Exploration vs Endorsement

Last week, I talked a little bit about identifying reasonable critique in the turbulent sea that is online writing discourse. This time around, I’m going to piggyback off of that a little bit and briefly delve into a problem I see coming up a lot when it comes to discourse about media.

That problem is a seeming inability for some people to differentiate between a story that explores difficult or uncomfortable subject matter and one that actively promotes bigoted, dangerous and/or unhealthy ideas.

You wouldn’t think that this would be such a common issue in 2026. I’ve said it before, in many ways, we’ve never had greater media literacy. We have been exposed to so much media and have access to so many different stories, it’s easy for us to identify common tropes, plot beats and themes in fiction. But sometimes, some of us seem to really struggle with anything beyond that.

Now, to be clear, this isn’t meant to be some sort of alarmist blog post about the death of modern media literacy. Like I said, arguably we have more media literacy than ever before. But I do think it is worth explaining the difference to clear the air, hopefully help some potential critics learn something and, admittedly, vent my frustrations just a little.

While it is far from being the majority of people who do this, it has become increasingly common for me to stumble across posts decrying, shaming or otherwise criticising media because it may contain sensitive content. Sensitive content here being anything from depictions of petty crime or drug use to actually unsettling or uncomfortable topics like abuse or torture and everything in between.

To be explicitly clear: depicting ideas or behaviour in a story does not inherently mean that the author of that story shares that ideology. If this were the case, just about every single writer of crime fiction would be a murderer. But we don’t look at your airport murder mystery novels and assume that the writer is actually a killer. So why should we assume that any other behaviour or idea we find uncomfortable or detestable is being encouraged by the writer?

In fact, you might note that when a writer is presenting you with a murder plot, typically the point of that story is for the detective to discover who the killer is and prevent them from killing again. Telling a story about bigotry, dystopia, oppression or even genocide is more often than not in a similar line of reasoning. The point isn’t to encourage people to go out there and beat anyone who looks different to them to death, the point is to show you how the people who would do that think. It is to shine a light on the evil of such people. I’ve written two books set during the aftermath of a nuclear bombing. I’m hardly celebrating the idea of a nuclear holocaust. The point of those books is to highlight the kind of suffering ordinary people go through in the wake of large-scale, cataclysmic military or political violence. They’re about all the reasons we should never do that.

And, at risk of coming off a little pretentious, we need stories like that. We need stories that let us get into the heads of the worst people and that show us the results of the worst kinds of evil. We need stories that explore confronting and difficult ideas. Some of, if not most, of the best and most important stories ever written were doing this. We need to read about and explore these topics because it encourages us to think about them critically.  They teach us why we should or shouldn’t do certain things. They show us what the world could look like if certain ideologies are taken too far, or adapted as the norm at all. There is a reason that one of the first things dangerous, authoritarian regimes always seem to do is start banning books. Because a populace that lacks that kind of learning, that hasn’t been exposed to difficult ideas and forced to think about them critically, is much easier to control and to do those very things to.

Trying to censor any piece of media that might be about subject matter you find difficult to engage with is just doing the work of wannabe tyrants for them. It’s not just trying to impose your own preferences on other people (although it certainly is that too), it is an inadvertent attack on empathy and critical thinking. That’s how you end up with people who are willing to defend the leaders engaging in the actual killing of children in their homes. They’ve never seen the consequences of such violence or been presented with them in a way that makes them actually consider the cruelty of it. If you try to shelter people - including adults, for the record - from media engaging with difficult topics, they just don’t develop the ability to think about those things in reality.

Now, in fairness, there most certainly is media out there that glorifies hatred, violence and oppression. I would never claim that isn’t the case. I could go on a whole other rant about how media glorifying and propagandising violence and hatred is rarely in the firing line as much as stories that just want you to engage in critical thinking, but that’s a whole other thing.

All I’m suggesting is that rather than turning your nose up or clutching your pearls at the mere mention of uncomfortable subject matter, it might be worth engaging in some actual deeper reasoning about why a story is showing you such content and what it’s actually saying about it.