portraitoftheoddity:

Absolutely.

First off, darkfic as an umbrella term encompasses a lot of subjects and ‘dark’ topics, abuse being only one of many. It may be therapeutic for people who’ve endured abuse, but it can also be helpful for people who’ve struggled with other forms of trauma, or with mental illness, or other negative things. Depictions of intense, dark experiences can serve as a catharsis by being a direct analog for one’s own experiences, but they can also function more indirectly as a parallel, or a metaphor. Someone who has not been assaulted, but who has struggled with mental illness, may find a story about an assault victim resonating with them as they can identify with the fear and lack of control. And someone who has never been through a specific traumatic experience, but has a lot of fear of it and cultural anxiety around it, may feel bolstered by stories of characters surviving and recovering from that experience.

So for many people, with many different experiences, there can be a direct, therapeutic/comforting benefit to darkfic. 

But darkfic doesn’t need to be therapeutic.

There are, of course, other kinds of benefits. Someone who has never been abused might read a story featuring abuse (and clearly tagged for it) and because of it, identify potential warning signs in a real life relationship down the road and know to get out early before things get worse. Or, they might develop a better understanding of what abuse victims go through and as a result, have more empathy for real-life survivors they encounter. 

But it’s also 100% ok to like darkfic purely for entertainment value! It is, after all, fiction. 

Dark stories challenge us – and we can really enjoy that challenge. They take us to extremes of emotion and the human experience. They plumb the depths of the human id. Even someone with the most charmed life still lives in a world where bad things happen, and even the sweetest, naive person has the capacity for darkness in them. Darkfic lets all of us explore those in relative safety. It makes us feel, and can thrill and horrify us as much as any thriller or horror movie. It can make us consider our own darkness, and be more aware of it. And it can take us to a place so much worse than our reality, that when we resurface into our mundane lives, there’s a sense of relief; we’ve escaped from our escapism, and our hum-drum lives seem so much better and more manageable by comparison. 

Plenty of people create dark content who aren’t abuse survivors. There are books with very dark themes that are written by, edited by, published by, and consumed and made popular by people who have not been abused, but which may prove a lifeline for a survivor – one that might not have existed if the entire genre was limited to only people with lived experience. And by accepting that anyone can produce or consume dark content, we allow survivors the protection of anonymity, by not forcing anyone to disclose and reveal their trauma in order to justify liking a work without being harassed and shamed for it. Creating an exclusive club of heavily-scrutinized creators and readers who have to be ‘this traumatized to ride’ helps no one. Hell, trying to pass moral judgement on anyone by scrutinizing the potential reasons they may have for enjoying certain kinds of fictional reading material, rather than looking at their actions toward real breathing human beings, is utterly inane. Especially when fiction – including, and sometimes especially dark fiction – can be used to expand our horizons beyond our own lived experiences make us more thoughtful, empathetic people on the whole.