Plato and many philosophers have a special disdain for poets(artists). Where they urge people to live among reality, artists paint a picture that can never be possible.
There are ideas like: "Who knows what war looks like, a soldier? Or an artist? We get false ideas of war, and it corrupts our minds. Let us not pretend that the brain can fully separate our fiction media from what we are told is 'close enough' to real to be entertaining.
I worry most when it comes to expectations of interpersonal relationships. What poison is happening to the population when they read/watch unrealistic romances?
What all fiction tends to do - crime stories, disasters, horror, action, romance - is make ordinary life look relatively muted. Maybe you don't want to become a mafioso in real life, but you do want to feel validated in your more minor lawbreaking, your small rebellions against authority, etc.
Plenty of teenagers want to imagine themselves being action heroes, with a "simple" life full of glorifying adventures where people die but not them - an escape from the immediate problems of their everyday existence. As they get older, most of them feel less inclined to see the world burn, and so reinterpret the same stories in a more troubled way. But in the moment, it's always about being "so badass" or whatnot. A person you could be, if you were just a little less inhibited by things like emotion and caring for others.
And that's the second part of it - that you can uphold "glorified bad guys" as part of an elaborate rationalization process to ignore your own failings, praising their every motion while distancing yourself from the idea you are also bad.
You seem to have gotten caught on the analogy and failed to read my argument.
It doesn't matter if something is fiction, the reality is that fiction has a great impact on its audience, and that impact comes with proportional responsibility.
It does not matter what ideal rational actors should theoretically do when it comes to managing their opinions and knowledge about the world in the face of fiction, we don't have any of those.
We don't get to pretend society works a particular way, just so we can justify bad television that uses real places and real names of groups in a farcical way because it's capitalizing on a contemporary societal phenomenon of fear and ignorance of those things.
at some point one realizes that people like to make up dramatic situations in their own minds and then live in that reality, and that's a form of self-gratification. According to Brave New World, we should have gotten over this neo-religion of romance that hollywood preached.
It's important to both suspend disbelief to enjoy fiction from reality and take fiction with a big grain of salt that it's often missing considerations of reality. It's when people confuse and conflate fiction with reality minus critical thinking that hobgoblins of the mind get let loose to draw unrealistic conclusions.
Reality and fiction slightly intersect as a fuzzy Venn diagram, to a degree, but their more often echoes of imagination than of experience.
Frankly, it’s a lot easier if they’re imaginary/unreal as then there are far fewer facts in the way of whatever narrative the storyteller is attempting to tell.
Few things are more irritating when telling a story than having to deal with inconvenient reality.
I got a little lost reading your comment. Are you saying that it's fine having unrealistic fictional characters because it has no bearing on the real world? If so, then first, humans use stories as a primary means of teaching moral behavior. Second, when it comes to movies the actors playing the characters are real people. I mean, just look at all the damage done by the fictional stories in holy books.
We've had fictional characters in movies for decades, in literature for centuries, and in myths and legends for millennia. And people have made their living (and occasionally made fortunes) telling those stories.
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