When Is Disucssion Harmful?

I'm gonna have to go with the 'people are being too sensitive' option. ^^;

I mean, I do get why it can be seen as "harmful"-- it hurts when people complain about the very existence of something you love, especially when those people are people you look up to and respect. But...that's a fact of life, and at some point you're going to have to accept it and get over yourself. 6____6

People will have different opinions from you; people will like and dislike different things; everyone's bound to dislike at least one thing that a lot of other people love. And as long as you're not specifically going up to them and bothering them about it, there's nothing wrong with admitting it and discussing it.

Plus, I think it does a lot more good in the long run for people to practice speaking with civility about things they hate than to just consider a whole subject taboo if they don't have 100% purely appreciative thoughts about it. Because there's a difference between "this is bad" and "I don't like this", and the sooner you learn that difference the easier your entire life will be. ^^

There's no real reason why a discussion about things people don't like has to be hurtful. You can explain why you don't like something while understanding why other people DO like it and the value it has regardless, and maybe thinking about what would make you like it more. Basically, these discussions can be nuanced...but nuance takes practice, and people don't get practice when any subject matter that might possibly ruffle someone's feathers gets shut down on sight.

I think the problem is that there's really no way to keep an open discussion like that gated to just people who have developed good critical analysis skills. Everyone's allowed to have an opinion, which is nice, in some ways, but does mean the onus of working out what value to take from what people say is kind of on the reader.

I think in the right situation, it's very helpful to look at things that don't work, and to analyse why they don't work well, or to look at why some people don't like some tropes to understand another person's point of view.

But if you're dealing with people who aren't trained or experienced in critical thinking, any discussion can immediately spiral into either: "Oh no! People don't like this trope, so I should never put it in my work!" or "How DARE you dislike this thing I like!" And people who have no ability to separate things that have personal appeal, or that they personally don't enjoy, from things that are actually offensive, confusing, harmful or go against established good practice, have a tendency to miss the fact that not everyone is like that; some people can criticise a thing they like, or can criticise flaws in something while still acknowledging that it has value in other areas, or may be particularly meaningful to some people to an extent that the flaws don't matter.

It's a difficult problem, because it's neither entirely the fault of people discussing things they dislike, or completely the fault of people who don't like other people doing that being too sensitive. It can be either or it can be both. You often get people who just don't like something phrasing it like "DON'T put this in your story" instead of "I don't like stories with this in." but on the other side you often get people who read "I don't like stories with this in" as if it meant "nobody should ever make stories with this in and if you did, you're a bad person."

And on Tapas, the effect is compounded because people can be kind of.... ranked numerically here, and make actual money, and that leads to a lot of bitterness and envy. People develop a hatred of certain tropes or genres they feel are "cheating" by having an easier time getting readers, say they hate those tropes, and then upset people who make comics and novels around those things and feel like they're being called hacks. Worse, they're often tropes around gender and sexuality, so there's this unfortunate extra element in there. Sometimes people pile in a lot of dogwhistles and then are like "why u so offended, it's just my opinion, bro (tee hee)." framing another person's actually reasonable anger at them as an oversensitive overreaction, and relying on people with poorer critical understanding, or limited English or where the discourse is on issues like race, gender and sexuality in English-speaking countries, to feign innocence.

Basically... it's a mess, and with "things I hate" type discussions, I find they're often not that useful on an open platform where you don't have the benefit of knowing the people who are talking or whether they really have any idea what they're talking about and it's hard to flag blatant trolls, and I tend to get more out of them when they're in a space where I can see a more measured conversation around the thing being discussed by people I trust to have an interesting and nuanced view.

Something I notice with online discussion is that the relative anonymity, mode of communication, and how public these discussions are, often make people read things in binary— black and white, taken to the extreme, in bad faith, with ego, and without room for clarification.

When I have discussions with irl friends or even people I’m close with online, there’s room for nuance and immediate clarification. I remember the recent “tropes you dislike” thread, and how it became a heAted argument between people accusing such threads of discouraging artists and people saying we should be able to freely discuss those things. Both had legitimate arguments, but I’m betting that if this was a private discussion btwn people within a restaurant, there would be much less heat on such a mundane topic lol.

I suppose when you have a big platform, you have to take more care to clarify thing to a certain degree, but also it’s up to your followers to learn to read between the line…

Like @DokiDokiTsuna mentioned, if it's speaking within the context of a discussion where everyone is joining in for that theme of "what we don't like and why", then I think that's perfectly healthy to exercise these types of subject matter in conversations. I don't think it's harmful at all. Having sensitivity on something like this, or even being very insecure about it, needs to be explored introspectively. This is how we grow as artists.

For something similar, I've had people straight up say in front of me the kind of art styles they don't like and I would just laugh and say, "Aw, man! That's what I LOVE about it." But it becomes more of a friendly conversation about dislikes/likes rather than an argument or making it seem awkward. It may take practice for some to not feel riled when someone tells them they don't like their favorite color. But that's okay. More exposure to listening to others is what will help someone get a better sense for how to join in on conversations like those.

Like, I LOVE Range Murata's work. But a person could say, "Omg I haaaate how he draws women. And I can't stand his shape language." I would just find it interesting and ask them why, while making a few jokes of course--all in good fun.

@darthmongoose also made really great points in their response about how these ARE just opinions and harmless POVs. It is the discussion of art. And, unfortunately, many people getting into art communities come to it with a lot of insecure feelings because hey, who doesn't wanna fit in?

And YOU made a great point in your most recent comment. The nuance of IRL conversation. Looking into a friend's face and talking at length about why you thought the most recent movie you saw was a flop while they laugh and tell you they actually enjoyed it. Yeah... I think the faceless internet loses that nuance you speak of. I think it leads to people getting very defensive about their likes/dislikes because all we have to display ourselves online and in forums are blocks of texts, and an ankle-deep bio about ourselves.

I know this is going to be a hot take, but when something is described as 'harmful' that usually entails that thing causing damage. In the case of discussion that could talking about things that can bring on an anxiety or PTSD episode, encourage someone to hurt themselves, cause a relapse with an eating disorder, things like that. I don't see how people complaining about fiction things, and possibly discouraging someone from that thing, is harmful.

That being said I don't think discussions should be policed. With certain things we should be mindful, and bring up the topic with care, but we should be allowed the freedom of speech. In this case specifically I'm kind of apathetic, if someone is discouraged from creating because they saw some randos complaining about not liking the thing they're into online, maybe they weren't really passionate about creating to begin with. (It can be more nuanced than that, but that's usually what I see.) Hearing people's opinions on things is part of being in a society, even online you're going to get people not liking the thing you're into, just like you're going to get unsolicited criticism regardless of how upset you get by it. People have opinions and preferences, that's how they work.

Can't tell you how many times I hear/see people saying folks who make dark stories/art, like myself, are wallowing in our sorrow, being disrespectful, are fetishists, immature, romanticize trauma, harm "actual" survivors. How our work shouldn't exist, or how we should be thrown in prison or a mental facility. Now I would say that psychoanalyzing a real person for the fiction/art they create can do harm, since it can encourage a negative simplistic viewpoint on a very nuanced psychological topic, and if you get enough people who believe that simplistic viewpoint it can bring real damage. (Witch hunts, governmental censorship, fear mongering, the spread of misinformation, etc.)
Regardless, I'm not going to discontinue my comic just because randos hate what I do, or hate me for what I do.

Sure, we can police speech, make the internet a puritan safe space for all the young, impressionable children starting to use it. (They're already starting to try to do that.) Although at some point we may as well just not talk, because almost anything can make someone discouraged or uncomfortable. If someone is genuinely very sensitive to negative discussion of their favorite thing, they should take the steps to not be part of those discussions. If they see people talking about disliking things, it would be best for them to either block words relating to the discussion, block the thread, block the people disliking the thing, or scroll past. The tools are there, how you curate your online experience is your responsibility.

My thinking is everyone has an opinion. And whether you allow it on a forum or not doesn't change that. You are just not allowing it to be seen. It's still there. If you create, you will have to deal with people, end of story. The only way not to is not publish or show your work. In that case, why bother making it. You want people to enjoy your stories. Nothing is harmful as these are just names on a forum, you don't know them, you'll never meet them. and at the end of the day you will not remember them. Their complains or hates might have value, but you determine that value. Remember the source and where the opinion comes from.

Ooh, I guess I can see that, depending on how niche the community is. Like, I've seen people saying the "I don't like 'X'" discussions hurt the writing, art, or indie comic community as a whole. Which is like... almost fear mongering levels of embellishment, because as long as our species has that wiring, we will always create. There will never stop being writers, artists and such just because some people don't like certain things. Even if creativity were made illegal, and the penalty for creating was death, there will still be people writing and making art.

However if the community was small, like if they revolved around a certain trope, then I can see enough negativity causing damage. Such as the use of mental illness being the source of someone being evil or doing a bad thing, it was a very popular thing in fiction for a while, but in the past few years it's been discouraged to where you don't really see it much anymore. Granted, while some very talented people can pull it off, I'm 100% for discouraging creators from using that particular trope... or whatever it is. Same with the SA=love thing that was used in a lot of romance fiction back in the day, some people still use it because they're into that, but it's widely been discouraged for "normal" romance.

Pfff I've seen that! Isn't it fascinating? Folks who see someone having preferences as being a danger to their community is other worldly. Yeah, that's totally petty and childish. I imagine most of the people who think this are kids or young adults... I hope... well, I've seen 30+ adults like that too, but I don't want to think about that. For sure, some people can be assholes about your their preferences and opinions (You can say the same for the people who think you shouldn't have opinions if they're negative.), but it definitely wouldn't be productive to disallow certain speech.

If someone likes a thing I don't like, I usually don't even talk about my opinions, mostly because I know that for some, it's is a part of their identity. If I'm more comfortable with them, then I'll tell them why I really hate the BBC Sherlock adaptation, youknow? I'd rather not cause grief to people that may be on the sensitive side, or little kids who have nothing else going for them. Maybe it comes from years of being on Tumblr, where if I shared an opinion and tagged it, I'd get responses from strangers being like "WELL I LIKED IT" and it's like...who are you? Why are you looking for my posts that don't like the thing you like? Online is just a weird place to share my opinion, honestly, because people get so fixated on my opinion when they don't even know me. So it feels like it's never safe to share.

And some people are so cemented in their ways, there is no point in extending the effort to dislodge them from that opinion. Sometimes I get responses that are so stupid I just...don't respond, youknow? It's not that I hate discussing, I just hate discussing with them? youknow? Like it's not about the discussion, but about the person you're discussing with being an ass about it.

So when I see people say "oh discussing why you hate 1st person narrative is harmful" like yeah, I think that's a "them" problem. The discussion itself is not harmful, they themselves need to figure out why they react in this way to confrontation.

Especially for very petty differences, I do not understand why those tend to blow up online, especially when there's so many serious discussions to be had in the literature community that people are willing to talk about. Maybe because those more serious discussions about race and rewritten history aren't a hot take. But if you say something a little petty and hot-takey like "I'd like to see less anime style art on the front page" people will FREAK OUT.

I think I somewhat understand where you are coming from. I think in recent years, people are been critical of media trying to over correct itself, the Disney live action remakes are a good example of this. They feel more like they are written by a committee instead of someone who is passionate about what they are creating.

I don't think "tropes you dislike" forums are designed to be a "how to..." for writing, it's more just people ranting. Because a lot of people dislike tropes like love triangles yet their are books/shows/films with love triangles that are still popular. You shouldn't really be doing CinemaSins when it comes to your own writing.

The idea that you shouldn't discuss things that don't appeal to you is the most anti-intellectual thing that I have ever heard of.