Pristine

For those who follow me and my videos on YouTube and on TikTok, please remember that The Freak Circus is not a game or media meant to be played by anyone under the age of 18.

It features dark, sensitive and graphic content that is meant for an adult audience.

Myself, Neko and the entirety of the TFC team are incredibly uncomfortable that there are people under the age of 18 interacting with the game and fandom, especially when we’ve taken a great amount of care to properly tag and label things across the board— its labeled as such on itchio, the official blog is clearly labeled as well with no room for misinterpretation:

The Freak Circus is not meant for anyone under the age of 18.

We are also not the parents of other people’s children, and are not responsible nor obligated to witch hunt every single minor that posts in the TFC tag or comments somewhere. I have become incredibly wary to interact with people who do not have a posted age (though people can and do lie on the internet, I’m quite aware of that) largely because there are many people who just don’t respect that boundary.

(There are a lot of fans who don’t respect many boundaries, but that’s a separate issue and one that I can ignore a lot easier.)

There’s very little an adult creator can do to restrict access to their adult-but-not-explicit media without also risking their media to be blacklisted, banned, restricted to those who show government IDs, ect. Even if someone is an adult, they should never be forced to show their photo ID to a company or to a government in order to access the internet or to interact with a piece of media, and it’s the biggest reason I use tags instead of labels to try and find a responsible but aware balance with who can see and access my content.

For context, the whole TFC team grew up and were fundamentally part of an internet where governments and companies did not have access to people’s personal information in the same way they do now— the idea of them even asking for more than your name was strange. I know I’m not the only adult who would agree that the internet is a very different place then where it started, and very much worse in some regards (I hate the state of modern day social media and the commodification of art) but there is only so much one person can do without going completely insane.

Me and Neko have agreed on many occasions how important it is to keep the game accessible for people, because there are plenty of adults who cannot access the game otherwise if there was a price tag on it or if the game itself was restricted behind Patreon or a similar process.

We just… fundamentally disagree on restricting it in that way, and its exhausting to take every reasonable measure to communicate this boundary and still have people disregard it or get angry that we aren’t ’doing more’.

I’m going to preface this that I mean you no anger or malice, anon. I try my best to assume nowadays that people are using translators since a lot of my followers with TFC are not from America nor speak English natively— and that’s awesome! Genuinely, I think to be more aware of the wholeness of the world has helped me appreciate all of us who live on it. You even said yourself you don’t mean your ask maliciously, and I appreciate that.

But it makes me want to take a moment and say I’m not trying to sound like a bitch even though I’m probably gonna sound like a bitch, and its just because I’m trying to be firm and careful with my words.

This blog has existed for about 15 years. I made this blog when I was in high school, when I was young and silly wanted to talk about fandom things and write my fanfiction. It has always been my safe little corner of the internet, the place I could hang out when I was stressed, scared, angry, unsure.

It’s the place that helped me get through when I forcibly removed myself from my parents’ household and joined the military (despite the fact I hate the military as an entity and those four years were traumatizing enough). It’s the place that helped me meet my wife, my girlfriend, my friends that support me even when I make it hard because I’m the kind of person who takes on a lot of pain and effort for the people around me. It’s the place that helped me deal with the loss of my little brother several years ago, helped me deal with the grief and existentialism that sometimes gets so bad its really hard to focus on anything else.

So all of that to say is this: this blog is not a TFC blog, this is MY blog. This is MY corner of the world, and it just so happens that in MY corner of the world I am seeing my government kill innocent people, seeing them detain and rip apart entire families based on the color of their skin, the sound of their voice, or just because they can. I have people whom I love who are accosted by this fear every single day, afraid for their own safety or the safety of their neighbors. I have so little in the way to help them— I don’t have money, I don’t live somewhere I can protest, I have very few things I can do while I’m watching my country fall into some level of chaos I cannot escape from across a LOT of my social media where I continue to feel more and more helpless and afraid that suddenly I’ll just stop hearing from one of my friends. I’m scared, always a little scared, and always feeling a little helpless.

So if I reblog a post on occasion to spread awareness and help other people who need the information, and if I use my own personal blog because that’s the ONE place I have where I feel like my voice matters, then I am well within my rights to do it. I’ve even made sure those kind of posts are tagged ‘not tfc’ so people can block them if they truly want, which I shouldn’t have to do in the first place but I do it to try and be kind and understanding.

There will be an official tumblr blog for The Freak Circus at some point soon, when I’m done creating it myself, and I can promise that there will be no content besides The Freak Circus and information pertaining to the game, the lore, updates, merchandise, official announcements, ect.

But until then this is still my blog, it’s one of the few places I have online that I do feel safe in some form where I can be myself, and I am not going to let anything take that from me.

I do believe everyone is allowed to be in a space where they don’t have to be exposed to these horrible things constantly— but my blog is still my own space, and never once have I tried to claim this to be an official blog in itself. I speak for and help Neko as best as I can, and I have taken a lot of tasks on as a friend and a fan to help him, become his social media manager which I am genuinely happy to be, but this blog is still my own space.

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