starklore:

I guess my issue with the whole framework of certain works being “trauma porn” is like, the idea that traumatized or otherwise hurting people have to censor the real horror of our real-life experiences just because someone out there in the audience might, potentially, experience the wrong emotion upon consuming that work. They always say “who is this for?” and then don’t wait for an answer, assuming that the answer is “people who actually enjoy it when real-life people suffer.” It’s always a dichotomy between those people vs the good pure survivors who would never enjoy such content; the creator is rounded into the first category, and the existence of audience members who find such content cathartic is denied entirely.

I think about how growing up it was an established complaint since like the 60s or 70s at least that Mexican newspapers would run gore photos (or at least w/ visible corpses, dying, etc.) and how that was one of the first things when sites were trying to be not just home forums but like “landing pages”, the thing you’d go to first thing on the net. Stile Project I remember being the big thing but that trickled down the Seanbaby way to SA and X-E.

And it wasn’t even understood (by me) as “yeah! a guys brains!” (Public schools had used gory cautionary filmstrips in driver’s ed. in the 70s and that was regularly disdained in my day) but like, yes, this is what these “it bleeds, it leads” stories are about, that we are all physical vessels that might be traumatically ended