A sad gay rat that’s in to many fandoms

if you report fanfiction to police and tell them they should “investigate this because fictional children are being harmed in these fanfiction and I don’t like it!!!!!”, you will get either of these outcomes:

the police will laugh at your face

they will investigate fanfiction, and while they waste their time investigating fanfiction and victimless “crimes”, real children are being hurt elsewhere, and you are taking the police’s time and resources away from these real children. so instead of doing something to actually help save real children, police are too busy trying to protect fictional ones that exist only in fantasies

also ao3 abides by american laws, so actually everything that is posted on the site is legal in america. and no, it’s not “child abuse” or “rape” or “csem” if the “victims” are fictional characters who were harmed in a fictional world (I believe that’s why it’s legal and allowed).

you don’t have to like it. you can find it extremely disgusting. but whether or not you like it, your personal discomfort is not law. for the record, anything that involves (fictional) children in sexual situations makes me super uncomfortable. so I just… don’t seek out fics that I know will make me uncomfortable. it is in fact that easy.

if you are allergic to peanut butter and you swallow a spoonful of peanut butter, knowing damn well that you are allergic, then the one who’s to blame is you. peanut butter alone will not and cannot hurt you unless you shove it in your mouth.

AO3 was built because fics were being banned merely because a queer relationship was mentioned. If we allowed censorship on ao3, who would determine what is allowed? Would it ban every FICTIONAL event that includes illegal activity? Would kink or explicit material be banned? Would ANY queer rep be banned?

if you report fanfiction to police and tell them they should “investigate this because fictional children are being harmed in these fanfiction and I don’t like it!!!!!”, you will get either of these outcomes:

the police will laugh at your face

they will investigate fanfiction, and while they waste their time investigating fanfiction and victimless “crimes”, real children are being hurt elsewhere, and you are taking the police’s time and resources away from these real children. so instead of doing something to actually help save real children, police are too busy trying to protect fictional ones that exist only in fantasies

also ao3 abides by american laws, so actually everything that is posted on the site is legal in america. and no, it’s not “child abuse” or “rape” or “csem” if the “victims” are fictional characters who were harmed in a fictional world (I believe that’s why it’s legal and allowed).

you don’t have to like it. you can find it extremely disgusting. but whether or not you like it, your personal discomfort is not law. for the record, anything that involves (fictional) children in sexual situations makes me super uncomfortable. so I just… don’t seek out fics that I know will make me uncomfortable. it is in fact that easy.

if you are allergic to peanut butter and you swallow a spoonful of peanut butter, knowing damn well that you are allergic, then the one who’s to blame is you. peanut butter alone will not and cannot hurt you unless you shove it in your mouth.

And there was a woman there who was some form of disability advocate (it was the 90s so her existence in the company was a minor miracle) and apparently she completely blew his mind on that project.

See, he'd imagined that this service was exclusively gonna be for deaf people. Obviously very useful for the very small number of people who couldn't hear their phone, but why would you even own a mobile phone if you couldn't hear?

But she described to him all the times he might want to read a message instead of listen to it. Maybe he was in a loud football crowd. Maybe there was important info that he needed to copy down that was spoken too fast. Maybe he was holding his sleeping newborn (me) and didn't want his phone to be loud and wake them up.

This doesn't feel as revolutionary as all that to those of us that have only ever known phones with the ability 'send text message', but given the timing and placement of this conversation I wonder if this woman and this project is *part of the reason text messaging exists*. The first text (SMS) message was sent by Vodafone UK in 1992 - where + when this conversation was happening - and then for a long time it was supported exclusively for 'messages from the carrier', and this project was an early potential extra use of the SMS protocol.