![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrI'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 withdeborah_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.
***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.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-05 01:37 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-09 03:51 pm (UTC)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?)