I understand where you're coming from, but this goes into a very troublesome place where we start dictating what can jokes be about and what can they be about and such things, as things go, evolve into what can stories do and when we take it to it's furthest extreme, we'll end up with fiction that can't do anything ever at all because someone MIGHT be offended by it. And since anyone can possibly be offended by anything, how long before we start censoring non fiction too?TheGreatness25 wrote:But something like pedophilia, sexual harassment, and sexual assault hit too close to home for many people. You can call them "overly-sensitive" all you want, but if unfortunately you knew someone who was a victim of that, you might not be laughing. That's why many people don't laugh at it and don't find it funny. If you had some sort of disease and the series kept jabbing at it and making fun of it, you'd be very upset by it too. You wouldn't just laugh it off and say, "Well it's not meant to be taken seriously." But my entire point is you don't need to know someone or suffer from something yourself to have sympathy and empathy for others and acknowledge that something just is not funny and cannot be made into a joke. Brushing it off like that shows a real lack of compassion, understanding, sympathy, empathy, and humanity, in my opinion. Sorry, but I can't budge on that point.
Assuming people get offended which is a big iff since people react differently to things that remind them of bad experiences, as I mentioned before, my dad was in war and has worked in prison for years, he loves war movies and prison movies, dramatic and piss takes. He doesn't care, other people can't do that, does that mean we shouldn't do that stuff because someone might get offended?
My answer is a resounding no, maybe its because fiction has never influenced me in any actual way, it's just a thing that I do because it entertains me to watch or read or talk about it but this whole idea of policing what people can say through stories or jokes is a slippery slope that can easily grow into a beast and I do not trust other people enough to NOT fuck something as delicate as this up.
You're also making a massive assumptions like people who joke about dark subject matter don't have empathy, which is just wrong. I'm a big animal lover but that doesn't mean I can't burst out laughing at a roadkill joke or something along those lines just like how my black friends can laugh at "n-word jokes" or how I can laugh at jokes where my non-Croat friends call me an inbred, Slav moron.