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

[guardian-yugi.livejournal.com]

100% Agreement.