In that way, it's completely different from the reality of that sort of relationship, which is why it works so well in a fictional context. There's also no victim, no real abuse is being committed or perpetuated
So in your mind, you are liking to see in 2D, the same situation and same acts that in reality would be unfathomably sadistic and horrible ?
This is literally close to the very first thing ever said about fiction in the history of criticism--Plato thought it was a major problem that (for example) people laugh at drunkards on stage who they would find shameful and disgusting in real life.
Then Aristotle pointed out that working things out in the imagination is not the same as performing them in real life, and that people enjoying a play were not advocating killing their fathers, marrying their mothers, and then gouging their eyes in shame.
Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in classical philosophers going at it and poking holes into each other (metaphorically... mostly)
While the "Catharsis Theory" (which Aristotle was apparently partial to) has been proven false repeatedly in regard to fiction (i.e. Releasing violent impulses in video games doesn't diminish your propensity for real life violence, as an example), that doesn't mean that the opposite is necessarily true. There's another important mechanism to consider.
The modern term would be "Stimulus Discrimination", which describes how the same basic stimulus will, based on context, elicit different reactions from people. SD, however, can be a learned ability and vary by person.
I recall a German case study where a "naïve" person who had never played a first person shooter game was subjected to a rather graphic (if by today's standard horribly outdated) scene from a rather violent and explicit FPS. (I think it was an early 2000s title, maybe even late '90s).
MRI imaging showed that the "naïve" participant's brain reacted to the game footage the same way as it reacted to scenes featuring real life violence. Thus the participant showed no stimulus discrimination.
They repeated the experiment with an ESports participant with thousands of hours spent in the game in question and others like it. He showed hardly any reaction to the game footage (same as when playing) but showed basically the same reaction to real life violent footage as the "naïve" participant. This participant thus demonstrated a high degree of stimulus discrimination.
Make of that what you will, I don't really want to suss it out much more right now :D
last edited at Jan 15, 2022 9:59PM
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