Walls

[channonyarrow]

I always THINK that I'm totally not squickable. I mean, I know myself pretty well, I know that I'll try just about anything once, and usually two or three times to make sure I didn't like it the first time. I read voraciously, in many genres, and I pretty much only don't read sports and biographies. I read horror, I read splatterpunk, I read stuff that makes your spine want to crawl out of your body and find a new home, and not because it's badly written. I only don't watch horror movies because I have a morbid imagination and I get nightmares.

Anyone who can get nightmares for a solid week from the ep of Transformers where they brought back Optimus Prime has problems.

I have things I don't like, sure. I don't like mpreg, I don't like badly-written or overdone incest, I don't like women-as-eternal-victims-in-need-of-saving, I don't like plots that involve everyone wilfully not telling anyone in authority what's going on so they can FIX it, I don't like lots of things - but I don't think of those as squicks, any more than I'd think of walking into an ice cream shop(pe) and deciding that I had to leave because I really don't like rum-raisin ice cream (or raisins in general, in fact). It's a like or a dislike, not a squick.

Obviously, if I had once been viciously raped with a carton of rum-raisin ice cream by a hillbilly axe murderer, I might then legitimately have a squick about ice cream.

But I do still think of myself as someone not squicked by sex or violence or language or imagery, and generally when I run up against a wall and find myself going "Oh, yeah, squick, hey," it's a brickwall...topped with razor wire. And patrolled by an Unfriendly Patrol. Armed with guns. And guard dogs.

In other words, when I do find a squick, it usually makes me want to vomit.

So congratulations, person on bad_rpers_suck who has the icon of someone slitting a woman's throat with a straight razor. You've just found a squick of mine.

Thanks. Have some vomit.

And it's not that I'm not into freedom of speech (my inclination to that alternates with my inclination to buy a gun and shoot everyone I disagree with), it's that I'm not into an icon that I have to watch - carefully and repeatedly - to determine that it is, in fact, as disturbing and disgusting as I thought it was. So now I've overconsumed something I never wanted, and maybe it's the fact that I feel a little full of disgusting that is making me want to vomit, but I tell you - that icon's a winner.

In some strange alternate universe where using a graphic murder icon in a community is okay.


ETA: Okay, so it's her eye. How is this different? I don't care how marvellously arty it is, I find it disturbing (though admittedly a lot less so than when I thought they were cutting her throat). I don't like being an icon nazi, but that's REALLY the sort of thing best left in a personal journal.

Comments

[pocketfox.livejournal.com]

Wordy McWorderson all over your post, dude. I'm really hard to squick (hellfire, I watch movies like Hostel, Saw (both 1 and 2), and all those other delicious slasher fics for fun!), and that icon freaked me the fuck out. Somehow it being an eye instead of a throat makes it even worse for me... *shudder*

And just because it's from a "classic" movie doesn't make it any better.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

Christ no - that's not an argument, and for me it stopped being one the second I saw Taxi Driver. I don't care if Un Chien Andalou was crapped out by baby Jesus onto celluloid of gold and myrrh or not, I'm not watching it, and the icon in question fails to impress me. Use that sort of thing in YOUR journal, dude, not in a comm.

Actually, I think that post could have consisted entirely of someone typing "fuck" eight thousand times and no one would have caught it, based on the comments on it.

[pocketfox.livejournal.com]

I don't care if Un Chien Andalou was crapped out by baby Jesus onto celluloid of gold and myrrh or not...

AHAHAHAHA! That is so full of win. XD

But yeah, you're probably right. Last time I looked there was one comment about the post. All the rest was icon-squick.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

And it was never changed, either. I'd call troll, if it weren't for the length of the post.