#dark shipping

I'm going to make the case that shipping—as a practice, as a community, as a creative tradition—cannot be meaningfully described as harmful. Not "is usually fine," not "probably okay in most cases." Cannot. I want to make a specific, sourced argument and I want it to be airtight, because this discourse is old and I'm tired of watching it go in circles.

I'm not going to rehash the fiction-vs-reality debate. That's been done. What I want to talk about is what shipping actually is, where it came from, who it's for, and why the attempt to pathologize it as harmful inverts the actual evidence in ways that should embarrass the people making that argument.

what shipping actually is (and isn't)

"Shipping" comes from "relationship"—you ship two characters, meaning you're invested in them being together, romantically or sexually or both. It's a form of parasocial engagement with fictional characters, and that term has a long academic history worth understanding before you use it as a pejorative.

Parasocial relationships—one-sided emotional connections to figures who don't know you exist, including fictional characters—are not pathological. They are not a symptom of loneliness or detachment from reality. A 2024 study published in Scientific Reports (Ntotal = 3,085) found that people actually rate their parasocial relationships as more effective at meeting their emotional needs than relationships with acquaintances—real, living people they interact with face-to-face—though less effective than close friends. [¹] The same research found that these relationships function as "integral" components of what the authors call a person's "social portfolio," not last resorts for the socially isolated.

The brain does not cleanly distinguish between a parasocial relationship and a real one in terms of how it processes emotional engagement. Research cited extensively in the parasocial literature shows that the same neural networks used to process real social relationships are activated when processing mediated or fictional ones. [²] This does not mean people can't tell the difference—obviously they can—but it does mean that the feelings generated by caring about fictional characters are real feelings, not delusions or substitutes for genuine experience. They are a legitimate category of human emotional life that probably dates back to the invention of storytelling and that researchers have been formally studying since sociologist Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term "parasocial interaction" in 1956. [³]

Shipping is parasocial engagement with a creative output layer on top. You don't just feel things about these characters; you make things about them. And that distinction matters.

where shipping came from, and who built it

People love to talk about shipping like it's a new and suspect internet phenomenon. It is neither.

The modern tradition of shipping—specifically slash shipping, meaning romantic or sexual pairings of same-gender characters—originated in the late 1960s in Star Trek fandom. Fans, predominantly women, were privately trading stories that read romantic and sexual subtext into the relationship between Kirk and Spock. By the early 1970s, as Star Trek conventions and fanzine culture proliferated, these stories started making it into print. The first slash story published to a wider audience was Diane Marchant's "A Fragment Out of Time," appearing in the Star Trek fanzine Grup #3 in 1974—written so obliquely that many readers didn't initially realize the two characters having a romantic encounter were both men. [⁴] The term "slash" itself comes from the punctuation used to denote these pairings: Kirk/Spock as opposed to Kirk & Spock. The slash mark meant something was happening between these characters that a simple ampersand wouldn't contain. [⁵]

The people who built this tradition were primarily queer women and women who went on to discover they were queer—writing, in secret, stories about same-sex love and intimacy in a world that didn't produce those stories anywhere else. They traded zines through the mail. They met at conventions and had a second, parallel social life running quietly alongside their public one. They argued about it in newsletters and letters and at panels where emotions ran extremely high. They received commentary like this one, from a Star Trek newsletter in 1980, about Kirk/Spock slash: "excursions into human sexual abnormalities" that were corrupting Gene Roddenberry's optimistic vision. [⁴]

And they kept going. Because they were building something that mattered to them. And the people making those arguments in 1980 were wrong then and wrong now, just more openly homophobic about it.

This is the lineage of shipping. It was not invented by terminally online teenagers with no grip on reality. It was built by queer women in the 1960s and 70s doing the only thing available to them: writing the stories they needed to exist.

who's in fandom right now

The 2013 AO3 Census—a survey of over 10,000 users of Archive of Our Own, the largest fanfiction hosting platform in the world—found that only 29% of respondents identified as heterosexual, and over 54% identified as a gender, sexual, or romantic minority. [⁶]

By 2024, that number had shifted even further. A follow-up demographic survey found that 81% of respondents identified as LGBTQ+, and that non-cisgender people were more than 55 times more prevalent among AO3 users than in the US general population. [⁷]

Fifty-five times. The people doing this are overwhelmingly, statistically, queer people. This is not a minor demographic detail. It is the entire picture.

Shipping spaces—particularly slash and femslash communities—have functioned as queer community infrastructure for decades. Before mainstream representation existed, before there were visible queer characters in popular media, before it was safe in many places to be out at all, fandom spaces were where queer people wrote the love stories they needed and found each other doing it. That didn't stop when representation improved slightly. It kept going because representation is still insufficient, because canon still kills the gays, because fandom still gives queer people what mainstream media consistently fails to.

When you treat shipping as something to be policed and pathologized, you are treating queer community infrastructure as something to be policed and pathologized. I need you to sit with what it means to look at a practice built by and for marginalized people and decide it's the harmful thing in the room.

what fandom specifically does for queer young people

This is where I stop being abstract, because the research here is consistent and worth laying out clearly.

A 2021 paper examining trans and genderqueer adolescents' relationships with fanfiction found that participants described fandom as where they discovered language for their own identities, found community with others like them, and first felt they had permission to exist. Researchers found that young people who participated in fandom were more likely to have identified their queerness earlier in life than queer youth who didn't participate, and more likely to have non-binary or trans gender presentations. [⁸]

A 2018 study surveying LGBTQ+ youth online found the same correlation—fandom participation correlated with earlier self-identification and stronger queer identity development. [⁸]

A computational analysis of fanfiction versus mainstream fiction from McGill University found that fanfiction narratives are significantly more focused on introspective feelings, intimacy, and emotional vulnerability than published mainstream fiction—and roughly six times more likely to explicitly address sex and sexuality. [⁹] The researchers specifically identified fanfiction as a "queer information world": a distinct space built around and for the exploration of non-normative identity, that operates differently from mainstream fiction in ways that serve the people who most need it.

Research examining slash fanfiction specifically found that it allows writers "to explore gender and sexuality without the imposed boundaries of heteronormativity and homophobic social standards" and has historically enabled more positive portrayals of queer relationships at a time when mainstream media refused to produce them. [¹⁰]

The Open University's research on fanfiction and youth identity found that for LGBTQ+ young people specifically, fanfiction "served as a space to explore their emerging LGBT identities" during periods when representation was limited elsewhere, and that fandom communities provided meaningful support during formative years. [¹¹]

These findings point in the same direction across every study: for queer people, especially young queer people without access to community or representation elsewhere, shipping and fanfiction serve a genuine developmental and psychological function. They are not a distraction from real life. They are, for a lot of people, a prerequisite for being able to build one.

the tagging system is actually a model of consent culture and they built it themselves

Here is something this discourse ignores constantly: AO3 was deliberately designed to enable content warnings and content filtering.

The site was created by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit founded in 2007 by and for fans, in direct response to platforms censoring and deleting fanworks without warning or appeal. [¹²] One of the founding principles was that fans deserved an archive where their work could exist, and where readers could exercise real choice about what they encountered. The result is a tagging system more sophisticated than virtually anything you'll find on any commercial media platform.

Want to avoid non-consensual content? Tagged. Character death? Tagged. Specific relationship dynamics, dark themes, heavy angst, specific kinks, specific tropes? All tagged, filterable, and opt-in. The entire system is built on the principle that readers deserve the ability to choose their own experience, and that creators can make things without having the most squeamish possible reader as their ceiling.

The claim that shipping communities recklessly expose people to harmful content is just factually wrong when you look at how these communities actually function. The harm-reduction architecture of AO3 is more thoughtful than what you get from streaming platforms, from bookstores, from social media algorithms. The fandom community built it themselves because they wanted to be able to engage with complex and dark content while protecting people who couldn't or didn't want to. That is not irresponsibility. That is considered, community-driven design by people who actually thought carefully about what they were building and why.

what the "harmful shipping" argument actually requires you to believe

For shipping to be harmful in the way antis claim, you have to accept a chain of reasoning that doesn't hold at any link.

First, you have to believe that the people doing it—the overwhelming queer majority that demographic data consistently identifies—are uniquely incapable of distinguishing fiction from reality, in a way that people who consume crime dramas, war films, or dark literary fiction are not. You have to believe queer people are more susceptible to this confusion than the general population.

Second, you have to believe that engagement with fictional content generates harmful desires rather than reflecting and processing the interior emotional life of the person engaging with it. But the parasocial research doesn't support that model. People seek out fictional content that resonates with feelings and questions they already carry; the content doesn't produce the feelings. [¹]

Third, you have to ignore the populations actually being harmed by the anti position. The queer young people who needed fandom to figure out who they were. The survivors who process their experiences through dark fiction. The people who were harassed, doxxed, and driven off platforms by campaigns that claimed to be about safety but functioned exactly like any other targeted mob. The research on what actually protects people from harmful behavior—empathy, community, access to spaces where difficult experiences can be explored safely—points toward what fandom does, and directly away from what antis do.

on "but what about the REALLY dark stuff"

Okay. Here's where I'm going to say the thing that makes people the most uncomfortable, because it's the part of this argument that actually needs to be made instead of danced around.

Darkfic exists. Taboo ships exist. Incest ships, dead dove content, kink that would make your grandmother pass out—all of it exists on AO3, all of it is tagged, all of it is opt-in, and none of it constitutes real-world harm as long as it stays fictional and involves no real people. This includes the stuff you personally find viscerally repulsive. This includes the stuff I personally find viscerally repulsive. The argument doesn't stop being true because the content is more upsetting.

Let me lay out why.

The "dark = harmful" argument has never held up for any other medium. Nobody is seriously arguing that Oedipus Rex—in which a man kills his father and has sex with his mother, and this is the foundational text of Western tragedy—is harmful. Nobody is arguing that Lolita, which depicts the sexual abuse of a twelve-year-old child in close first-person detail and appears on virtually every "Best Novels of the 20th Century" list including Time's list and Modern Library's list, is harmful. [¹³] Nobody is arguing that V.C. Andrews's Flowers in the Attic—which involves extended sibling incest and which sold tens of millions of copies and spawned an entire literary dynasty—is harmful. [¹⁴] Nobody is arguing that Edgar Allan Poe, whose work scholars have described as "macabre" and "necrophiliac" in its themes and obsessions with death, desire, and decay, is harmful. [¹⁵] Nobody is arguing that Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which depicts child rape, or Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, or the entire Gothic literary tradition from the Marquis de Sade onward, is harmful—because these are canonical literature and therefore get the presumption that literature has always received: that depicting something is not the same as endorsing it, and that engaging with dark material serves purposes that sanitized material cannot.

Fanfiction does not get that presumption. And the only principled reason it doesn't is classism and snobbery about who's writing it and who's reading it. Working-class people, queer people, women, teenagers writing on the internet don't get the good faith that Nabokov got. That's what's actually happening here.

There's also decades of research on why people engage with taboo content—and it's not "because they want to do it." The expressive writing literature, pioneered by James Pennebaker at UT Austin starting in 1986, has produced over 100 studies with a consistent finding: writing about emotionally intense and even traumatic subjects produces measurable improvements in physical and mental health. Pennebaker's 1997 paper in Psychological Science—one of the most cited articles in the field, with over 1,100 citations—summarized the core finding: when people write about difficult emotional experiences, their health improves. They visit the doctor less. Their immune markers improve. Their depression symptoms decrease. [¹⁶] A subsequent meta-analysis across 13 expressive writing studies found a significant overall benefit (d = 0.47). [¹⁷] This research wasn't conducted on fanfiction specifically—but the mechanism it describes is exactly the mechanism fandom has always intuitively understood: getting the dark stuff out, in a safe and contained way, helps. Repressing it does not.

Carl Jung called this the "shadow self"—the aspects of our inner experience that are suppressed or socially unacceptable, which become more destructive the more thoroughly we refuse to look at them. [¹⁸] The taboo, the forbidden, the grotesque—these are not created by dark fiction. They are part of the human interior. What fiction does is give them a container. What antis do is blow up the container and then wonder why things are messier.

For people who have experienced trauma specifically, dark and taboo fiction can be a genuine processing tool. A survivor of abuse writing or reading incest darkfic is not celebrating abuse. They are engaging with something from a position of safety and control that they didn't have when the real thing happened. This is documented. The Prostasia Foundation's harm reduction research notes that the therapeutic benefits of fantasy specifically apply to processing traumatic experiences—that recontextualizing trauma through fiction and art produces lasting improvements in quality of life, including reduced chronic depression symptoms and improved work and academic performance, drawing on Pennebaker's research framework. [¹⁹] Telling a survivor that they're not allowed to engage with the themes of their own trauma in fiction is not protection. It's a second violation of their autonomy dressed up in safety language.

And the "normalization" argument collapses immediately when you look at the actual objects in question. Necrophilia is not going to become normalized by fanfiction because the barrier to real-world engagement with it is not moral unfamiliarity—it's the fact that dead bodies are not accessible to most people and that obtaining them for this purpose would involve serious criminal acts with serious criminal consequences. Incest is not going to become normalized by fanfiction because people know who their family members are and the psychological dynamics that make real incest harmful don't disappear because someone read a Wincest fic. The entire "normalization" theory requires you to believe that exposure to fictional content reshapes people's moral frameworks and practical decision-making in ways that decades of research on the fiction/behavior relationship has consistently failed to confirm.

What actually normalizes harmful behavior is not fictional depiction. It's cultural permission and impunity. Real-world sexual abuse is normalized when abusers face no consequences, when victims aren't believed, when institutions protect perpetrators. Not when someone writes a dead dove fic on AO3 with seventeen warning tags that a reader had to actively click through to access.

The test for whether fictional content is harmful is not "does this content depict something that would be harmful in reality." By that standard you'd have to ban Hamlet (murder), The Road (child endangerment), Blood Meridian (atrocity), and the entire horror genre. The test is: does this content cause real harm to real people in the real world? And the answer for properly tagged, opt-in, fiction-about-fictional-characters on a platform with more sophisticated content filtering than Netflix is: no.

Draw the line at real people. Draw the line at content that documents actual abuse. Draw the line at anything that crosses from fiction into reality. Those lines exist, they're clear, and the fandom community generally understands them better than the people screaming about darkfic do. Everything else is imaginative space. And imaginative space—even dark imaginative space, especially dark imaginative space—has always been part of how humans process being alive.

specifically on kodacon: no real children, no real harm

I want to dedicate a section to this specifically because it's the argument antis think is their nuclear option. If they can get you to concede that fictional content depicting minors is equivalent to CSAM, they think the whole proship position collapses. It doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is not a technicality or a cope—it's a fundamental distinction that the United States Supreme Court has recognized, that researchers have documented, and that basic moral reasoning supports.

I'm also going to make this personal. Because I have standing here that most people making this argument don't have, and I'm tired of making it in the abstract when the concrete version is sitting right there.

My paternal grandparents were full biological siblings. My grandfather had Down syndrome. My family's understanding—though we have no proof and no way to prove it now—is that my grandmother initiated the relationship and that my grandfather, given his disability, may not have had the capacity to meaningfully consent to it. We don't know for certain. We may never know. What we know is that it happened, that it produced children, and that this is part of my family history in a way I carry around all the time without having anywhere clean to put it. I didn't choose to know this. I didn't choose any of this. But I know it, and it has shaped the way I understand what real harm looks like versus what fiction is.

And then there's the CSAM.

At some point I found out that sexual images of me as a child exist. I'm not going to detail exactly how I found out—that part belongs to me—but I want to be precise about what it meant and what it did, because this is exactly the kind of real harm that anti discourse collapses into the same category as a drawing, and that collapse makes me furious in a way that is hard to put into words without screaming.

Finding out that images like that exist of you is not something you recover from on a timeline. It is not something you "process" and then file away. It is the knowledge, permanent and unrevokable, that somewhere there are records of something that was done to you as a child, and that those records are completely outside your control. You don't know who has seen them. You don't know where they are. You don't know if they're still circulating. You don't know if someone you've met has seen them. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection surveyed CSAM survivors and found that nearly 70% worry constantly about being recognized from their abuse images, and 30% have actually been recognized by someone. [²²] That statistic is not abstract to me. That is a specific fear with a specific texture that lives in a specific part of my brain, and it doesn't go away.

That is what real harm looks like. That is what it produces in a real person. A child was abused. Images were created. That child becomes an adult who carries those images around in their mind as a permanent feature of their existence, not knowing who has them, not knowing where they are, not having any power over them at all. Real CSAM is prosecutable for exactly this reason—not because of what the imagery depicts in the abstract, but because of the chain of actual harm that runs from production through circulation to the survivor who spends the rest of their life living with the consequences. [²²]

Now.

Kodacon—along with lolicon and shotacon—refers to drawn, written, or animated sexual content involving fictional minor characters. No real child exists. No real child was photographed, filmed, coerced, or abused in the creation of this content. There is no chain of harm running from production to a survivor, because there is no production event involving a real person and there is no survivor. It is lines on a page or pixels on a screen depicting characters who do not exist and have never existed.

I am telling you about my own life—about my grandfather's likely exploitation, about the images that exist of me—so that when I say this next part you understand that it is not coming from someone who doesn't know what real harm looks like. It is coming from someone who knows exactly what it looks like and who is therefore extremely clear on the distinction:

Fictional drawings are not that. They are not even in the same category as that.

The Supreme Court agreed. In Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002), the Court struck down provisions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act that would have banned virtual and computer-generated depictions of minors, ruling 6–3 that they were unconstitutionally overbroad. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, explained the reasoning: real CSAM is prosecutable because a real child was harmed in its production and because its circulation perpetuates that harm. Virtual depictions, by contrast, "record no crime and create no victims by their production." [²⁰] The causal link between fictional imagery and real-world harm, Kennedy wrote, is "contingent and indirect"—insufficient to justify suppression. [²⁰]

Congress pushed back with the PROTECT Act of 2003, attempting to recriminalize fictional depictions under obscenity law. The legal picture since then is genuinely complicated, jurisdiction-dependent, and contested—I'm not going to pretend otherwise, and I'm not here to give anyone legal advice. [²¹] I'm here to make the moral argument, which stands independent of the legal one.

The "but it normalizes attraction to children" argument doesn't hold up empirically. The Sociological Mail's analysis of available research found no evidence that lolicon or shotacon content increases rates of child sexual abuse or makes pedophilic attraction more socially acceptable—and cited Japanese researcher Takatsuki Yasushi's observation that rates of child sexual abuse in Japan were higher in the 1960s and 70s and have declined since, roughly coinciding with the increasing presence of fictional lolicon content. [²³] I'm not claiming fictional content prevents abuse—the research isn't strong enough to claim causation either way. I'm pointing out that the confident anti claim—that this content demonstrably increases real-world harm—is not supported by what evidence exists.

Pedophilic attraction is also not caused by exposure to content. The neurobiological evidence for pedophilia as an orientation rather than a learned behavior is substantial enough that the APA's own literature treats it as such. [²⁴] Not all people with pedophilic attraction offend, and not all people who offend have pedophilic attraction—the relationship is not deterministic in either direction. [²⁵] What the research identifies as actually protective against offending is access to community, therapeutic support, and non-stigmatizing frameworks for managing attraction. [²⁴] The anti position—that engaging with fictional content marks someone as an offender or a future offender—destroys exactly those protective conditions. It doesn't protect children. It removes the scaffolding that helps non-offending people stay non-offending.

And there is a survivor dimension here that anti discourse completely erases. People who were abused as children sometimes engage with dark fictional content involving child characters—because they are processing experiences from a position of control they didn't have when the real thing happened. Because they need a container for something that has no other container. A therapist's perspective published by NOCD recognizes that fantasy allows people to "explore desires that may be socially and morally unacceptable in real life"—and that this is a fundamentally different psychological process from intent to act. [²⁶] I'm not saying this is true of everyone who engages with this content, and I'm not saying I'm okay—I'm specifically not saying that—but I am saying that treating every person who engages with fictional dark content as equivalent to the person who created the images that exist of me is a moral failure so complete it takes my breath away.

The line is real and it is clear: real children versus fictional characters. Real harm versus no harm. Content that documents, depicts, or facilitates the abuse of real children is CSAM and should be treated as such, with the full force of law. Drawn characters, written fiction, animation, fanfiction—none of this harms real children in its creation, and the moral and legal frameworks built around child protection were explicitly designed around this distinction.

Collapsing that distinction doesn't protect children. It muddies the legal category designed to protect us, redirects outrage away from real abuse and toward pixels on a screen, and insults everyone who has actually lived through what real harm feels like.

The children who need protecting are real ones. I am one of them. And I'm telling you directly: fiction is not what hurt me. Focus on what actually does.

the long view

Shipping is over fifty years old as a formal practice and probably as old as storytelling itself. Every generation that has encountered it has decided it was dangerous and in need of suppression. Every generation has been wrong. The medium changes—zines, websites, Tumblr, AO3—and the panic follows, and the evidence for the harm never materializes in the form the panickers insist it must.

The women who built slash fandom in the 1970s were writing the only queer love stories they could access. Queer people building fandom spaces now are in many cases doing exactly the same thing. The arguments against it have not meaningfully improved in fifty years. They've just shed some of the more obvious homophobia.

Shipping isn't harmful. The communities that built it, built it because they needed it. The research on what those communities do for the people in them is consistent. The tagging infrastructure they built is more thoughtful than most commercial platforms manage. The demographics are overwhelmingly queer people doing what queer people have always done when mainstream culture withholds what they need: making it themselves.

That's what this is. That's what it's always been.

sources

[¹] Metz, M. et al. (2024). "People Perceive Parasocial Relationships to Be Effective at Fulfilling Emotional Needs." Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-58069-9

[²] Tukachinsky, R. et al., cited in: "Parasocial Relationships, Social Support and Well-Being: A Mixed-Methods Study Among Indian Youth." *Journal of Adolescence* (2025). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673843.2025.2480712

[³] Horton, D. & Wohl, R.R. (1956). "Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction." Psychiatry, 19(3). Via Wikipedia, Parasocial Interaction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

[⁴] Hale-Stern, K. (2018). "About That First Kirk/Spock Slash Fanfiction." The Mary Sue. https://www.themarysue.com/first-published-slash-fanfiction/ | Fanlore, History of K/S Fandom (including 1980 newsletter quote): https://fanlore.org/wiki/History_of_K/S_Fandom

[⁵] Wikipedia, Slash Fiction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction

[⁶] centreoftheselights. (2013). AO3 Census: Masterpost. Fanlore: https://fanlore.org/wiki/AO3_Census:_Masterpost

[⁷] Rouse, L. & Stanfill, M. (2023). "Over Flow: Fan Demographics on Archive of Our Own." Flow Journal, University of Central Florida: https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/fan-demographics-on-ao3/ | centreoftheselights (2024). AO3 Demographics Survey 2024: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54011047/chapters/137376028

[⁸] Duggan, M. (2021). "'Worlds…of Contingent Possibilities': Genderqueer and Trans Adolescents Reading Fan Fiction." PMC: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9616102/ | McInroy, L.B. & Craig, S.L. (2018). "Online Fandom, Identity Milestones, and Self-Identification of Sexual/Gender Minority Youth." Journal of LGBT Youth, 15(3), 179-196.

[⁹] Kraicer, E. & Piper, A. (2021). "Queer Fans: The Difference That Queer Fanfiction Makes." TxtLab @ McGill University: https://txtlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/QueerFans2021.pdf

[¹⁰] Coates, E. (2022). "Sexuality and Gender Exploration in Contemporary Slash Fanfiction." Kutztown University: https://research.library.kutztown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=englishtheses

[¹¹] Holford, N. & Clayson, S. "'Accepting Me': Young People Reflecting on Fanfic and Their Identity." The Open University: https://fass.open.ac.uk/research/groups/health-and-arts/blogs/accepting-me-fanfiction-and-identity

[¹²] Wikipedia, Organization for Transformative Works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Transformative_Works

[¹³] Wikipedia, Lolita (publication history and best-of lists): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita

[¹⁴] EBSCO Research Starters, Incest in Literature / The Gothic Library, "Gothic Tropes: Incest" (2020): https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/incest-literature | https://www.thegothiclibrary.com/gothic-tropes-incest/

[¹⁵] New World Encyclopedia, Gothic Fiction ("macabre, necrophiliac work of Edgar Allan Poe"): https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gothic_fiction

[¹⁶] Pennebaker, J.W. (1997). "Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process." Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166. Via PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28992443/ | Cambridge Core overview: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/emotional-and-physical-health-benefits-of-expressive-writing/ED2976A61F5DE56B46F07A1CE9EA9F9F

[¹⁷] Smyth, J.M. (1998). Meta-analysis of 13 expressive writing studies (d = 0.47). Cited in Baikie, K. & Wilhelm, K. (2005). "Emotional and Physical Health Benefits of Expressive Writing." Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 11. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiatric-treatment/article/emotional-and-physical-health-benefits-of-expressive-writing/ED2976A61F5DE56B46F07A1CE9EA9F9F

[¹⁸] Carl Jung, shadow self concept. Via TabooFantazy analysis, The New Order Magazine (2025): https://thenewordermagazine.com/taboofantazy/

[¹⁹] Prostasia Foundation. "Taboo Fantasies: Real Harm Reduction" (January 2023), drawing on Pennebaker (1997): https://prostasia.org/blog/fantasies-as-harm-reduction/

[²⁰] Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002). Full ruling via Justia: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/535/234/ | First Amendment Encyclopedia summary: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/ashcroft-v-free-speech-coalition/

[²¹] Wikipedia, Legal Status of Fictional Pornography Depicting Minors (covering PROTECT Act, Miller test, Handley, Whorley, and jurisdictional patchwork): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_fictional_pornography_depicting_minors | Wikipedia, PROTECT Act of 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003

[²²] Canadian Centre for Child Protection, CSAM Survivor Survey (2017). Via OurRescue: https://ourrescue.org/resources/child-exploitation/csam/what-is-csam

[²³] The Sociological Mail. "Does Loli and Shota Hentai Normalize Pedophilia?" (2019). Citing Galbraith/Takatsuki research on Japanese CSA rates: https://thesociologicalmail.com/2018/11/05/does-loli-and-shota-hentai-normalize-pedophilia/

[²⁴] APA Books, Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children (Seto, 2008): https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4317491

[²⁵] ScienceDirect, "Criminological Differences Between Child Pornography Offenders Arrested in Spain" (2019)—noting not all CP users have pedophilic interest and not all pedophiles view CP: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0145213419303552