~~ me and my meta kink issues :>

Reading tinderblast's, switchknife's & cathexys' thread about `Prisonnier de Guerre' finally addressed an issue I'd been curious about for quite some time, but particularly after my wibbly post about people's apparent enjoyment ("ooh, sexy") of amanuensis1's `And Just Plain Wrong'.

I find myself lost when people claim to like a (sexual) scenario on fiction that they -despise- in reality. Mostly because I tend to approach escapist fiction from the "god, I wish this were true" angle-- I -want- there to be wizards, mind-bonds, insane monarchs with huge destinies, star-crossed lovers, talking horses, aliens and so on. If I love a story, usually it's because I feel it is true, or can be true, or should be true. With stories using "dangerous" sexual kinks, clearly this becomes fuzzy for some people, because this interacts much more directly with something that -can- easily be real (more directly than wizards), which is to say, sex. So maybe unlike other sorts of fantasies (which one can go through life wanting safely, knowing they're untouchable), sexual kinks in fiction invoke the readers' sense of personal ethics, thus triggering a split between their Id (which goes berzerk with lust) and their Superego, which disapproves. Which is why the distinction between fantasy and reality suddenly becomes a conflicted one (instead of "I wish this were true but it isn't and I know that" it's "I wish this were true but not real").

Generally, I don't really -enjoy- disturbing stories (horrific rather than dark) in the escapist "mmm, yummy" sense. It seems to be a contradiction-- enjoyment and horror, unless it's grotesque horror which is so unbelievable as to be play. Perhaps I should read more horror fics to get a better grip on this phenomenon, and then I'd understand the (sexual) appeal of the horrific on a more intuitive level.

It especially all clicked into place with tinderblast's comment about realism introducing a "clear moral element" to the suffering in a fic, and the idea in general that realism brings the fiction just that much closer to "reality", where people's ideas of right and wrong and rooted (well, other people's moreso than mine, heh). I'd written a non-con H/D once (that I hated writing), `As Good As He Got', which a number of people who like non-con didn't find hot, and I got the sense that this was because I went for psychological realism more than anything else.

( This brings me to the idea of realism as counterindicative in fantasy-based fic... )