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Jax O'Lantern has had a long day of splashing bandits🎃✨️

@rufflejax.bsky.social

gonna need cis het male authors to start realizing that "being gang raped in public" and "wandering a haunted castle" carry different weight with their readers, and you do not get to use the first one to advertise writing workshops about the second

8/10/26, 3:21 pm6 reposts85 likes

Joseph D. Carriker, Jr.

@oakthorne.bsky.social

WELP that is more than enough "humanity" for today I think

Jax O'Lantern has had a long day of splashing bandits🎃✨️

@rufflejax.bsky.social

obviously gothic fiction can and often is a way of talking about sexual violence, but you can tell by the way a lot of these dude talk about rape in horror that a) they're missing that point and b) rape is about as real an experience as going to Dracula's castle themselves

Jax O'Lantern has had a long day of splashing bandits🎃✨️

@rufflejax.bsky.social

this series of posts brought to you by a friend of a friend's bookshop having to cancel a horror author's workshop after said cishet male author sent out an email about writing ghost stories including the line "let’s learn how to make people fear the fears we feel or the terror Jane Doe felt."

Jacq

@jefrir.bsky.social

Oh good grief

*puts on autumn crown, falls into a turkey circle*

@klezmerstyle.bsky.social

reminded of a creative nonfiction class I took in grad school where the instructor literally had to pull one of the workshop pieces because a guy started a piece with an elaborate rape fantasy and then woke up in a cold sweat and played it off as "but it was only a dream, it's okay"

*puts on autumn crown, falls into a turkey circle*

@klezmerstyle.bsky.social

like it's one thing to write whatever you want sure, go ahead, if I start reading it and don't like it I can set it down but bringing that into a workshop is really stripping away layers of consent pretty quickly

Jax O'Lantern has had a long day of splashing bandits🎃✨️

@rufflejax.bsky.social

I remember the short story class I took where I got dropped a whole letter grade because I refused to provide any critique to the instructor's favorite student - he'd written a frat rape from the perspective of the rapist and how romantic the whole thing was

Toffee

@tmece.bsky.social

Uuuuuuuuh

Jim Has Fun

@jimhasfun.wnyrpg.com

Dearest God in Heaven. 😳

Jet Stromfield

@jetstromfield.secondlife.bio

If you have to come up with a line like that to get people to look into your shit, you failed as a human being and a horror writer. What the fuck, who does that shit?

Jax O'Lantern has had a long day of splashing bandits🎃✨️

@rufflejax.bsky.social

like maybe consider having an ounce of empathy when you're a horror writer. just a smidgen. a jot.

Jax O'Lantern has had a long day of splashing bandits🎃✨️

@rufflejax.bsky.social

been thinking about this a little more and like. to me the obvious thing to assume complicity and tacit support on the part of the workshop host, but I want to take a step off to the side and think about it a little more.