when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”
no actually me and everyone else who’s ever watched crimson peak were brainwashed by guillermo del toro into believing that incest and violence are cool and awesome. sorry
Horrifying that this pearl-clutching over horror actually being dark is unironically becoming A Thing…
(tags via @waterandsilver, id in alt)
Write the problematic thing. Make people uncomfortable. Create art!
The tags are actually mine, and I need you all to know when I said "girl," I actually meant "young woman of 23 years old," and the brainrot was so deep she tried to get us all to sit down as a class and vote as to whether or not we thought the designated reading with its dark themes were appropriate reading for a classroom.
For a Gothic Horror Literature class at university level.
There was not a single person in that room under the age of 20. We were all adults, mere months away from graduating with our bachelor degrees, and this person felt comfortable trying to police us and the class contents like we were five.
Needless to say, we did not participate in a vote. Nor did the professor call her stupid to her face, no matter how much she might have wanted to. Instead, she invited anyone who felt uncomfortable to drop the class. Bafflingly, the student who complained didn't leave, but she made damn sure to let us know during every class discussion that she didn't agree with the morality of the texts.
And this wasn't recent. This was over 15 years ago, long before TikTok, so this was home-brewed idiocy likely strained through the puritanical discourse of some LiveJournal flamewar.
Basically, what I'm getting at is 'what's old is new again.'
The only difference is now everyone's got access to the Internet via the smartphone in their pocket, and they're making their ignorance everyone else's problem on a much larger scale.
I didn't post a link to it on my blog because the podcast doesn't have a text transcript on the Webpage, but this last Sunday (12 October, 2024) I listened to the radio show With Good Reason.
And in an interview on the history of horror movies, German Studies Professor Jenny Taylor, of William and Mary College, pointed out [paraphrasing from here on out] that the genre of horror movie was invented by filmmakers in the Wiemar Republic, as the society came to terms with the horrors of losing the First World War ...
And there were no horror movies made in Nazi Germany, because authoritarian regimes hate it when people take the time to examine their anxieties. And that when the horror genre starts to die out, that's a sign that the country's democracy is in trouble.
