However, one point Calculating... made bears outlining again; if you look at a lot of the responses on the first few pages, and in particular the responses to the (in some cases perhaps overly harsh) criticism of the story, a lot of people DID argue, "Oh, that's just Conan," and laughed it off. I put it to (generic) you that that is, in fact, a problematic reaction. The story says, "Take Conan, the unstoppable force, and give him a magic lust compulsion, which then backfires on the evil woman who attempted to trap him via lust." That's a pretty horrific scenario. But no one in the story - least of all Conan - feels any remorse about what he (almost) did, and back here in the real world, the audience rushes to apologize and explain it away... that feels pretty icky to me.
I've got other responses to what Calculating... said earlier, but I want to speak to this.
I've got to say, this plot actually works for me. I see no reason to apologize for Conan.
Perhaps its the fiction thing, but the fact is that Atali was attempting to use magical mind control lust to entrap and destroy Conan for no good reason at all. There was no kindness, compassion, or justice in her actions. Conan was a victim of her mind control powers - and not in complete control of his own faculties - but his incredibly awesome Conanness caused the situation to blow up in Atali's face. That's a story.
I think we can all agree that rape is bad.
Mind control, on the other hand, doesn't actually exist. However, I'm pretty sure we can all agree that mind control is also bad.
Is mind control worse than rape? Is rape worse than mind control? Is mind control so bad that a failed attempt at mind control exploding into rape is just desserts (not in the "real justice" sense, in the "poetic" or "narrative" justice sense)? I don't pretend to know the answer to any of those questions, but I am firm in my belief that the answer is not a foregone conclusion.
What a lot of people seem to be reacting to is the fact that the situation
resembles something else. Atali kind of resembles a flirt and her "mind control" resembles the lame excuses for rape that we hear a lot: she was too cute, dressed to attractively, in the wrong neighborhood.
I understand that these are not completely insane interpretations of the text. What I'd like to propose, however, is that they are not the only interpretations of the text. To some readers Atali is not a human woman, her evil mind control is simply evil mind control, and that's evil enough that maybe the situation is not so cut-and-dried as it seems to others.
Ok, I'm on a roll here so I'm going to go ahead and include my response to Calculating...
First of all, I have no idea what you mean when you say "the real fear felt by a fictional character." To me, that phrase is an oxymoron. It doesn't make any more sense to me than "the red part of a blue dress" or "the up part of moving down" (don't get snotty at me science guys; I know full well that there is a red part of a blue dress AND an up part of moving down, but I can't think of a better way to express myself. I mean in common parlance, not science fact. Go back to Escape Pod). Perhaps this is our central disagreement: I don't see any reality in fiction.
Secondly, it sounds like you are trying to say that we need to be careful of fiction that talks about bad things because it can influence real lives, like people who read Gor and become "Goreans," people who take Star Trek too seriously, and people who use Tolkien's work as an excuse for lame graffiti. You're making this point in a roundabout way, and I think I understand why. It's hard to advocate for censorship in this day and age.
My response to this can be summed up as "crazy is as crazy does." John Norman's work - that's Gor - never
made anybody crazy; people who were disturbed, probably because of events in their past or unfortunate quirks of biology, ended up patterning their crazy after the books they read. Nothing about Star Trek
makes people obsessive; people who find Star Trek and also have holes in their emotional lives chose to fill those holes with Star Trek. If you can find the part of Tolkien that
forces people to graffiti "Frodo Lives" on things, I'll eat one of my hats.
If you're crazy, you're going to do crazy things. You might be inspired by a crazy thing you read somewhere, but it's not like you'd be a perfectly sane, safe, and normal person if only - if only! - you'd never read the wrong short story. Someone who's going to rape is going to rape whether or not he reads Conan the Barbarian short stories. You can't stop him by taking away the short stories - you need to intervene earlier, at whatever point some trauma causes his life to depart from sanity.
Ultimately, I find the idea that fiction can "cause" evil to be destructive for two reasons.
Firstly, when you say that fiction can cause someone to do something bad, you are simplifying the reasons that people become screwed up. You are replacing "he could have been a good person, but then he got caught up in complicated economic/sociopolitical/personal events that led him to a warped way of thinking, and then his cries for help were ignored" with "oops - read the wrong story!" The thing is, in some ways, it's a lot more comforting to think that stories are to blame. You can save people from stories. It's a lot harder to look at how our societies are deeply screwed up, deeply unfair, and incredibly warped and then try to figure out how to fix them. Really fixing our problems also involves a lot more sacrifice.
Secondly, that way lies censorship, close-mindedness, and
damnation. I refuse to live in a world of censorship. I demand the right to read, write, create, and consume ideas however the hell I want, no matter how distasteful anybody finds them. I demand that people who want to read, write, create, and consume ideas that I find distasteful have the right to do so. Period.