A question about a specific story
As yet theoretical, as far as I know, but based on a real if half-rememebered event.
I generally hold the opinion that fiction about "dark subjects" is about exploration, not descriptions of what one wants to enact in real life. That's certainly my motivation for reading and writing such fiction. But does that still apply when the story is about a real, non-famous person?
Back when I was young there was a legal case I half remember. A young man and a young woman were in a class together. The man wrote an explicit snuff-fic about the woman (as in his story described raping, torturing, and killing her), gave her a copy and asked what she thought. This led to what I recall being a civil court case about whether the First Amendment protected the story.
Unfortunately I don't recall the verdict.
I've been thinking recently about a related question concerning Archive of Our Own, its current policies and what they should be. One of the common talking points against addressing racist harassment on AO3 is the supposition that doing so would necessarily involve deleting stories. Suppose someone got into a fandom fight (that never happens), then posted a story to AO3 along the lines of the one mentioned above, including the real name and address of their combatant. Should AO3 remove that story? (Asking for it to be edited is implicitly a threat to remove it if it's not edited, isn't it?)
The answer might not be simply one word either way. Would such a story count as threatening speech? Would threatening speech qualify something to be removed from AO3? Would removing this story about a real, if non-celebrity person, require removing any or all stories about real (usually famous) people? What other questions could be asked about this situation? It's an interesting question with, as we can see, real-life ramifications, because fandom really isn't disjoint from real life.
