Morality
and responsibility ... Let's be honest, art is known for both entertaining its
audience with violence as well as for moral education. While there's a long
tradition of showing war and battles in heroic light there is also another
tradition with artists like the painter Vasily Vereshchagin who aimed to show the horrors of war in order to promote peace.
At the same
time there's also law. For example, here in Germany those who describe violence as beautiful, romantic or otherwise
positive and/or harmless can be sentenced to financial penalty or even go to
prison for a year. Most countries in the world have similar laws. Being a
moderator of Fanfiktion.de (FF.de),
a German mass archive for fanfiction, prose and poetry, it's my task to lock
stories that violate the German law and the rules of the website, for example
by plagiarizing, downplaying rape or uploading pornographic texts. What's
interesting about this is that many immature "writers" who obviously
don't care about the rules or even the laws of the country they live in
consider it an insolent restriction of their freedom. They say we're just
power-mad and enjoy suppressing them, and our admin was even labelled as a
dictator. And no, it isn't a joke.