little violence
- Lauren Jane
- Jan 21
- 2 min read
Updated: Jan 26
In fiction, I can explore this safely by framing it within clearly defined terms of real-world harm and focusing on controlled, fictional, or symbolic forms of violence—the kind people encounter in stories —and BDSM can offer emotional release. 'little violence' has a little bit of everything.
little violence embodies all kinds of violence, consensual sexual interactions of force and explored boundaries, the violence of having desire rewrite your path and your ideas about yourself, the sudden intrusion of violence from another person's arrogance and righteous indifference to your existence, their entitlement to destroy you to get what they want, to the welcome and breathless violence of falling suddenly in love - my characters face all these in different ways (it is worth noting there is no SA, we don't need SA to talk about violence).
Violence in fiction has existed for as long as storytelling. From myths to action films (modern myths), conflict has always been a way to explore fear, courage, justice, and consequence. And even postmodernism has gripped media, storytelling, and modern thought, as good and evil become less total and meaningful, violence remains a path to narrative release and closure.
There is something human about watching tension resolve, even if order isn't restored because it never existed in the first place. We like it when a punch lands.
It’s contained.
Real life rarely offers that kind of closure.
Fictional violence is safe the way a pressure valve isn't a trigger - only minimally and in the right conditions.
One of my favourite sex scenes in my book is a half-naked conversation, spoken in half-sentences, between two people who are basically strangers, that largely explores the word 'no.'
Those moments are important becase enjoying high-intensity or fantasy violence doesn’t mean I want chaos or harm in real life. It’s emphatically the opposite. I appreciate fictional or symbolic violence becase I respond to intensity, and I am drawn to the illusion of clarity it provides. In a safe environment, fiction provides clear stakes, visible consequences, obvious dominance and defeat, the idea that positive actions matter more at scale than negative ones, that comfort will be offered... In a messy world where almost none of that is materially true, the clarity of fictional violence can be comforting.
True violence destroys lives and communities, it eats at our ideas about safety and justice, it encodes punishment into our worldviews and undermines our ideas of goodness -- our own and other people's. Violence in our lives deserves to be taken seriously. And part of that is acknowledging that humans are drawn to intensity in many forms. That intensity, including violence, is like an appetite, and part of learning to live with our better natures means learning about and finding safe ethical outlets for it, how to live and thrive in goodness while knowing our full complexity. In facing this with fiction, we grow to understand ourselves more deeply, more personally.
Enjoying a little violence isn’t about hurting anyone. It’s about feeling something intense and honest, then returning to the real world with new self-knowledge.
