madelinemasoch
Masoch's 2nd Cumming
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2022
- Posts
- 578
I've noticed several things in my reflection on the site, the readers, and my writing. The main thing I've noticed recently is a concept I'll call reader-character confusion. This isn't reducible to the banal statement that readers oftentimes identify with characters, especially the main character in any given story but not necessarily. It's more that they have done so to the extent that they confuse their own lives with those of the characters as written. This isn't to say that the reader begins LARPing as said character full-time; it's not anything close to method acting that I'm attempting to describe. What it means is that the reader's expectations and tastes are inserted, by them, by force, into the fictional world of the story. The reader has confused themselves for the character they're reading about when they say "no humiliation! I don't like that" or something of the like, like if the other character says something very brutal, and the reader says "how could you say something like that? it makes it hard to like her..." but it doesn't make it hard to like her for the character they've confused themselves with. The position of a reader is not to tell the writer what to write. When reader-character confusion happens, this is what they're trifling with. But the reader's tastes and expectations are simply never what the characters' relationship is characterized by, and it should not be. You are not the character. You cannot decide where the character draws the line. Just stay along for the ride anyway.
...if you get what I mean. Big ask, I know.
Additionally in our little "wrong ways of reading" seminar, there's character-author confusion, as well. This would be when the reader takes the sentiments, statements, and actions of one character and inserts all of that into the author's intentions and belief system, as if the character represents exactly what the author thinks and feels about the world, their moral compass and their values, and so on. At the extreme end of character-author confusion, there are people who genuinely believe that if something happens in a fictional story, that story's author condones that action morally, no matter how reprehensible that action might be in reality. It's the people who read a femdom story and assume the author hates men. It's the people who read interracial feminization/humiliation stories and assume the author is racist against white people. It's all of that and more, and both of those are bound up in numerous other factors of misunderstanding... but I hope you get the picture.
So, yeah. I think the reading experience as a whole and our comment sections would benefit from this if people stopped reading stories as if they are the main character, and/or as if the author and character are the same. These are both wrong ways of reading even when the author has a self-insert, or if the reader self-inserts as a character (again not what I'm referring to)–wrong ways of reading in the sense that it deteriorates the quality of the read, as in, literally the likelihood of misreading the text becomes higher.
...if you get what I mean. Big ask, I know.
Additionally in our little "wrong ways of reading" seminar, there's character-author confusion, as well. This would be when the reader takes the sentiments, statements, and actions of one character and inserts all of that into the author's intentions and belief system, as if the character represents exactly what the author thinks and feels about the world, their moral compass and their values, and so on. At the extreme end of character-author confusion, there are people who genuinely believe that if something happens in a fictional story, that story's author condones that action morally, no matter how reprehensible that action might be in reality. It's the people who read a femdom story and assume the author hates men. It's the people who read interracial feminization/humiliation stories and assume the author is racist against white people. It's all of that and more, and both of those are bound up in numerous other factors of misunderstanding... but I hope you get the picture.
So, yeah. I think the reading experience as a whole and our comment sections would benefit from this if people stopped reading stories as if they are the main character, and/or as if the author and character are the same. These are both wrong ways of reading even when the author has a self-insert, or if the reader self-inserts as a character (again not what I'm referring to)–wrong ways of reading in the sense that it deteriorates the quality of the read, as in, literally the likelihood of misreading the text becomes higher.
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