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tirediscourse:

disgust-as-morality is a terrible system of belief, for a million and one reasons, and a lot of people more eloquent than me have already talked about how using disgust as a moral judgement has historical led to punishing queer people and anyone else outside the mainstream, and how disgust reactions to fiction is entirely understandable but not an excuse to endorse censorship, so i won’t talk about that specifically–

–but i would like to address the idea that not having an emotional reaction to something, even something that is not contained in fiction, means that you think that thing is All Good, All The Time. and one thing i’ve been thinking about specifically lately is animal death.

(warnings for mentions/discussions of animal death/murder, death of humans in general, death/murder of children, and school shootings)

lately, for a variety of reasons, i’ve been thinking a lot about how animal death serious affects me, both in fiction and reality. i don’t know if i would call it a trigger, but it might legitimately be that, and it’s certainly worse than anything else i regularly see depicted in fiction or talked about in reality. i’ve broken down crying and gone into severe depression for several days simply from reading a bluntly worded title of an article. i have panic attacks whenever my dog is off-leash if there’s the slightest possibility that she could get onto a road. (this particular fear actually has solid backing – there have been multiple occasions where she has run into traffic and either luck or me throwing by body in front of a moving vehicle to make it stop has saved her life – but even so, panic attacks are not a rational reaction.)

this carries over to fiction. i can’t read stories about animal death. i like stephen king, and i’ve had to stop reading several of his stories because i could not handle pets dying, especially if they’re specifically killed, or fatally hit by cars. death by illness is more manageable, as is death by old age, but any depiction is enough that it can be seriously detrimental to my mental health.

by contrast, i can read about children dying with next-to-no emotional reaction.

it depends on the situation. fiction is easier than real life, and how it happens or how it’s described is relevant, but for the most part? i don’t really have an emotional reaction to it, any more than any other death. human death, for the most part, doesn’t bother me. on occasion some random celebrity death will seriously affect me – and it’s seriously completely random, i have no way of knowing beforehand if it’ll bother me at all, i’ve shed tears over rappers i’d never heard of before they died and shrugged off beloved childhood actors – but other than that it doesn’t generally bother me. in fiction, it has to be seriously well-written to cause anything more than “well, that’s too bad, i liked that character, wish we could’ve seen more of them.”

and none of this means that i actually value animal life significantly more than human life.

none of this means that i think that animals hold more value than humans. (i’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian, for one thing.) i absolutely know, objectively, that human death is a serious thing, and that’s bad. i’m staunchly anti-war and reasonably anti-death penalty. i am infuriated by school shootings and police killings and everything else involving humans dying. i just don’t get emotionally affected by it, unless i do (for no reason i can predict).

it doesn’t make me a worse person than someone who can’t even hear about human or child death without breaking down and who doesn’t bat an eye at a stephen king story where a man kicks a pet dog to death or where a man kills his own cat while delusional. what matters is actual actions. your emotions do not determine your morality or whether you are a good person.