the rachel drama/hack, the pronoun struggle sessions, and now this (most likely) false accusation against beatnik show that there's a lot of asshats with no morality willing to use anything against the site, and we need to get a lot smarter and stop falling for it
I'm unhappy because daddy used to beat me, it has nothing to do with this website
Creating an atmosphere of respect and ensuring everyone is comfortable posting here is one thing, and a laudible goal (although it would also be nice to be able to tell people to fuck off). But you want to feel comfortable at the theatre, the audience wants to be able to applaud or withhold applause, and the players want to be able to express their art. It would still be considered wrong if someone thought the characters on stage were real, if they couldn't tell that behind those characters the players may or may not really believe what they are saying.
I meant feeling unhappiness with regards to reading the posts here as messages from people rather than from fictional characters. Man, I'm sorry that your dad used to beat you. That fucking sucks.
My point is that it's unfair to assume people are actors on a stage playing characters if/when they are real people expressing real thoughts and emotions. It's an unsubstantiated accusation. It's invalidating and alienating.
Edit: fuck I can't figure out quotations
Actors are also real people, and their emotional expression can be taken seriously, but their characters aren't 'real'. Or take a standup comedian, they may be speaking as 'themself' but it is still a comic persona that you see on stage, the character of which is distorted by the medium, and you have to treat it as such. The medium of posting here - partially through the style differences between posting and actually talking, but mostly imo due to anonymity and the screen barrier - creates such a distortion, and the alienation is a result of that distorition, of failing to understand that it is a distorition.
The thing is, although alienation is a downside, this distortion also has upsides, like for example it allows people to be funnier, more raw, etc.