So apparently, the anti movement is now citing the Jaws effect as a reason why Morally Bad Fanworks Make People Do Bad Things In The Real World, and I’m just… honestly staring into the camera like I’m on The Office, because yes, the Jaws effect is a salient example of how fiction - or rather, reactions to fiction - can have an impact on the real world, but it demonstrates exactly the opposite point to the one antis think it does.

Because when Jaws came out, sharks weren’t the ones reading it. No humans reacted to Jaws by saying, “oh, fucking SWEET, seeing this enormous shark murder people in a book/film means it’s totally okay for ME to murder people.” No: what happened was, people looked at Jaws and said, “wow, this completely fictional story about a shark doing murder must be STONE COLD FACTS, and therefore justifies KILLING EVERY SHARK,” to the point where actual science about sharks was ignored and their populations were decimated and it’s taken us literal decades to walk back even a fraction of the harm done by shark-fearful zealots.

The Jaws effect doesn’t support the claim that dark, squicky or otherwise problematic fanworks can turn people into predators. It’s evidence that, when reactionary people confuse fiction with reality and use their fear of the former to justify acts of persecution in the latter, there are terrible, widespread consequences that do nothing to mitigate the thing they were actually scared of in the first place, but which have a toxic cultural half-life regardless.

It’s evidence, in other words, that the anti approach to things is a goddamn bad idea.