues about mortality, the body, Things Getting Worse etc. These are topics that are important to me, and that I like to see explored, and to explore myself. And something which comes at them the right way can not only be enjoyable but cathartic and even calming.

A very counterintuitive reaction I have that is apparently associated with anxiety disorders and trauma is that violent imagery can calm my mental state. Yet sometimes it makes me very anxious! One of the weirder examples of this for me is that there are shows I absolutely cannot watch because they'd be too depressing and bad for my mental state, but I love fanvids about them. Especially if they emphasise how hopeless everything is? The Sarah Connor Chronicles, for example. Yet a short film of the same length with the same plot would probably depress me??

It's really hard to engage with this sort of topic in a nuanced way. I know myself that there are topics where my NO BAD WRONG response is too intense for me to be able to engage with any discussion reasonably. I took a long time to be able to accept the existence of stories with sympathetic depictions of rapists, since that is a large and pretty consistent trigger for me. But then I realised how many stories I'm into with sympathetic depictions of people who are, in fact, rapists, or at least pretty close, but don't hit my subjective gut definition of what a rapist is with regards to this specific trigger.

Also even beyond that it can be hard to really get your head around how differently other people react to fiction. I find On the Prowl really interesting: it's increasingly violent scenes of men being hurt, and the goal is to capture the line between "sexy" and "gross" as experienced by female viewers who kink on fictional depictions of violence towards men. Which is absolutely the sort of thing I'm talking about in this post. Except for me it's never very sexy, and never too gross, just a little disquieting but also kind of cathartically calming.

Something I've seen a lot is people having the opposite experience: making something disturbing that they find cathartic etc but not in a sexy way, and then having to deal with the fact that other people do find it sexy. But this is getting off topic, so.

tl;dr BRAINS ARE WEIRD.

Comments

[ember_keelty]

The rest of this is interesting so please pardon me jumping straight to on specific part but...

A very counterintuitive reaction I have that is apparently associated with anxiety disorders and trauma is that violent imagery can calm my mental state.

Oh hey that's a real thing? One of the most effective ways I've found of pulling myself out of an extended emotional flashback is to loudly sing murder ballads or showtunes about fighting or murder or suicide (obviously this is... not a thing that I can do in public, unfortunately, so it has limited helpfulness). Much earlier than that, I was bemused by those science center display booths that are supposed to demonstrate how different kinds of music affect your vitals because when I used them they always had the opposite effect of what the explanatory signs said they were supposed to do: listening to the "angry" music made my pulse readings calmer while listening to the "calm" music could actually increase my pulse.

[alias_sqbr]

I don't have sources but saw it in some article and went OH HEY THAT MAKES SENSE.

And now I'm trying to find a source and it's all "calming images for people with anxiety who worry about violence" or "how to cope with intrusive violent thoughts" etc. But I know I have seen a few things about it over the years.

I too find "dark" music soothing, one of my favourite genres is break-up songs which made choosing a wedding playlist challenging :)

[deborah_judge]

This is so interesting, especially the slippery line between squick, problematicness, and moral objections. There are definitely things that are morally objectionable that I like to read in stories. And there are narrative tropes that send me into a blind frothing rage, or make me feel personally wounded.

I've noticed that one way things get bad for me is through, of all things, envy. I used to be very upset by stories about older men and younger women, especially when the love of a younger woman is redemptive for the older man. It upset me because it was very rarely genderbent. These stories presented themselves as hopeful, but to me they felt excluding: there's hope in the world, you should know, but not for you, because you're a *girl*. I was also, ten years ago, struggling with the reality that men my age weren't interested in me because I was too old. So what looked like a story about hope and the infinite renewability of life to the person writing it looked to me like a story about how hope was impossible for me because I was a desexualized old lady. Now, ten years later and happily married, I seem to (::checks current shipping preferences::) not have that squick. Interesting how that changed. I think years of writing older woman/younger man fanfic also helped, as did seeing more older woman/younger man romances in popular culture, because it's important to me that it happens in stories and not just in reality. On the other hand it still doesn't happen *enough* to really be a gender-neutral trope, so I'm still sometimes upset by it.

Or to take another example: I really really have trouble with stories about men who sleep around and never experience consequences because the consequences all fall on women and they don't care. I can't read a man like that as a romantic protagonist. So, weirdly, the thing I was most squicked by in Hakouoki is that Harada, Heisuke and Nagakura all go to Shimabara regularly. And ok Harada I have no use for, I'm glad his route is there for people who are into it but it's really not my thing. But I *like* Heisuke and Nagakura. So I struggle with that. But when I think about what world I would like, I don't *want* a universe in which everyone faces consequences for having sex. I want a world in which no one does. So of course my first Hakouoki fic had to be about Nagakura taking Chizuru to a brothel, because when I find something upsetting sometimes I have to poke at it...and I found that if I imagine Chizuru also having lots of sex with strangers (and both of them being anachronistically careful about contraception) I'm not bothered that Nagakura does. So, was my original squick partially envy? Maybe.

And I guess that's another piece: sometimes being upset by something is what gives me the motivation to write it. Like, if something in me is hurt by a narrative trope, that can be a sign that that is a place where I need to work. But not always, because sometimes it can be a place where I'm not ready to work and maybe never will be.

And sometimes it really is moral judgement: I'm not okay with this and don't want to be. I find that the moral judgment kicks in for me around the writing, not the action. I'm not very interested in reading virgin woman/sexually experienced man because I think a lot of fiction (even a lot of fanfiction) still presents that as the ideal. Obviously I don't object to any particular couple that happens to fall out that way, but I very much object to the fetishizing of it, which will often squick me the hell out of the story. And there is moral judgment attached to that: I don't judge women for being virgins or men for being sexually experienced, but I do judge the hell out of sexual double standards, and I don't think I want to stop doing that. But I guess an important distinction here is that what I am judging here is the narrative trope, and not the act. A writer could write the same two people doing the same thing, and even write *them* having sexual double standards, and I might not be bothered by it. When the *writer* has sexual double standards and makes clear that in their opinion women are more attractive when they are virgins and men are more attractive when they are experienced, I'm super-squicked.

Thanks for the post! This is a fascinating conversation.

[deborah_judge]

When the *writer* has sexual double standards and makes clear that in their opinion women are more attractive when they are virgins and men are more attractive when they are experienced, I'm super-squicked.

I'm looking this over, and maybe even there it's less moral judgement than the feeling of being personally excluded. Or maybe: the way it taps into my own self-judgement. There's a part of me that has a hard time feeling attractive as an older woman who has been around the block, and when I hear that voice in something external to me I *need* to push it away, in a way I don't need to push other disturbing things away. Hm.

[alias_sqbr]

there's hope in the world, you should know, but not for you, because you're a *girl*

Yeah, I have exactly the same reaction to a lot of "hopeful" narratives that only really offer hope for men (or a very small set of of woman). Though I've tended to be most alienated by stories with no women in them at all, or at least no women who get to do much but be support for the Important characters (eg men) It's thus been very odd to realise I'm not a woman myself, and to try and figure out what stories that offer hope for someone like me would look like. It hasn't changed my reaction to misogynistic narratives much, since I'm still not in their narrow set of People Who Get To Be Happy. But I'm more likely to relate to male characters than I used to be, generally in queer friendly narratives that feel like they might have space for transmasculine people even if none show up on screen. It's a strange experience after a lifetime of being All About Female Characters, and being quietly baffled by women who related more to male characters. The narratives haven't changed, but my reactions to them have.

I also can't stand the sexual double standard, though in this specific case I related to Chizuru being Weird About Sex and so just headcanoned Heisuke as having been honest when he said he just went to hang with his friends.

But yeah the Virginal Woman and Experienced Man trope is obviously appealing to a lot of people and I can enjoy specific examples, but it can feel really gross in aggregate or when it feels like the narrative is saying that's the way things should be. Stories that subvert that (making the woman more experienced and/or making the man less so) are much more appealing to me.

A writer could write the same two people doing the same thing, and even write *them* having sexual double standards, and I might not be bothered by it. When the *writer* has sexual double standards and makes clear that in their opinion women are more attractive when they are virgins and men are more attractive when they are experienced, I'm super-squicked.

Right, same!

[deborah_judge]

This might be a long/different conversation, but I'd love to hear more about your thinking on the question what stories that offer hope for someone like me would look like. It's something I've thought a lot about myself, especially as a middle-aged woman with quite particular identities, just having stories with women in them isn't enough.

headcanoned Heisuke as having been honest when he said he just went to hang with his friends.

That makes sense! I have a much more complicated Heisuke headcanon which involves him having so much angst about being a bastard that he doesn't want to risk inflicting that on someone else. But then that leads to some *seriously* complicated ambiguous feelings about his friends, especially if we un-disappear Nagakura's historical child. (Maybe some of that joke-hostility is sublimated actual hostility.) But yeah, ends in the same place, with Heisuke not sleeping around like his friends do.

[alias_sqbr]

but I'd love to hear more about your thinking on the question what stories that offer hope for someone like me would look like

Well part of it is that there are just so few stories with non binary people in them at ALL. Or people with severe disabilities. And the few I've read often feel wrong but I'm not sure what "right" would look like beyond "not that". Especially since the tropes I enjoy for female characters aren't always the same as the ones I enjoy for male characters so I can't just go "Like the stories I like but with a genderfluid protagonist". So it's been a process of looking at the stories that almost work and going "what would I change about this to make it better for me". It's still very much a work in progress, I have yet to write anything with an unambiguously non-binary protagonist, but have written a few non-binary secondary characters.

It's been a little easier, if still difficult, with disability, since there are more examples to work from. One of the things that got me so heavily into Hakuoki is that all of the LIs except Harada and Kazama have what is effectively a terminal illness with painful side effects, even if it does also give them superpowers (and Okita also has a mundane terminal illness on top of that) and the game lets them have happy endings without pretending everything will necessarily be fine.

It's messy for me with age since my "normal" adult life stopped when I got sick at 28, and thinking about what Stories About People My Age Look Like can get depressing when I compare myself to my healthy same-aged friends and their lives, and where I thought I'd be at 38, or to the vast majority of characters my age in contemporary fiction. But there's still this specific ache of recognition I only get from characters who are like 35-45, and I definitely want to be able to capture that in my own writing. It's been useful writing fanfic about, say, the 40ish fantasy Pope from Dragon Age: her life is not much like my life, but it's so different I don't feel weird about it.

[deborah_judge]

This is very powerful, thank you. So it sounds like it's a matter of finding different stories that give you pieces of what you need? Or that almost give you what you need, and tinkering with them? (gah fanfic is so necessary)

One of the things that got me so heavily into Hakuoki is that all of the LIs except Harada and Kazama have what is effectively a terminal illness with painful side effects, even if it does also give them superpowers (and Okita also has a mundane terminal illness on top of that) and the game lets them have happy endings without pretending everything will necessarily be fine.

Yes, that is really powerful.

[alias_sqbr]

So it sounds like it's a matter of finding different stories that give you pieces of what you need? Or that almost give you what you need, and tinkering with them? (gah fanfic is so necessary)

Right! And yeah, it really is.

Now to see if this also gets posted from my sqbr account for some reason... (I'm 90% sure I replied to that last one by email so it should have gone through as alias_sqbr and yet it didn't?)

[bunny_m]

*

[alias_sqbr]

:)