As a person who loves reading and spends more than 50 percent of my day on phone, it became necessary for me to know what sort of content, I am digesting. The majority of it is reading. I read not only paperbacks and hardcover but also from various sites and apps of comics and books. So in a time when everyone can be a writer, where everyone can be heard, we readers do need to know the validation of the content and the effect it has on us.
I cannot condemn others for a thing that I enjoy myself too. I do understand the appeal of the perfect fantasy life or the need of escaping reality. However, the major growing concern with unchecked fiction is that it not only engages into different sensitive topics but also raises some major concerns about the handling of it.
Especially, the young adult genre novel which has become so diversified, from dragons and fairies to BTS and one direction and other fan fiction. While many of these stories are excellent, some cause concern. There is research on how these sites affect the students in studies and how some of them affect the readers based on the type of content they are reading.
There are many steps taken to ensure the level of the content is proper according to the age of the reader, but we never know who might be reading the stories.
On one hand, the concept of bad boys, good girls, bad girls, werewolves and vampire mates, etc make an excellent plot, on the other hand, the violence in such stories goes unnoticed. The sexism, misogyny, the idea of a controlling male, a submissive female, or vice versa, drills the idea that these types of actions are okay. The stories of selling your body to the devil or the playboy stereotype make the idea of love revolting.
People did not like Mr. Darcy because he was brooding or rich or blunt but because he gave the idea that a person in love changes to make oneself better and to rise above the hate and the dislike of some ideas.
So while I will never tell you to give up on reading I would like you all to differentiate a right behavior from a wrong one.
After all, it is true that “we become what we read.”
