Lie's hopefully soon to be written fics

Theoretical goal of banning things you find uncomfortable as a CC:

Bad things you don't like will stop being made and existing about you/your character.

Actual outcomes of banning things you find uncomfortable as a CC:

Bad things you don't like will Still Exist.

Subsets of your community will harass & abuse other fans. Trolls will make upsetting bait content that devoted fans feel a duty to engage with & fight against. Well-intentioned fans who don't know the rules exist will break them and get yelled at. People will arbitrarily interpret rules to bludgeon other fans' headcanons & send hate campaigns after each other. This WILL happen, no matter how many times you caveat with 'but don't harass anyone': You have issued an edict whose only enforcement mechanism is harassment.

Some of the fans who are most viciously defensive of your rules will still create stuff you find uncomfortable. Life finds a way. If you ban peanut butter, the fandom will create a series of intricate excuses as to why ground peanuts with sugar added is totally a different thing, and moreover how dare you imply they would break boundaries. The stuff you dislike won't stop being made, it will just be mislabeled and harder to avoid.

Artists will inevitably make cool shit that technically breaks your boundaries but Is Cool. Engaging with it will get that artist harassed for ignoring your boundaries (even if you say this one is fine).

Less people will engage with your work. You will have a smaller audience and much more limited free advertisement.

Everyone following the rules will create a constant need for judgment about things at the edge of your comfort zone. 'Ask for permission' means you have given yourself a part-time job arbitrating to strangers on whether it's okay to draw you mad at another minecraft guy.

More earnestly: By and large the people who are most online, who take boundaries seriously and actually care about seeking permission, are teens and very young adults. That's who you're setting rules for and telling that they can't depict certain things. The kinksters and smut writers and grown-ass adults are generally going to be unaffected, because their self-esteem doesn't hinge on the approval of a Twitch streamer.

Genuine question: Do you want to have to stare at an ask on Tumblr and consider whether to give permission for some 14-year-old to write a fic about your character self-harming or having cancer or being sexually assaulted? To say yes or no, while knowing that this person is probably asking not out of prurient interest, but because it makes them feel a little less alone to imagine an older, stronger character going through what they are?

That is the actual effect of setting those rules.

(The better boundary, btw, is 'I don't want to see things that make me uncomfortable': it's still not perfectly enforceable unless you entirely abstain from the internet, but it is much more actionable than 'make that stuff stop existing'. Having a dedicated 'don't look' tag blocked solves a lot of problems. Another strategy would be letting friends/trusted fan-acquaintances vet the best work and send it to you to gush about, rather than scrolling your tags at random.)

I know today Pyro updated his "boundaries" regarding shipping of his and his girlfriend, Maddy's, characters. I am here to tell you that you do not have to follow them.

Art is art is art. All art is derivative and all art can be derived from. To try and command people to only create certain fanworks based on your art, you are fundamentally misunderstanding how art and humans work.

I understand that people put a lot of themselves into their roleplaying work. Emotional bleed is a very real thing, and I can only imagine how much bleed there is in between the wishy-washy line of Minecraft roleplay. However, and I don't mean to be rude, creators simply have to deal with this. If what they are acting is affecting them in real life, that is something they have to find a way to work around. If what people are creating based on their acting is affecting them, they need to find a way to avoid seeing it themselves.

When you put something out into the world for people to enjoy, think about, play with, you cannot prescribe what they then do with it. If your partner puts something out into the world, you cannot prescribe what people do with it. If you are uncomfortable with what your partner is doing, have a talk with them about how they can change their behavior, whether that is no longer joke-flirting with people, no longer interacting with shipping content, or anything else. You cannot decide what their fandoms get to do, though.

Boundaries that actually work in situations like this, where people are uncomfortable with being shipped/their partner being shipped:

Don't send me or my partner ship works. If we see any ship works we will block you.

Don't talk about ships with me or my partner in either of our chats or discord servers. If you do, we will ban you.

(To other ccs/friends) Do not flirt with me on stream, and don't encourage shipping of me to fans.

Now, a lot of this has been said before, by people more articulate than me. I decided to make this post however because of one thing Pyro said on his stream that I think is very concerning.

Link Transcript: (In response to chat message that reads: I'm choosing to read this as "don't @ me or send me content that makes me uncomfortable, and I won't go looking for it in spaces (like tumblr or w/e)."

"um, if I hear about- I mean I have- I have my little birds in all forests, and if I hear about, um, if I hear about repeated offences, then, like, I will send my people after them. But, um, and I will- like, y'know, deal with that in ways that I deem appropriate.")

This is a threat to fans. He is threatening online harassment to people for the crime of shipping characters. He is saying he has full knowledge of his fandom, that you are never safe from his eyes, and that any step outside the lines (offense) is going to get people sent after you.

This is not safe. This is not possible, even. But this will create a community of fear and policing as people rush to "inform" other fans who create "boundary-breaking" fanworks that what they are doing is "wrong," and if they don't immediately fall in line, they will be harassed out of the community. Many of these fans, by the way, being teenagers.