Episode 139: Transcript

Episode: 139: How to Write About Violence (with Fonda Lee and Lauren Beukes)

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, do you remember when we went to Portland? 

Annalee: [00:00:03] Yeah, sometime in the distant week… past. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:10] We had vegan Sri Lankan food. We hung out with cool nerds.

Annalee: [00:00:12] It was so good. We went to Rose City ComicCon. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:16] We did. We went to Rose City ComicCon. It was such a blast. We had an amazing time. 

Annalee: [00:00:21] I really liked how it had the feeling of a big con, like the San Diego Comic-Con, but it was small enough that I felt like I got to see everything and talk to people. I would really recommend it.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:35] Highly recommend.

Annalee: [00:00:35] And we got to record a live episode. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:40] Yeah, we did a live recording of our podcast at Rose City ComicCon. And we talked about how we use violence in our writing. And we were so lucky to be joined by two incredible authors. Fonda Lee, the author of The Green Bone Saga, the first book of which is the award-winning Jade City. And also her latest book is Untethered Sky. 

[00:01:01] And then, also, Lauren Beukes, the author of The Shining Girls, hugely acclaimed book, which is now a TV show on Apple TV. And her latest book is Bridge. 

Annalee: [00:01:12] Yeah, so you're going to hear now the actual live episode that we actually were not sure if the audio was going to be good enough, so, very pleased that it turned out.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:24] And on our mini episode next week, we're going to give you the Q & A from Rose City ComicCon, where we kind of get a little bit deeper into the topic of violence. And it was actually some really good questions. 

Annalee: [00:01:33] And that reminds me, if you want to support this podcast, we do it all thanks to you donating through Patreon. You can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. If you support us, you will get access to our Discord plus all of our amazing mini episodes and you're just… any amount of money you can give us, five bucks, ten bucks, helps make our opinions more correct and brings you awesome things like this live episode.

[00:02:02] Yeah, so this is us coming at you live from the past in Portland, Oregon at Rose City ComicCon.

[00:02:10] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]

Annalee: [00:02:43] Today we really wanted to talk about violence and where violence fits into our stories. We're not going to be trying to hurt you with violence, so, I don't believe we're going to need to have trigger warnings for anyone. We're going to be talking about the craft of violence and where it fits into our work.

[00:03:00] All of us have written about different kinds of violence, and have explored the theme of how it fits into our lives and when we should engage in it and when we shouldn't. So, I think we're going to have just a conversation about our work, but also like, the larger questions. Yeah, so Charlie, do you want to start us off?

Charlie Jane: [00:03:18] I'd love it if we could all just talk for a minute about, like, our work and how violence factors into it. Lauren, do you want to start off? 

Lauren: [00:03:26] So, all my books are quite violent, my kid has a friend that she's talking to and she asked if there was a book that might not be so violent that he might be able to read, and I was like, oh, I just don't think so. But the reason I write into violence is because I grew up under apartheid South Africa, which was a utopia for white people like me, and I've grown up with systemic violence. South Africa has like the highest Gini coefficient in the world, which is the divide between rich and poor. We have a history of colonialism, we have a history of a deeply racist state which tortured people to death. There was a chemical weapons program. It was absolutely horrifying. We also have one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world, and this is something that I'm constantly writing into, and I find that there's a lot of noir-ish elements in my book, because I'm very interested in the fracture points of society, and how violence affects us, how systemic violence affects us, including racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, all the horrible things we have to deal with all, all the time.

[00:04:22] So that's very present in my work, and I try to write it in a way that feels real and horrifying, and sometimes that can be quite upsetting. 

Fonda: [00:04:30] I came to writing, at a pretty young age, was a big fan of science fiction, fantasy, and a huge bookworm. I also at a relatively young age started studying martial arts. So those have been two major threads in my life, creativity and martial arts. So that has a huge influence on my work. My debut novel was a book called Zero Boxer. It was about a prize fighter who was competing in the future in the sport of zero gravity combat. So that was my debut. And then my next two novels were, like military science fiction with bioengineered teen soldiers. And then I have a gangster family saga with, wuxia-style super powered kung fu fighters. And my latest piece is, a story about, a young woman who trains rocs, the mythological birds of prey, to hunt man-eating manticores. So, there's a lot of action in pretty much everything that I write.

[00:05:24] And I also come from just having been very inspired growing up by kung fu movies and Bruce Lee and The Matrix when it came out, so a lot of my stuff is, heavily influenced by cinema as well. And I love a good fight scene, I love putting violence into the story in a way that ups the narrative stakes, is entertaining, and hopefully is thought provoking.

Annalee: [00:05:49] I also have a lot of different kinds of violence in my work. I do have, in my novels, a lot of fight scenes. There's a very intense war scene, a couple of different wars in The Terraformers, which were very hard to write. But I also, write about psychological violence a lot. I'm really interested in the ways that trauma and psychological harm erupt into real life physical harm. I shouldn't say real life, but erupt into physical harm, erupt into acts of what are often called now stochastic terrorism, where people are inspired by things that they read online or in books to just suddenly take a gun and shoot a bunch of people in a mosque, or in a mall. 

[00:06:31] And I just finished, I write both nonfiction and fiction, and, my latest nonfiction book, which is coming out next spring, is a history of psychological warfare in the United States, which required me to spend a lot of time thinking about how we harm each other psychologically and how that, fragments our cultures.

[00:06:52] And so, that's just something that, continues to interest me and it's sort of my way into this question of violence. And, it's definitely influenced by real world stuff that's going on. Like Lauren, I see a lot of violence around me, and particularly, the way that we harm each other through rhetoric and misinformation. But also I grew up in a very psychologically abusive home, which I wrote about a lot in my second novel, Future of Another Timeline, and I think that intimate family psychological abuse is deeply tied to authoritarianism and political abuse and I think that they're part of the same system. And so, that's again something I'm very interested in exploring.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:40] Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there, in what all the three of you said. I'll just add really quickly that violence is kind of a huge theme in my work. I wrote a novella called Rock Manning Goes For Broke, which is all about slapstick comedy and extreme violence and how the two kind of blur together at a certain point.

[00:07:54] My novel City in the Middle of the Night has like a badass killer who's killed tons and tons of people who suddenly, like, something breaks inside her and she can't touch a weapon. She unable to touch a weapon anymore. It’s something, she just has a block. And in my YA trilogy, the main character kills a bunch of bad guys and then has kind of a nervous breakdown about it. And realizes that she doesn't want to kill people. She wants to be a hero, but the thought of just killing all the bad guys is something that just revolts and nauseates and upsets her, and so she just can't. So I think that's a theme I obviously struggle with a lot in my work.

[00:08:29] I wanted to just kind of unpack the notion of violence, because I feel like, something that all four of us have actually kind of touched on a little bit already is that violence covers a lot, like the word violence covers a lot of different types of stuff.

[00:08:42] There's like cool fight scenes, but there's also, you know, imprisoning people is a form of violence. There's psychological violence, like Annalee talked about. There's, unfortunately, sexual violence, that is a huge theme in our culture. Right now, there's many different types of violence, and often those get undifferentiated in kind of pop culture and in how we talk about violence. And I was wondering if those kind of different types of violence are something that we think are worth exploring, or thinking about mindfully when we're, when we're kind of dealing with it? I’m just going to throw that out there. 

Annalee: [00:09:14] Yeah, what do you guys think? What are the different kinds of violence that you incorporate, or that are incorporated into our work, and how do you differentiate? Like, what's the difference between a fight scene and body horror, for example? 

Charlie Jane: [00:09:24] Right.

Fonda: [00:09:25]Well, from a purely craft standpoint, if I step back and look at this as a writer, I think a lot of it comes down to the audience that you're writing for, and the genre expectations, right? You can absolutely lump, like, there's so many different types of violence, but the type of violence that you, as an audience member, as a reader, or a viewer, expect to encounter when you open a book that's a psychological thriller, or a horror novel, is completely different than if you buy a ticket to the next Marvel movie.

[00:09:56] So, you're going in with certain expectations of, how am I going to be treated as a viewer? And, as a writer, you have to be cognizant of that and what's expected and what are sort of the guardrails around violence when you're writing a piece of fiction. If I'm writing a middle grade novel, I have very different boundaries as to what I'm going to put, what level of violence and what type of violence I'm going to put into a middle grade novel as opposed to if I'm writing an adult horror novel.

[00:10:28] So from just like a purely sort of big picture perspective, think carefully about what is the audience expecting and what type of violence are they going to be comfortable with because they're consenting to be afflicted with this violence when they open your book or go into your film or read your comic.

Annalee: [00:10:48] Yeah, that's really, I love the way you put that, that they're kind of, by picking up a certain type of genre book, you're consenting to a particular way that you're gonna experience violence? What do you think, Lauren?

Lauren: [00:10:59] So I've written in children's animation and I was the head writer on South Africa's first half hour animated TV show, which ran for 104 episodes. And we had specific guidelines from the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which is that we weren't allowed to show kids hitting each other, for example. It was a show age 7 to 11, so we had a lot of giant robot battles. But, unlike Fonda Lee, I'm like in awe of the fact that you've actually done martial arts, that you are, like, great at choreographing, like, fight scenes. In that kind of circumstance, I usually just hand it over to the people I'm working with. I'm like, I don't know what happens. There’s a fight and then it's got to resolve. And it's the same with comics. I had an epic fight scene at the end of a spinoff of Fables, it was called Fairest: The Hidden Kingdom. And it’s a J-horror take on Rapunzel, because it's all about the hair. And yeah, we had this huge fight scene with all the yokai at the end, and I was like, I said to the artist, Inaki, I was like, dude, I don't even know what happens, just have a cool fight scene. And this is the plot point which needs to come out of it. And he did this incredible [DPS?], and it was great to lean into somebody else's expertise, and it was really fun. 

[00:12:01] But in my novels, I try to write violence realistically, and some people have found it really upsetting. I got some bad reviews of The Shining Girls, where people were some people said that it was gratuitous and too violent. And I went back and looked at it because I take criticism seriously and I was like, cool, could I have done this better? And there are some body horror stuff, but it's also a serial killer novel. But I think what people were responding to was also the emotion of the violence. Because usually those scenes I wrote from the woman's perspective. And it's a Black woman in 1945 in America and she's working in the shipping yards and her husband's died at sea in the war and has not got a medal because he's Black. So, there's some systemic violence happening there and the killer attacks her and she's fighting for her life. And it's so emotional and she's thinking of her kids and I think that's kind of where I want to come at violence from is the emotional impact. Like what it does to us on a human level, what it means when we lose someone, and the ripple effects that that has to everyone around us. 

[00:13:05] So, it did make me think about how I write violence going forwards, but I also try to write into… I want you to be upset. There's the main scene in The Shining Girls, I wanted you to put the book down, and go away and fortify yourself with a cup of tea, or a double shot of whiskey, or whatever your poison is, and then like come back to it. Because it should upset us, it's awful. 

[00:13:26] On the flip side of that, I've had a handful of people come up to me and they've never told me exactly what happened, but a handful of women have come up to me at various points over the last 10 years and said, the way you wrote about it was true to my experience and to what I went through, and I really appreciate the way you wrote about that trauma. And to me, that means the world. So, yeah. But, you know, it is a difficult balance. I do want people to be upset. It should be upsetting. 

Fonda: [00:13:55] Yeah, I think one thing that you just said brought to mind, in addition to the, when we think about violence, the genre boundaries and what's expected, based on like what the audience is buying into, there's just also an element of the spectrum, right? How true to life and how realistic you want it to be. And I find that as a science fiction and fantasy writer, I'm always kind of walking this line, where I want my fantasy work to feel very grounded, and to feel very authentic, very real. Even though it's a secondary world, it's a completely different society, or maybe it's in the far future, I still want everything that happens to those characters to feel authentic, and to have lasting consequences.

[00:14:38] At the same time Sometimes there's always that speculative element. They have some sort of magic powers or there's some high tech or there's some element. So even by the fact that there is that element automatically removes it several degrees from our own lived experience. And then part of my job is to kind of claw it back to make you accept the speculative element. So that you believe in the violence, but there's almost a bit of a safety net because of the genre boundary that's been placed there.

Lauren: [00:15:12] I often talk about science fiction genre as a kind of a distorting mirror on reality that allows us to see reality more clearly. Yeah. because, you know, a lot of these issues are very close to home and very raw and very real. And to be able to write about stuff… Like, let’s be real. Most women are not killed, or femme people are not killed by a serial killer, they're killed by the people who say they love them. And the men who say that they love them. And The Shining Girls was a way of writing about misogyny and a way of writing about violence against women in a way that was also incredibly engaging and that people would like. People weren't going to sit and read a tract about domestic violence, but I could talk about misogyny and violence through the lens of a time traveling serial killer.

[00:15:56] I also, if I can just add to that, I think what's so interesting is, at the time that I was writing it, which was in 20… so it came out in 2013. Yeah, there was this serial killer narrative, which was quite, very gratuitous and very kind of you were on the shoulder of the serial killer and you were kind of stalking the victim and it was kind of sexy and fucked up. And the Hannibal Lecter model and the Lecter TV show, you know, like he's diabolical and he's so intense and so interesting and fascinating and this broken man who had this terrible thing happen to them and that's what explains everything. And real serial killers are not like that. And it was so amazing in the TV show to have Jamie Bell, who was last scene, oh, I last saw him in Billy Elliot.

[00:16:37] This is what ballet does to you, don't let your children dance. You grow up to be time travelling serial killers. But he played the perfect incel serial killer, this broken little shit who kills women because he's so broken inside, not because he's diabolical and fascinating. And it was perfect, I really appreciated that.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:54] Yeah, I was just gonna say that on the topic of genre expectations, this is something I think about a lot. I always try to kind of play with the expectations set up by a particular genre, and I try to, I often like to mash up genres, and I like to kind of pull the rug out from under the reader. But you do have to be really careful with that doing that with violence. 

[00:17:14] Like, I don't know in All the Birds in the Sky it starts off as a cute story about little kids and then by the end people are getting shot in the head and there's actual mayhem and layering in the expectation that stuff is gonna get darker or stuff is gonna get more intense is a really tough balancing act. And I think that you do have to kind of hold the reader’s hand a little bit If you're going to get to that level of kind of whoa, things are getting really intense and dark.

[00:17:40] I also think that, yeah, the more you can use surface level violence to kind of get at the structural aspects of violence, which I'd love to talk, I hope we all talk more about, then it becomes more than just somebody shot somebody. It's like, somebody shot somebody and this is emblematic of a larger, like, “The violence inherent in the system,” as Monty Python says. 

[00:18:04] Alright, we're going to take a little break, and when we come back, there's going to be even more of our conversation from Rose City Comic Con.

[00:18:08] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Annalee: [00:18:13] I often think when I'm including a scene of violence in my novels that what really matters is, I think what we've all been talking about a little bit, which is context. Like how do you contextualize the violence for the reader? And I think with a lot of violence, there's kind of two basic pathways you can take. You can be exploring violence in order to hurt the reader, to make the reader feel how terrible something is. And then, if you take that path further, you can say, all right, and I want to leave the reader in the end with the sense that the world is violent and broken and horrible. And I just reread the novel 1984, which absolutely does this. Maybe you read it in high school and you don't remember, but literally half the book is just Winston Smith being tortured. And it ends with like, yep, and the world is a giant torture machine. The end. Goodbye. No shade on that novel. I mean, obviously it's incredibly, an important, literary work, but, that's one direction.

[00:19:17] And then I think the other direction, and this is where I like to go is a version where you have aftercare and I think you can have a violent scene and then sit with the reader afterward and kind of care for them and either contextualize it in a kind of social framework where you're like this is something much bigger, this is a system that we can fight. Or, like what I did in my second novel, Future of Another Timeline, which does have a group of teenage girls murdering men who are menacing them, there's a scene in there which I thought a lot about, where the main character has had an illegal abortion, so she's already really freaked out and pissed off. And she discovers, along with her friends, that there's a teacher at their school. This isn't really a spoiler. There's a teacher at their high school who's been tricking their fellow girls into going to his house and letting him take pictures of them. And he keeps promising them, “I can help you be a model.”

[00:20:15] So they find out that he's doing this, and so they figure out a way to kind of get invited to his house. And he starts showing them his, like, look book and they're obviously really pissed off. They're like riot girls, they know what they're going to do. And they're like, what are you doing to these girls? And he's like, no, no, they wanted it, they liked it. And the main character just loses her shit. 

[00:20:36] And they were just going to try to scare this guy. But she jumps him, she smashes him over the head with a bottle, and she's like, they didn't like it! And she jams her thumbs into his eyeballs, okay? 

[00:20:50] But then, the next scene is this amazing scene of solidarity with all these women in a different place who are like having this party and who are celebrating joy, and so you’re led out of this violent scene into a scene where it's like, no, female solidarity does not have to always be murdering shitty high school teachers. It can also be… I mean, I know. It can also be joy and pleasure and having a nice party where you plan to overturn the patriarchy in a gentle, friendly way. So I thought a lot about that, about how, once we had this horrible scene, I wanted people to feel held and hugged and to get after care and feel like, no, it's okay, it's alright. 

[00:21:39] But that’s not how you have to handle it. I also have total respect for the other way of doing it, for just like, yeah, now everything's fucked up.

[00:21:48] So, all right. I wanted to lead us into our next conversation which is, I really wanted to ask you guys about whether you think about violence as part of the pacing of a story? Do you feel like, oh, we have to have a scene here that's like action or violence or some kind of physical intensity? Is it pacing? Is it plotting? How do you plan putting it in? 

Lauren: [00:22:13] I love how you think I'm that level of organized writer. It's just intuitive. I just kind of, I know where I'm going ultimately, and I know some things which have to happen along the way, but I'm not that kind of structured, brilliant person.

Fonda: [00:22:27] I am super structured. 

Lauren: [00:22:29] Of course you are. Of course. 

Fona: [00:22:31] I do really think about where violence goes in terms of the narrative pacing. But not in a sort of formulaic, you know, every four chapters I should have a fight scene. I think that would be incredibly artificial and limiting. But one thing that I absolutely do always think about is where to place the violenct scenes for maximum effect and for their narrative importance. And one of the reasons why I'm not going to have two or three big fight scenes in a row is because they're going to lose their impact. You're going to get action fatigue. 

[00:23:02] And one of the things that I'm always cognizant of when I'm putting a big violent scene that's going to be a narrative turning point is that it doesn't come out of nowhere. Ideally a scene like that should feel surprising when it happens, but also in retrospect seem entirely inevitable. So, every action scene isn't just a scene where the violence happens. It's the lead up to that scene, the pressure that builds, or whatever it is that makes that violence eventually erupt. And then, the narrative consequences on the characters, on the events of the story. 

[00:23:35] So, that scene is more than just that scene. There's kind of the borders of it. And that's why the story should always feel like there's this ebb and flow of tension. And one big element of tension is the threat, the physical threat, and potential violence.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:54] Yeah, I mean, I set out to write this space opera trilogy, and part of what I was thinking is we need lots of space battles. We need to have space battles all the time. And actually, some of the feedback I got from my editor, from some other people, is yeah, there's too many space battles, they feel too repetitive, they're slowing down the story. The story's getting bogged down in space battles. We don't necessarily need three space battles here where there's a cool maneuver, or there's another cool trick, or something. Maybe have one space battle that's really cool and memorable, and not have three that are just kind of, like, cool and interesting, but still just a space battle.

[00:24:32] And I really thought about that a lot, and for the third book especially, I really was okay, I want to do this mindfully, and every space battle is also a turning point for the characters and is also like an emotional situation that is changing something that is changed in a permanent, kind of meaningful way.

[00:24:53] And I want to surprise the reader like so, in the third book, minor spoiler. There's a place where you're like, they're gonna have a really awesome space battle and then, nope, it just turns into basically they go sailing into a trap and it's a massacre and a bunch of people die in a very kind of anticlimactic way on purpose. And later then there's more of a battle, but it's not what you're expecting it to be.

[00:25:15] And I just was like, how can I keep turning expectations on their head, so that when these things happen, it's not just like, okay, I saw that coming, I saw that coming, oh, now it's happening, and there's a maneuver and we're doing a thing. It's more like, oh, okay, whoa, no, this is, yeah. And I tried to actually, part of that, and this is something I think about a lot when I'm doing anything where there's an antagonist or a villain or whatever, is the villain also is thinking about what they're gonna do. And they probably know that there's gonna be… they also think there's gonna be a battle, and what are they gonna do about it. And maybe they found a way to avoid the battle, because they're smart. They don't necessarily want to have a battle right now, because why would they? And so, trying to kind of think about it from that side, so that when you do get violence, it feels like a shock rather than just like, oh, yes, we're getting the… it's right on schedule.

Fonda: [00:26:10] I’ve written a number of books where actually there was sort of built into the story these these incidents of violence that were very regular.

[00:26:19] So, my first book Zero Boxer, he's a prize fighter. So he's at a tournament and there's a considerable number of fights that he has to go through. And I'm writing right now another book where there's sort of a tournament storyline. And so the challenge there is, yeah, I don't want these all to feel repetitive. I don't want it to feel like, oh, okay, he's going to another fight. So each one has to have a different tone to it. And there's times when I'm just going to skip through a few of those, but whatever next combat situation this character is in, there has to be a reason that I'm putting you in the scene to show you this particular thing happening. And I've actually had readers say like, oh, I thought your book would be more action-packed because. But to me it's not about the quantity. It's the quality and the impact of them. 

Lauren: [00:27:08] I think also you have to earn it. 

Fonda: [00:27:10] Yeah. 

Lauren: [00:27:14] It's disquieting to me about how… because I’m not moralistic. My books are very dark and there's quite a lot of horror and there's quite a lot of violence. And why do I write that? I think it's partly cathartic. I think some of the, some of the darkest writers I know are like, Paul Tremblay and Grady Hendrix and, Mariana Enríquez are the nicest human beings you've ever met in your entire life. The kindest.

Fonda: [00:27:36] So true, horror writers are the nicest. 

Lauren: [00:27:38] The most generous, the most fuzzy. They will have your back. They will like come to your aid.

Annalee: [00:27:45] They all have cute cats.

Lauren: [00:27:45] Totally. Or cute beards, or just you know. But I also think that you get a lot of the darkness out on the page and I think I think the human experience is that we are full of rage and we're full of violence. And there are ways to kind of play with it and play it out and part of storytelling is also for me, I think, kind of looking at how that affects society and writing into that.

[00:28:07] But yeah, I'm feeling a little bit unnerved about why my books are quite so violent, now. 

Annalee: [00:28:13] Well, I really like the violence in your books, so I'm on the, like, A+, good job, violence. 

Fonda: [00:28:18] I think you're in good company.

Lauren: [00:28:20] I've also written for kids, so you know. I'm fuzzy, even though I don't have a beard.

Annalee: [00:28:24] I also think, I've heard people compare a good violent scene in a movie to the scene in a musical where people burst into song. It's like this super, it's a hyper compressed burst of emotion. It's very physical, where people are doing things that they normally don't do with their bodies. And it just serves as this like punctuation mark, and I love that. 

[00:28:45] I wanted to get to the morality question, about violence. Because I think we're kind of trapped in, at least in the United States, we're trapped in this debate over violence, which comes out of really talking about video games, where you have the kind of concerned parents who are worried that video games are making their children violent. And then on the other side, I think you have, sort of the extreme other side, you have a kind of libertarian idea that like, do whatever you want. Have as much violence as you want, it doesn't affect anyone, you should just be allowed to express whatever you feel on the page, on the screen, and it has no repercussions whatsoever. And I wonder how you guys grapple with that. How do we get away from both of those ends of the spectrum, which I think are not helpful ways to frame it? 

Lauren: [00:29:37] Well, I think it's very concerning and messed up that I believe the weapons manufacturers get a licensing fee for using their guns in video games. And every time whatever appears, obviously I'm a deep weapons expert. They’ll actually get a licensing fee, and charging people to use that.

[00:29:59] I was at the Cheltenham Science Festival recently, and it was kind of messed up because the careers tent was actually an arcade, and the three major exhibitors there were, Northrop Grumman, whatever it is, BAE Systems, and Lockheed Martin. And my 15-year-old came with me, and she was like, oh, I'm gonna mess with them! And she, like, goes up to them, and she's like, but aren't you in weapons? Don't you make weapons? They're like, no, no, no, we're in the defense industry. 

[00:30:25] And to be fair, like, I think Lockheed Martin helped build the James Webb Telescope, so there is that aspect to it, but it's also… I don't think it's. What was interesting was one of the people was also telling me about how they've actually adapted the tank controllers to be an Xbox controller because that is what kids are familiar with. 

[00:30:44] So I do think that there is a line to that, and I do think, I see the British Army has got a lot of ads out at the moment in London. And my kid was also noticing them, and she was like, trying to find out why there's so many ads. And they’re ridiculous. Something about like, the most fun you can have. Join the army. It's like, sorry, what? And the violence there is that it's September, which means that a lot of kids have not got into the universities that they wanted to go to. And now they're being advertised to as the army is a fun time, and they get to use Xbox controllers, and they’ve played Call of Duty, and they played all these other games. And it was fun blowing people up. I don't know what the direct line is. I mean, I love a violent video game. It's really cathartic and fun. But I do think people, it can become the same way, I guess, hardcore pornography and like, can become desensitizing. 

Annalee: [00:31:30] Do you worry about that in your work, though? Like when you're writing a violent scene or publishing a book, do you worry that people read it and it will inspire them? Is that something that you think is a real concern?

Lauren: [00:31:42] I don't think so. I think because the violence is messed up and it's not sexy and it's not a fun time. But there might be someone who takes that to heart, but it's also, I'm not putting you in that position. I very rarely write from the killer's perspective in like the actual… No, I do sometimes, that's not true. But it's not a fun time, it's not sexy, you're not sitting there going like, oh yeah, like, you know, get that knife right into her eyeball. 

Charlie Jane: [00:32:10] Yeah.

Fonda: [00:32:11] The thing that is so incredibly frustrating, I think, about the, whole discourse of video games and violence, et cetera, in the United States is, Japan has the world's highest per capital consumption of video games, and they have just an incredibly small fraction of the amount of violence that we have. So I don't think that violence… I think there is absolutely a level of what is age appropriate when it comes to violence in children's media but unless I'm writing for kids. I'm usually writing for adults. I think that we have always used violence in our stories to process the world and to better understand it. And that in, ever since, you know, we were cave people around a fire , we have told violent stories. Everything from the Greek myths to Beowulf, to everything that we've told. I mean, go back to the original fairytales, they're horribly violent.

[00:33:14] And violence in stories has been the way that we have, as primitive people, been like, okay if you wander away from the tribe and go into the dark forest, really bad things can happen to you and you could be eaten by a bear and graphically we're going to tell you exactly how that's going to happen so that, you don't have to go through that experience yourself. And that we can learn as a society what the consequences are of certain actions.

[00:33:45] So I don’t... People have asked me, it's like, oh, well, do you worry about the violence you put in there? I just worry about telling a good story. I tell a story that, I feel, doesn't gloss over the violence, that is going to present it authentically, that is going to feel true to the characters, true to the world that I've created, and then people can decide whether or not they want to partake in that.

Lauren: [00:34:10] If I can just add to that, so the Catalan and Spanish editions of Bridge, and it's about an alternate reality, and she experiences multiple versions of herself. And one of them is a domestic violence victim. And the cover of Bridge in, it was either the Spanish or the Catalan edition, it's kind of like ripped pages, and you see the different faces, like, multiple through. And the one had a black eye, and she was bleeding, and like, a little corner of blood from her mouth. But she was also beautiful. And I was like, I just feel very uncomfortable with this. And I have friends who are experts in domestic violence, violence against women in South Africa, and I ran it past them and I'm like, am I overreacting here, and they were like, absolutely not.

[00:34:49] So, there is a risk of glamorizing violence, and my publisher was amazing. I was like, look, I just feel uncomfortable with this, these are the reasons why. They're like, oh my god, absolutely, no, no problem at all, and they changed it immediately. 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:58] That’s awesome. I mean, I actually, I love violent media. I just watched John Wick 4, and I really loved it. I thought it was super fun. I love, like, super cartoony action movies where there's just a huge body count, it feels like a cartoon, and it doesn't feel like real violence. I actually find that very cathartic at times. I feel like it can be actually just very, kind of, a healthy way of dealing with the frustrations of the world in a way. As long as you're able to process that it's fictional. And I think that people are able to make that distinction between fantasy and reality. I think that like a healthy, human mind can actually make that distinction.

[00:35:42] But I think that in my own work, I do try to, you know, if I kill a bunch of people, I then go and say, well, this person who we just killed, who was just an anonymous bad guy, was a prized gardener, and actually really loved growing vegetables, and just got drafted into being part of this war, and didn't actually even really want to be there, but we just killed him, and that's too bad.

[00:36:03] And I try to put a human face on anybody that I kill because I want to, and I try to mourn the people I kill in my books. But at the same time, I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying violence and taking pleasure in mayhem. I just think, yeah, it has to be a good story, and I think that the problem is when the lines between fantasy and reality get blurred in various ways, like what you were talking about with the video game controllers in tanks, that makes me very uncomfortable. And obviously we have a problem in this country with gun fetishism, and basically, we're all hostage to the, the, the gun lobby.

[00:36:44] And, you know, that's a terrifying fact that does blur fantasy and reality in a terrible way. 

Annalee: [00:36:49] I mean, I think in the U. S. context where we have these debates over violence and guns, often the same policy makers are kind of making the argument that guns should be legal everywhere and everyone should be able to get access to guns without any kind of background check. But at the same time we shouldn't allow kids or even adults to have access to video games or stories that have violence that we don't like, because of the fact that you know, if kids are exposed to this stuff, they're going to become violent. And that just feels really convenient to me, the idea that we're going to blame art and creative works for violence that's being created by the state, and being created by people's access to deadly weapons when they're in perhaps really fragile mental states.

[00:37:42] So I think a lot of that rhetoric really is this effort to blur fantasy and reality in a way that people don't actually. Like you were saying, I think people are able to distinguish the difference. But if you have an actual gun in your hand, that's the problem, not having the controller in your hand and, and just playing Baldur's Gate, or whatever having sex with a wolf guy. Bear guy, sorry.

Fonda: [00:38:07] Thank you so much!

Annalee: [00:38:07] Thank you everyone!

[Applause from the panel audience.]

Charlie Jane: [00:38:11] Thanks so much for listening to our live recording. The magic of recorded liveness. If you just somehow stumbled on this podcast, we’re Our Opinions Are Correct, and you can find us wherever you find podcasts. And we really appreciate you subscribing. And if you really like us, please leave a review because it makes a huge difference. 

[00:38:31] Also, you can find us on Mastodon at wandering.shop/ ouropinions, on patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect and on Instagram at @ouropinions. 

[00:38:46] Thanks so much to our incredible audio producer Veronica Simonetti. Thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music and thanks again to you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode, but if you're a patron, you'll get a mini episode next week and we'll be hanging out with you on Discord. Bye!

[00:39:01] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]​