Part of me feels like COVID in a fanfic is different than COVID in original/real/"serious" writing, but that may be a false distinction. How it's written is more important.
I would agree on a distinction insofar as I have seen letters for exchanges, prompts etc. specifically list COVID among their recipients' DNWs, but outside of those kinds of restrictions, I don't see a difference: if fic is how you're reckoning with it, that's how you're reckoning with it. It's not more meaningful or more trivial. It's the mode of art that enables you to work out what you want to say.
In a way it feels akin to this country's endless cycle of gun violence--there seems to be no amount of death that is enough to change anything.
Yes. It's horrifying. It feels like the thoughts and prayers of gun violence to me, too: a kind of communal lying on a scale so huge I understand the grief may be incommensurate, but I don't understand how anyone tries to pretend it's not there. I don't even want to call it surreal; I like surrealism better.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2023-09-24 01:40 am (UTC)I would agree on a distinction insofar as I have seen letters for exchanges, prompts etc. specifically list COVID among their recipients' DNWs, but outside of those kinds of restrictions, I don't see a difference: if fic is how you're reckoning with it, that's how you're reckoning with it. It's not more meaningful or more trivial. It's the mode of art that enables you to work out what you want to say.
In a way it feels akin to this country's endless cycle of gun violence--there seems to be no amount of death that is enough to change anything.
Yes. It's horrifying. It feels like the thoughts and prayers of gun violence to me, too: a kind of communal lying on a scale so huge I understand the grief may be incommensurate, but I don't understand how anyone tries to pretend it's not there. I don't even want to call it surreal; I like surrealism better.