Essays Are Magic V: On Cruelty (And Enjoying It) · 3:58pm Aug 28th, 2015
Recently I dipped my hoof in novel ground by writing a pair of fics: the Dragonshys “Gone Wrong”. The novelty of the pieces was due to their violence, which was sexual and fetishist in nature. The response was overwhelmingly negative, as was to be expected. Nevertheless, the whole business, and especially the discussions undergone in the comments, got me thinking.
What is cruelty? And what is it in the context of fiction? Can there be cruelty in a fictive work? And what if there can be – would it be a bad thing? Moreover, say someone – myself for example – were to enjoy suchcruel violence in a sexually oriented manner? My answers here, if there will be any, will not be definitive. For the most part I am more interested in clarifying what exactly these questions are, or attempt to be, about.
To begin with, imagine a doll in virtual reality. Imitating human (or pony) appearance perfectly, it would in that reality be an exact replica of a sentient creature. When hurt, it would react accordingly; just so with pleasure. For the sake of argument let us say it was, for all intents and purposes, an adult human. With the major exception that it was not – even at the peak of its artificial authenticity it would still be but a program, and its reactions, no matter how genuine in appearance, would basically be no different from those of a thermometer exposed to various temperatures. It would not be sentient. Pain would be as foreign to it as it would be to your average chair.
Could one be cruel to such a thing? Say a human entered the virtual reality and performed the most hideous, vile and inhuman actions on the doll, merely for the sake of the pleasure they received from the act. The doll would react precisely as if it was a human, again for the pleasure of the human. Would an outside observer witnessing such a sight, knowing it was but a sophisticated machine that was being “tortured”, call the scene cruel? Would you?
Intuitively and personally, I would say no. Reason would guide my judgement, I believe, and lead me to the conclusion already sketched above: no matter how despicable the act, performing it on the doll would in principle be morally indistinguishable from exposing a thermometer to boiling water. The object itself, in either case, would not be concerned by the event in the slightest, because it was but a lifeless artefact, completely void of capacity to feel anything.
Now, consider a case where I wrote a character who faced all the same things the doll did. Wouldn’t the two cases be identical insofar as the question of cruelty was concerned? Obviously enough, a character is not a real person. It is not a person at all. That’s what being a character means: to be fictive, i.e. not real. And if something is not real, how could anyone be cruel to it?
The issue is far from being this simple, of course. Everyone who has ever written a decent story knows that well written characters do arouse emotions in the reader. I became sad when Fred Weasley died, even though I knew it was stupid to become sad over such a thing as a character dying. But my “reason” had little power over the fact that I felt genuine compassion for the characters in the story. Likewise, reading about my favourite character getting tortured does make me feel wretched, angry even. At times like those, my answer to the question whether one could be cruel to a character would be a definite, heartbreaking yes, accompanied by a wish that they would stop that cruelty. And I could very well imagine that, was that cruelty created for the sole purpose of producing pleasure for someone else, I would be disgusted to the core.
In the comments of my aforementioned fic, I leaned more towards the answer offered by “reason”. “Twilight Sparkle isn't featured in this fic,” I wrote, and continued:
“Only her name is, along with whatever imaginary version the reader has of her. In fact, I think real cruelty was if I did make this a real fic; if I did focus on (re)creating Twilight as a character and not as a dummy of pleasure and then went on and let all the nasty stuff happen to her.”
At the time, I felt quite content with my reasoning. But then I started rethinking my position. Does it in concrete clarity make any sense to say that Twilight was not a “real character” in my fic, but only a “dummy of pleasure”? What is the difference, precisely speaking? I did not offer an answer in the comments, although for a while I thought I had. The answer was in my mind, clear as rain, up until I opened the umbrella of my self-criticism. For long I walked between the raindrops, searching for clarity, in vain. When does a character become a real one instead of a mere dummy? The quest is legion, and thoroughly beyond me. If there is a difference, it was not mine to find.
And yet I could not fathom a scenario where I felt sorry for the “Twilight” in my fic. To the contrary, I still felt aroused by it like originally intended. My situation was rapidly gaining paradoxical features, for I could remember the many times I had felt glad, sad and mad for Twilight while watching the show. In there, I felt bonded to the character, just like I had for poor Fred. So if my hands were capable of delivering all those horrible things on the doorstep of her soul and consequently bust right in with a sledgehammer, all the time feeling nothing but arousal, was that not proof most undeniable that there was something wrong with me? Am I a disturbed personality?
Perhaps I am. Clearly introspection can only carry me so far on this point. For the record I must say that I do feel very balanced about myself. The fact that I am able to enjoy the torment of Twilight is precisely because I knew for sure that it was not really her I was hurting: it was simply some dummy I made up. The name was a piece of clothing borrowed for the spark of life it brought along; for the imaginary it represented. Funnily enough, this is not always the case: there are plenty of fics more or less violent than mine that I cannot read. They are too violent, too cruel, towards the characters I love. That’s one of the reasons I decided to write my own violent porn to begin with: because I felt that only then I could be sure that no “actual” Twilight or any other pony would be hurt in the process.
I already remarked the paradoxical status of this position. How, on the one hoof, can I claim to be fond and caring of the character Twilight, genuinely invested in her feelings, while at the same time I am capable of writing such thrash about her?
The answer, or the sketch of one, might be found with the help of our hypothetical doll from the land of virtual reality. My intuitive answer concerning the cruelty the doll could face was coolly negative. The problems began only when we considered the case of a fictive character. But it might be that I was too hasty with the initial judgement. On the first thought it would be easy for me to imagine not getting upset about someone immersing a thermometer in boiling water. But what if the thermometer could scream? No matter if the scream was but a twisted way of the responsible engineer to let the user of the instrument know the water was indeed boiling. Could I still honestly say I would not feel the slightest unease in the situation? Raising the stakes, we could add the thermometer a face with capability to expressions; a body of a human, with all the vivacity of a living one. Say I heard it pleading for its life not to get lowered into the scalding liquid. What chance my “rational” knowledge of the thing had against the testification of all my senses and imagination?
As is, the question remains hypothetical, and thus must the answer, too. But it does stir some thoughts nonetheless. I cannot anymore claim such a secure stance as I did in the beginning. The thing is, people sometimes do feel empathetic towards lifeless objects, even when they are aware of this themselves. <i> Cast Away </i> was one of the saddest movies of my childhood because of the fate of Wilson the Volleyball, who slowly drifted away to the horizon at the end of the film. My parents smiled at my sorrow, which only made it deeper.
In truth, people have very little control over their emotional reactions. Most are able to show some control over how to express them, but the feelings as such come to us uninvited, in good and bad both. It’s a fact that, occasionally, I feel aroused by violent porn. It’s also a fact that, occasionally, I feel repulsed by such porn. Which side the scale tips is seldom, if at all, under my conscious power to choose.
In the case of the fics in question, my tentative conclusion would be that it was my stout conviction that I was not dealing with real characters that allowed me to extract pleasure from the scenes. The sight contained no cruelty, for I did not believe it to. In symmetry, I’d say most people found the fics appalling because they believed the contrary. The interesting thing is that I don’t believe any of us had much control over their beliefs. That is why, while I do not feel proud about my fetish, I would also be disinclined to feel ashamed about a quality of mine which I have very little if no control over. Is this in turn a choice I make, or a choice that makes me? I cannot say.
Finally I would be tempted to argue as follows: there is no objective cruelty in fiction. It’s not that one could not find the actions performed therein cruel as such. Rather, at stake is whether the objects of "cruelty" can be treated cruelly in the first place. What determines this, at least in my view, is the subject’s belief/conviction: are the objects worthy of his empathy or not; are they real enough to sympathise with. The question how much freedom of choice one has over the issue remains open. Cruelty in fiction is, after all, an experience.
I liked it even though I've treated characters the same way as in the show and you've seen it when I commented on their behavior and subtle things that were off. The choice is definitely not ours to make. We don't chose our fetishes, we are born with them. And in the same way there is next to nothing one can do to stop one's fetish from triggering and affecting one's judgement.
I can easilly read most of fanfiction and browse media where Rainbow Dash (my fav pone with whom I was tricked in real love in the past) gets violently tortured and killed. I love Cupcakes, Rocket to Insanity and so on. At the same time, I feel genuinely depressed and devastated if she tragically dies or gets killed in a non-fetish way while protecting someone or just living her life.
I guess it is just a matter of premise and if any of my fetishes can trigger by the story. Some scenarios are purely made for gore or violence and it isn't hard to separate them into a completely separate parallel Universe where all characters only look and act like what I know but in fact aren't them. The fics that feature a tragic romance where characters act totally believable and Dash dies in a tragic accident right before her loved one confesses to reciprocate her feelings is just completely different thing and makes me depressed for days afterwards.
So in the end the whole thing is caused completely by the fetish. If people have the fetish and are in the right mood - they will like it. Otherwise they will hate it. The hate is irrational though because they can just ignore and filter all content they don't like and pretend it never existed. The characters are completely imaginary and by killing them we aren't hurting anyone. If they decided to read the story after all the numerous warnings KNOWING that they won't like it, it is not the author who is to blame for the damage THEY did to THEMSELVES and THEIR view of the characters.
IMO tragic stories like I've described that make you read 100k words in hopes that main heroes sort everything out and then Rainbow dies because of an accident while being alone, depressed, hurt and scared that she has let everyone down is HUNDRED times more cruel than any gore story involving her. The author gave us hope, he didn't post any warnings and we had no idea it will end like that. And that is right after we started feeling every last emotion that went through the minds of the heroes and desperately wanted for them to be happy. Gore fics? No, they are just short scenes with puppets and predictable results that more often than not tell you exactly what's going to happen right in the description. I can't see how anyone manages to get emotional trauma from them =\
3353433
To anyone who disagrees, I DARE you to read this fic and then find me a gore or fetish story that is more cruel than it. Of course if one hates Rainbow Dash it can affect the experience but even then I'm sure most of you will agree that fanfiction like this is hundred times more cruel towards the reader and involved characters than any gore fic can ever DREAM to be.
3353446 I don't think most people have issues so much with a fic being cruel, but with someone writing what they consider to be a cruel fic solely in the interest of extracting sexual satisfaction from it. Like someone noted in the comments, "cruel" fics like the one you linked are okay because the reader is not "expected" to become aroused by them. But, as I write here, I consider the question of cruelty in fiction to be fundamentally a subjective experience. It can be shared, but the point is that, as an experience, one has very little control of the content of what is experienced.
Although I here admit enjoying "violent" porn, I on the other hoof note that most such porn that I consume can't be called violent/cruel in the sense that the object of the "torment" would suffer from it. In part this is a semantic question, but not completely. For there are cases where a person enjoying violent material actually harbors intents of actually fulfilling those desires on actual people. Now, that is sick, and I think everyone can agree on that. But I think that people are sometimes too eager to bundle these cases together with the type who enjoy violent/cruel porn, not because they can't get to the "real thing", but exactly because the difference between the "real thing" and fiction appears to them clear as day, and it would never occur to them to mix the two. In a parallel example, I'm hard pressed to believe that the majority of people playing realistic shooter games would "deep within themselves" hide a desire to shoot actual people. And the possibility that some people do harbor such intents should obviously not be turned into an argument against everyone. Likewise here.
3353511
From my personal experience, most people who hated on fatal or hard vore pieces were also hating on gore fiction. I've argued with quite a few of them and one even confessed to be so obsessed with his quest to stop the cruelty that he wrote a parody fiction demeaning the author of Cupcakes. Like really, it wasn't even directed against the fic but rather against its author. So yeah, I'm pretty sure they just don't want to see cruel clop and all that stuff, but some of them indeed can be against the idea of someone not only liking what they find cruel, but also getting off on it. I guess for them it just adds another layer of "justification" that they are doing the right thing by hating on it instead of just ignoring it like any normal adult would do.
If you find it cruel - don't browse it. By doing so you are NOT endangering anyone living as you would have been if you ignored an IRL serial killer. By preferring to omit such stories you are doing a good thing for yourself as your view and opinion on the characters stays happy and healthy. But if a person has a deep-rooted fetish and just feels COMPELLED to read such fiction to make himself FEEL BETTER - just let him do whatever he wants to do! Do you think that haters can cause so much negative emotions that writers will quit creating fetish fiction? What do you think happens next when all people who have these desires suddenly lose all sources of getting content they like? Don't you think that MAYBE, just maybe, some of them will turn to REAL life to seek the pleasure and release from the built-up frustration they feel? Is it what people are trying to achieve by hunting down and purposefully hating stories of the genre they don't like?
So what I'm trying to say is that it doesn't matter if certain people perceive this as wrong or cruel or if someone jerks off on it. What matters is that everyone is entitled to liking and doing whatever he wants as long as it doesn't endanger society as a whole or anyone in particular. In situation with your fanfic I see three groups of people:
1 - people who have dark fetishes and therefore liked it for its content, even though some of them might have found certain aspects of it lacking. These are people who so happened to have these fetishes. They didn't chose what they like, the fetishes chose them. Most of them are slightly biased because hard vore is rare and you have to enjoy whatever you can get;
2 - people who have some of the fetishes or decided to give it a honest shot to see if it is any good and in the end either liked or disliked it. These are the neutral folks who have a truly objective and mostly unbiased opinion;
3 - people who hated it because they dislike the genre of fatal vore or hard vore or anything else. People who purposefully downvote and even search for such stories to hate them maybe even without even reading them first. These are people who can't just mind their own business without trying to convert everyone to their likes. or maybe they are just somewhat dense and didn't think of the consequences and that their actions don't bring ANY good.
If you ask me, I will DEFINITELY say that it is the third group of people that has problems, not the first or second one. These people have mental issues or personality disorders or just haven't grown up to realize how they are acting. Don't be ashamed or scared of writing what you love. It is you and there is no way you should drop something you like or feel ashamed of it just because of arrogant fools who want to bully you. This fandom has a lot of childish or stupid-acting people, which honestly fits to the topic on which this whole thing is built. Just get used to it and don't take them so seriously =)
The crux of your moral arguments are reasonable in a lot of ways, but I want to turn your attention to something else.
How do you really feel when you have a craving to torture Twilight Sparkle?
Now, this is not directed at you, but there are many people who fall into the trap of thinking that their never-ending lust is anything other than an addictive quagmire.
When people have carnal desires they’re not happy. The whole idea is that it never ends, right? It’s the same thing as if you took a hit of cocaine or crack. You’re gonna keep coming back to it because it’s your fix. Carnal desires cannot bring about a feeling of balance. They are cravings. So as long as you are able to hit yourself with what you crave more and more and more, then you’re gonna keep craving it, and you’re gonna keep going after it, and you’re gonna keep feeling empty. That’s the whole idea, nobody is fulfilled through carnal desires. Carnal desires don’t represent a state of fulfillment. They represent emptiness. They are attempting to fill a void. And because those people can’t fill their void, they keep going back to this because that’s all they feel there is. So anytime you’re looking to fulfill carnal desire, that doesn’t fit, there’s no symmetry to the idea of something that is fulfilling and that is a carnal desire. Carnal desire exists because you admit to yourself that you are inadequate, and that’s why you’re going through this. Look into what your desire is trying to tell you. You're afraid of commitment. You’re afraid of knowing that someone can actually love you and that you are capable of love yourself. And that is basically the logic, the systematic approach, to all of the fixations you have.
I may have come across a little harsh there. I'm just trying to say that, as long as we are concerned with things like morals, then I was going to recommend that you don't let your sexuality become an addiction. It's difficult for people like us to walk that line because we tend to fetishize all the extreme stuff. I just want to make sure that you are happy in other areas of your life than just your sexual explorations.
Here's something that I think you might enjoy, despite it not being directly linked to the discussion of cruelty for the sake of sexual pleasure. It still brings up some of the principals involved.
[youtube=HNhPMjbgkXA]
Though in regards to being cruel to best pony, it better for you to dish it out to her, than for you to do it to your fellow human.
I don't mean to imply that you would actually visit that sort of cruelty on a human in real life.
While I may a bit disturbed and distressed by you deeply stabbing a tied up and helpless Twilight in the ribs and then fucking the stab wound until you cum into her chest cavity with your blood lubricated dick while she cries in pain to an unsympathetic one person audience, begs for mercy that will not be granted, calls for help that will never come, and tries to breathe with her single functional lung that will quickly fail due to all of her crying, screaming, and heavy breathing.
It's still preferable to read that treatment of my favorite mane 6 character, than to read or hear about that treatment of murder victim(s) that were kidnapped on the news.
Heck, hearing about that sort of treatment of animals would make me just as disturbed as if you did it to people, and I'm not a super "protect the animals at almost all costs" type person.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and read some fanfic where Twilight is happy and safe, before going through the other replies here.
*hugs Twilight figure*
Because I care about her. Regardless of if she is a fictional mythological unicorn/alicorn in a TV show, and voiced by Tara Strong (who apparently has a nice butt).
3665765 Well Yahtzee is always a pleasure to listen, even if he just farts half the time.
Violent fiction is like BDSM in real life; it's all okay so long as there is no serious intention behind the action, i.e. when it's just play and both agree to it. In fiction you get the consent from the reader who has decided to read the piece, and from the author who has decided to write it.
Now where is that RD blushie? I wanna cuddle something too...
3666497
Implied consent between the author and the reader via the social contract that is formed passively by the reader simply opening the fanfic. Nice concept.
*FFRRRRRRRT*
Unlike BDSM in real life, Twilight Sparkle/Rainbow Dash/the doll don't get a say in what happens to them.
*FRRRT**PRAP*
Though as we have both brought up, they are fictional characters. They were simply born as a collection of lines and color arranged on paper and Adobe animation software, lines on Hasbro scripts, and thoughts meshed together by Lauren Faust and the Hasbro writing team.
They'll never get the potential protection that a fully self-aware and sentient AI that may get via the ethics that arise at that point, since they aren't evolving programs. Simply products of imagination that do not represent anyone.
They do not have voices, feelings, or thoughts of their own. They will never scream.
Thus perfect victims.
*Fffrrrr-squeak*
I think my train of thought may have gotten away from me after the 'social contract' part of my comment.
My response got a little long, so i decided to make it a separate blog post instead. It can be found here for your reading "pleasure" if you are so inclined.
Best wishes and regards
00_02