lizbee | (Reply)

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Yeah, I find the idea of people insisting on making something good in the face of a nightmare, snatching hope, kindness and joy from the face of Hell, and insisting on fighting the kind of hopelessness that's used to promote dystopias really cool. But I absolutely hate how Tumblr gets about Soft and Wholesome, and I have a profound distrust of how capitalism treats those things (and a lot of opinions about what individualist capitalism is doing to the concept of self-care), and I really don't want to hear how my interestingly nasty, but not hopelessly bleak dystopian fiction is part of the same thing as fucking Americanized commercialized hygge.

(I've been in totalitarian countries, and places where horrible things happen and keep happening, and two things that get used to maintain the horrible status quo are encouraging denial of how bad it is, and encouraging hopelessness about it ever getting better. "Look at all of these nice and pleasant things! Okay, not for those people, but they're all flawed and disruptive and have done things wrong, so don't look at them! Look at all of these good things, enjoy how you can have pleasant and comfortable things and don't think too hard!" is up next to "Don't think you can change things, it's all going to go wrong, accept failure and defeat, change for the better is hopeless" on the list of ways to maintain the status quo.)