When I was a kid, a friend of mine got into trouble for a story.
We’d grown up down the street from one another in a rural neighborhood and he was pretty much my best/only friend until I was 7 and his family moved away. Then, several years later, when the internet was more of a thing, we reconnected and chatted online (this was the days of AIM and hotmail).
I’d gotten into message boards, and we wound up on some of the same RP and writing forums with assorted other friends I’d made, and some of the RPs we wrote got… kinda dark. The group of us were nerdy, precocious kids whose parents didn’t keep track of what we read and so we digested some dark shit (everything from Edgar Allen Poe to Stephen King), and in our bumbling, childish way, explored and interacted with the themes we encountered through the fiction we were writing. This took place though middle school and into early high school.
One day, my friend wasn’t online. Or the next. I didn’t think about it much, as his activity was often sporadic at best, until my mom told me she’d heard from his mother and it turned out he was grounded. Apparently, his mom had gone on his computer and had found a story he’d been working on. A very dark, very grisly story, written from the point of view of a serial killer, stalking his victims.
I knew about this story. I’d read some of it. See, my friend was playing the antagonist/villain on an original fiction group RP some of us had set up, and wrote the story to explore his character’s backstory and motivations so he had a better grip on them when writing the character in our roleplay. And the kid was actually a pretty damn good writer.
His parents, however, didn’t see it that way. He got in trouble, and I got to listen to my mom go on and on about how disturbing it was, how upset his poor mother must be, how glad she was that I wasn’t like that.
And I said nothing.
I didn’t explain the context, even though it might have helped mitigate his punishment, if they realized he was just playing the villain in a group story and wasn’t some Columbine-in-the-making psychopath. I didn’t explain that I wrote characters even more depraved (though it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that I had, considering I was the kid obsessed with The Telltale Heart in the fifth goddamn grade). And I definitely didn’t explain that I absolutely was ‘like that’, in that I was fascinated by the morbid stories and dark scenarios in my literal hundreds of books.
Because I was scared shitless. Of being in trouble, sure, but also of being judged, and of being rejected and told I was sick and wrong.
I hid my writing. I locked the floppy disks with my stories and wrote my notes in code. I became an expert at hiding my internet history and concealing my work from my parents. I continued to create, but largely in secret. To this day, my mother hasn’t read a single word of my fiction. And for years, I thought there was something wrong with me. That there was something fucked up, something dark and broken, something perverse that made me like that.
Eventually, (and I mean YEARS down the turnpike here) I got past that and realized that plenty of people write dark stories and are perfectly well-adjusted, and that it’s not an indicator of being defective in some horrible way. And oddly enough, stumbling into fandom in my early 20s really helped me with that. Finding out that the kinds of stories I wrote that filled me with the most shame, the most self-loathing, were a whole goddamn genre, and that I wasn’t this strange little degenerate alone in the universe, but actually had pretty common narrative kinks? Was both a revelation, and a relief.
Which is perhaps why I find it so upsetting now when I see people in fandom passing moral judgement on people over goddamn fiction, harassing or ostracizing them based purely on the fact that the content they consume or create fails to meet some standard of purity.
I’ve been watching people catch hell for stories since junior high, and I’m getting real tired of that shit.
When I was 12, I said nothing. I was scared. Now, I know better, and I’m less scared and more salty, verging into downright irked. So I’m saying: Please, stop. Stop telling people they’re evil or warped for writing fictional stories about fictional characters just because they aren’t to your taste. Stop telling people they can’t explore darker themes or dynamics in their work, because it squicks you out. Stop being judgmental and obnoxious about something as societally inconsequential as fanwork, and stop suggesting there’s something wrong with people to make them like that.
We’re talking about stories, and stories are ideas; not actions.
Judge people by the latter.
(And no, my childhood friend did not go on to become a serial killer. Crazy method fucker turned into a huge theater nerd and was working on an MFA from an ivy league school last I checked)
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