Friday, June 1, 2007

LiveJournal, writers and taboos--oh my!

By now, most everyone knows about the Livejournal fiasco where 500+ communities and personal journals were suspended and/or deleted. Cnet.com covered the story, with some interesting quotes from affected bloggers, and yesterday Barb posted some great thoughts on the situation over at our own blog.

To keep a long story short, it all boiled down to this: if people or communities listed certain trigger words in their profile pages, they were shut down. Phrases like"slash", "incest" and "shota" were targeted, which according to the LJ head honchos, 'could encourage illegal behavior'. In the process, many fanfiction writers and communities were slammed since, yes, many fics deal with themes like incest or other controversial subjects.

A number of issues have been raised in the wake of this. Just thinking about something taboo or illegal isn't a crime--neither is writing about it. Certainly not in a fictional sense. But do some topics push the envelope too far? Are there some taboos that should never be broken, especially in published fiction? If so, what are they and why?

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