Fiction is a really good way to "safely" explore horrific things.

However, it's easy to accidentally overlook how important the "distance" between the storyteller and the person reading/viewing/experiencing it is. When you move from writing a story in text and putting it in a book to verbally narrating something to people in person, a storyteller can stumble if they didn't take into consideration how in-person context might make change power dynamics enough that something okay in other contexts can suddenly become bad.

Let me give you an example. Bestselling romance writer writes a best-selling novel about Hunky McShirt'sOff that all the fans adore. It subverts tropes, it turns ideas on their head, it uplifts men and women alike. Anyone who wants to read it can buy it off the shelf or gets it from the library. This is cool, because the one reading it has agency about being exposed to it. They choose to leave their home and use their time or money to go find it and bring it into their life. Because they have agency, they can engage, or stop engaging, with the content as they wish.

Now imagine the same writer cornering their teen son in their bedroom and breathlessly narrating their bestselling romance book to him, in a situation where he is physically prevented from leaving, and the person narrating has full control over his food, shelter, education, access to travel, etc.

Same story, same book. And, funnily enough, it's not actually the book that is wrong. It's the power dynamics between people that take the situation from fine into abusive. The second example is a case where the teenage son has things that affect his well-being in a pragmatic way potentially imperiled if he doesn't sit there and listen to his parent tell him a sexual story, because the balance of power is in the adult's favor, because of the parent relationship and the dynamics between them that puts the storyteller in direct control of the listener's basic survival needs.

That's a VERY different situation than a book sitting on a shelf in a bookstore where every reader is free to pick it up or put it down with no real consequences for choosing either way.

Tabletop RPG stuff is also in person, and that changes the storytelling dynamics to some extent. Most people are socially-aware enough to realize you aren't going to do a horror or erotic tabletop RPG role-play with your parents or your kids or siblings. But when you're among peers, it can get trickier to navigate what's okay and what's not, and what the dynamics are.

Directly surveying players on what they can handle in a really up-front way is a way of giving people agency to tap out of something. It restores agency, which makes it safer for everyone.

Sexual violence in storytelling is a tricky thing. But it's important to realize fiction is not reality. It can be influenced by real things, but the character on the page is not a real person and never will be. Nor will the reader magically transform into the characters on the page--even if they might see aspects of themselves reflected in them.

People distill discourse about these things into black and white terms where somehow a story involving a difficult topic is suddenly 100% equivalent to the thing in real life...but it's NOT. In reality, a reader/viewer's interaction with dark topics is much more complicated and nuanced, and there's just as much a spot for healing to come from telling stories that are dark as there is for anything else.

One of my favorite authors is Anne Bishop. Her breakout series was the Black Jewels Trilogy. Practically every character in the series, though, is a survivor of sexual abuse, and a bunch of that is described vividly on the page.

Despite that, the series overall is sort of a "cozy dark fantasy", if I had to give someone an idea of how it "feels".

Why?

Well, because the theme of the whole series is kind of unflinching acceptance that people live through HORRIFIC things...but can still obtain found family and peace afterwards.

Honestly, I've never quite found another series like it, that combines unflinching renditions of horrific violence, then turns around and gives a big chunk of those characters warm loving families with unicorns and loving spouses and dogs and kittens running about. Most cozy fantasy seems to think you only deserve cozy if nothing all that bad has happened to you. As if "survivor of terrible shit" is incompatible with "happy ending".

Anne Bishop is the only author I've read serving up stories that say, "Yeah, what you lived through is royally fucked up and we're going to look right at it and not gloss it over--but also, have some puppies and a unicorn, you've earned it." And being able to see those horrible things spelled out hits differently.

But the folks who have decided that "violence and sex in stories is always bad because--" seem to have missed the memo that storytelling is how REAL HUMAN BEINGS process and come to terms with fears and trauma. And conflate storytelling with the actual act, and conflate story characters who are given stories full of pain with real people who have actually been through pain. (Which I personally think is some mental scarring from the religions that tell you if you even THINK something you're going straight to hell and will burn forever.)

Anyway. My point is that when it comes to storytelling with dark elements, the actual in-person power dynamics between storyteller and reader/listener matter MUCH more than the content of the story. One's agency to partake or not partake in fiction has a bigger impact than the content of the story--especially since dark stories can help us kick around ideas and figure out how one wants to respond to them.

(Plenty of people read a story they don't like and say "Fuck that shit!" in the end...reading something doesn't necessarily mean you'll slavishly accept it without thinking. The point of reading and storytelling is to think about things, and you won't always agree with the author!)

Horror play is a different beast than your run of the mill ttrpg crowd. You are trying to ride a line where you get under someone's skin but not enough to actually cause them to tap out. Flirting with the darkness is the point. Sometimes themes of sexualized violence find their way into horror, particularly if you are aping off of old school horror tropes. It is a gold standard rule to never impose sexual violence on a player character generally and it is safer over all to just exclude it entirely from games that are not an excersise in giving you the actual chills.

Most gothic horror stuff D&D modules pass for horror is actually pretty calculated. It still follows the curve of a power fantasy but with a Halloween haunted house-y coat of paint. Curse of Straud for instance will give you all manner of tropes you would find from R. L Stien novels from Goosebumps to the stuff targeted towards young adults but it's still designed to be overcome. You gain more powers as you go and become more capable and expect to have a fair shot of surviving because you are heroes.

The hard core horror players look for a different curve. You are never more capable than you will be at the start of the story. Some things are designed to give you odds of survival where the question is not if someone will die but when. You might be fortunate to lose half the party... It is sort of a trust exercise. Going into a table that seeks to spook you properly you let people know your weaknesses because your DM is trying to hit you in a way that is disturbing but tolerable. Coming away from that kind of experience actually can make for pretty solid friendships because sharing a faux traumatic event allows circumstances for you all to be vulnerable together provided it is done in a space where everyone knows they are safe.

They're dungeon masters not middle school chaperones