I've been sent pictures of wojacks being hung wearing a trans T-Shirt when I was younger. 

It shaped my perspective on reality. Sure Wojak was fiction but I won't pretend it did not leave a scar. 

There are people who want that to happen to me in real life and these pictures make a justification for it. 

Dark fiction is highly censored and many groups get excluded from viewing it (children). Religion is a good example of fiction effecting reality. 

Im not an Anti but you have to privlage of not having fiction weaponised againts you. 

Edit: I am a former Anti but nuance is lost on both sides sometimes.  

I would like to argue that your opinion, while acceptable, is wrong. Fiction does indeed impact reality, as noted by the increase in fear around shark attacks after the release of Jaws despite the fact that only around 64 shark bites (not even deaths!) are recorded annually. This isn’t necessarily a case of just a few people being unable to distinguish fiction from reality — I remember living through everyone being terrified of sharks and not understanding why because i had done a lot of research on them for a project in school and thought they were cool.

Or, how about when a character becomes such a deep attachment that you start collecting merchandise of them? Or how movie scores can make you cry, or how a character can influence someone to be better. What about children watching a superman movie and then wanting to be heroes themselves or actively trying to help their family more?

I’ll even share examples from myself (who technically likes “dark fiction” but respectful dark fiction not just fetishising my trauma). I’m a CSA victim who grew up being groomed by and repeatedly exposed to sex via my mother until i was assaulted by her boyfriend at 9. I started consuming dark fiction (specifically incest and “shota/loli”) around this time, and internalised that i must have liked my assaulter and invited this behaviour, because my freeze response (to a child who didn’t even know there was more than fight or flight) read similarly to the submission shown in these pages. Then, upon interacting in places where this sort of thing was drawn and discussed about, i was groomed further by multiple older men and exploited even further, and again, thought it was completely okay. I definitely should not have been consuming it and had predisposing factors, but it had an impact on my reality in multiple ways.

Even beyond the traumatic side of the effects fiction has had on me, there’s been good too, mostly coming from me being a very unsocialised autistic child. I didn’t have friends as a kid so i learned that i wanted to do good for others and protect them from playing Sonic Heroes religiously as a kid. I mimicked a lot of the inflections and sentence structure of my favourite characters, i learned how to use new words from them. they made me feel not alone in a time where i had no one in the world because my family abused me and i was too strange for the kids at school or in my apartment complex.

I still enjoy seeing disturbing content written about in media. Hell, i love FNAF, and the entire plot line of that series is about child murder and the gory consequences of it. I’m old enough to be able to tell the difference between content that mentions a dark subject and content that romanticises/fetishises that content and to use the tools at my disposal to block the latter from my online experiences. I try to avoid media involving CSA or incest these days as it’s mostly just triggering, but i imagine there’s media that tackles the topics respectfully (or even if they don’t, they don’t go out of their way to try to showcase it as hot). I mean hell, even being able to have genuine triggers based off of media is a way of showcasing that fiction, especially fictional depictions of REAL concepts, can impact reality — just maybe not as intensely as rewriting someone’s moral code just from watching a BAD Guy do BAD Things on a screen, or by watching gay people in a show and becoming gay.

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]