wlw (wooloowoo)

would putting a fictional character through real life awful events (something on the news, an article, famous tragedy etc) "allowed" or would that be too far?

No disrespect at all, genuine question. Was curious to how these things work

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Allowed? By whom? The fiction police?

This is a stupid way to frame this. Big names write distasteful Two White People Fall In Love Against A Backdrop of Brown Tragedy all the fucking time. Plenty of these things are critically acclaimed and/or financially successful.

Whether you personally should make art about a real life tragedy is a personal judgment call. It's about whether it's in good taste and whether it's kind, not whether it's allowed.

A common rule of thumb is to look at how recent something is. The more recent, the more tasteless. Another is to think about how much you "own" the real life events in question. If it's lockdown, lots of us experienced that. If you personally lost someone in tragedy X, you have something of a claim on it. Another way people look at this is to ask whether the art needs to be about that tragedy and whether it's doing something productive culturally and politically for the people most related to that tragedy.

It's fine to make art about horrible things from real life.

It's usually considered pretty rude to use horrible things from real life as a disposable backdrop for relationship angst between your blorbos.

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To pick a real example, Memories of Murder launched Bong Joon Ho to international fame. It's directly about that famous unsolved (at the time) serial killer case that like 90% of Korean crime dramas are riffing off of. The film is all about police brutality and incompetence and the emotional devastation of everyone around the case, from the survivors to the police themselves. The sexual violence isn't shown on screen.

The director commented that he was partly addressing the film to the unknown murderer, and that's why it ends with that character looking into the screen.

This film is massively influential. I'm pretty sure half of the cinematography choices in Beyond Evil are lifted directly from it. People are generally cool with it because it was grappling with something significant to Korean culture, not just doing disaster tourism elsewhere, and because it wasn't luridly obsessed with filming the actual crimes.

Other Korean dramas and films tend to fictionalize the case. Having a similar but fictional set of crimes gives them more artistic latitude and less of a responsibility to the victims.

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The Battle of Algiers was made by an Italian guy, but nobody cares. It's an unflinching look at French brutality and is pretty clearly on the side of the Algerians even if it also humanizes the French characters and some of the bystanders getting blown up in the quest for freedom. (The director claimed it was neutral, which it is, comparatively, but...)

It's shot in a highly realistic style and does not sensationalize. Many of the actors are non professionals who lived through the real events.

The upshot is that it is considered important political art with a right to tell that story.

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On the other hand, The Last Face faced massive criticism for being about the feeeeelings of two foreign aid workers against a backdrop of African suffering that the film didn't really engage with or seem to care about. I've only seen part of one cut of the film, but what I saw was pretty dire in a noble savage way. Some white guy was talking about how ~inspirational~ this woman was for still dancing after gruesome sexual violence. She's barely a character. She's just there so he can be inspired. It's the kind of art that gets made by outsiders with their heads up their asses.

There have been several cases of contentious fanfics with a similar premise: The OTP falls in love while helping with the disaster in [Haiti/Africa/wherever].

The key ingredients for failing and getting yelled at vs. succeeding are:

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How these things work depends heavily on the cultural forces in play. Are you from a rich country and writing insensitively about a tragedy in a poor one? x1000 if you're from a country that formerly colonized the site of the tragedy. Do you actually understand the tragedy you're writing about? Are you a good enough writer that your writing feels nuanced when you mean it to?

I really cannot emphasize this enough: the better you are at your craft, the more likely that a terrible, never-do-this idea will work just fine. I fucking love The Ice House and ship the leads despite it starting with a douchebag male cop harassing a "lesbian". The book is 1. good and 2. by a woman. The TV version stars Daniel Craig at his most subtle. On paper, this cop character should not be able to come back from such an inauspicious start, but it works. Every friend I've recced it to is like "There is no way!" and then ends up shipping it too.

The "rules" work differently if you're just that good.

No one is "allowed" or "not allowed". It's more about whether you'll upset people with a closer tie to the bad real world thing you're using...

But even then, some people will always be over-sensitive princesses who think only they have a claim on some topic when you actually have every right to it too. There will always be an outlier who finds some art offensive that everyone else from their same demographic thinks is great.

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As a general rule of thumb, I would not use a real and recent tragedy/natural disaster/etc. as the backdrop for a fanfic about the OTP getting together. Just make up a fake earthquake or plane crash.

This is not something you must do: it's just something that tends to be in better taste.

If you're writing historical fiction about events at least 300 years old, people generally do not care what you do as long as it isn't glaringly offensive about colonialism or something.

If you're making political art about the real world, you probably need the real event in there with all its connotations and nuance.

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Everything is allowed, anon. But can you take the heat?