#fanpol

The fiction you enjoy and/or create is not inherently reflective of your morality. Or just b/c you enjoy something in fiction doesn't mean you would irl.

Folks who push otherwise are being controlling and manipulative. Its a hallmark of authoritarianism, too.

I love how you can tell when someone is an anti of a ship because they probably got the idea from a certain corner of the fandom instead of reaching that conclusion by consuming the media itself, so now to be morally righteous they have to condemn it through parroting what they just learned. 🫠

and your takes on how being afab will automatically make your more targeted ..i could not agree more.. fanarts depicting kris playing "boy sports" or having masculine body traits are perfectly fine and full of "aura and rizz" while a fanart depicting susie with breasts is evil and misogynistic. "susie cant have boobs because shes a reptile" by that logic, susie shouldn't have hair, a sentinence, or wear clothes, etc... she is a damn anthropomorphic character, which have had existed since forever? and of course any fanart having kris on their period is also just as evil and wrong.🤤 whos the misogynist here?

why is it more woke to state that ralsei is transfem just because he exhibits slightly "girly" traits? characters like him and steven universe and finn mertens were meant to subvert gender stereotypes, which is also what susie is doing !?!? what is this performative wokism?

this fandom is incredibly misogynistic like fawning over the misogynist and 2016 sexy man but getting mad over boobs ok. i honestly wouldnt personally give a fuck if most of these people were 14-16 but i see grown ass adults doing these things...

i wish there were places that functioned less on fandom culture because idk reddit is not it. its hard to find this "woke but not so woke" side of internet people its made the internet boring for me.. its the same copy paste posts every day.. yawn..

also kind of unrelated but when you mentioned in your recent post that women are more prone to make better doctors, i have a story. my whole life ive been told that males are smarter, and that medicine is a male dominated field. even by my own family who wants me to become one (i am a girl if this wasnt obvious already). now that i am in med school i saw that 80% of us are women. including my teachers. lol.

also cool art !!!

thanks! honestly, fandom is probably not the root of these beliefs but merely the vehicle by which they spread. you'll see it iterated upon again and again in academia, activism contexts etc. at the same time esp. post 2020 i can see people have kinda reached the pinnacle of tolerance for all this and pushback is increasing.

Honestly a fascinating phenomenon wrt the weirdness about anatomical parts is that usually the biology being derided is female biology. So you can't make vulva art or speak about female anatomy because it could induce dysphoria but also you have to include penis in political art about womanhood because otherwise you are exclusive. Regardless of all the lip service in the end its all in service to the male sex. Same root for the whole "ew period gross" phenomenon youre describing. It's an observed trend that after any upswing of feminist progress, there is an occurence of backlash propelled by media, and this happens in a pendulum every so often. At the same time this all is happening, you see the return of heroin chic, insane beauty standards, etc. Given this is cyclical all you can do is push past it and continue. The thing about wokism is that for all it claims it's incredibly conservative so when you ask, is that not what conservatives are doing, the answer is YEP! because wokism is conservative!

(and i agree it's all really boring)

You know what, I figured my conscience is in fact clean enough to turn this snarky ask from 2+ years ago into a general essay about rule 34, fandom, people's relationship with it, and people's irresponsible use of it. Mostly because, surprisingly, my feelings on a lot of this changed in the two years I was away. They became more nuanced.

That said, yeah, I don't have a guilty conscience at all, especially after seeing the shit other people will post. I can be in complete peace knowing that basically every piece I drew was fictional characters depicted as fully sexually mature making love, rather than actual posts about wanting to go to the "terf homestead" with "guns and no condoms". like yeah I am completely zen about it thank GOD I never posted degenerate pedoshit and then defended it by saying the christofascists are prosecuting thought crimes jesus christ.

The context of this ask is probably related to old lore about a blog that went after me and other artists for making erotic content of the deltarune characters. As previously outlined, I still think this is minor in comparison to the shit other people have written, drawn, and posted without a second thought, but I've gained a more nuanced view of this. Basically, things aren't as black or white.

There is a first aspect, and it's the fact that fictional characters in their late teenage years, as they tend to star in anime like My Hero Academia for example and by extension in games like deltarune, don't really tend to act like real teenagers, or real people at all; and this is by necessity, given you're writing a fictional story that necessitates some suspension of disbelief. You need to create a character that acts believably enough like a person with a psychology (toby fox is very talented at this) while also keeping the unreality aspect. I am acutely aware of this because I think children and teenagers are fucking annoying IRL, simply put. I can reminisce about my own period of life as a teenager, and how my sexuality was developing around age 16-17, but at my current age I feel zero attraction, connection, etc to a teenager. They just live in a completely different world to me. If Kris was a real person in social media i would block their stupid ass. And to me the mark of an actual pedophile, you know, the one that wants to actually offend, is the sexual fetishisation of youth, innocence and immaturity. You see this language, visually and verbally, all the time. in the degenerate pedo posts you will see talk about the cutesiness of little sisters, and soft bellies and whatever the fuck not that I personally find stomach lurching. The fictional character or imagined real person in them being innocent, vulnerable and childlike is the point, rather than incidental and easy to bypass.

Here is what I understood after my absence. From my point of view, when I was drawing the DR main cast in erotic situations, it was completely removed from myself. To me, they were adults in that context; and any discussion of their sexuality in canon is simply from a point of view of reminiscence of my own experience as a youngster. It was as much a psychological exploration about fictional entities as it is under any other circumstance of pain, bullying, family trouble etc. And Deltarune itself both jokes about the maturing of these characters with the It Means Tity joke and Noelle wanting susie to bully her in a similarly fetishistic manner and seemingly having a smut folder or whatnot, and addresses complex family situations and pain that is unideal for a teenager to be experiencing, like susie's home life, which are themes that are decidedly adult, so to speak. Which is true of many other pieces of media like it.

So I thought, naively, that when I made and shared those drawings, my intention of "this is as much a shipping art as any other" was coming across. I was careful to gatekeep the profile I posted them in; to follow it on twitter I had to approve every request manually. I understood it was me as a grown up using fictional entities who are canonically younger (but don't necessarily behave as real people 1:1) as a vehicle to explore ideas for another grown up audience. This was also the case about an infamous fic i wrote and never finished about Noelle and Chronic Wasting Disease. It was meant to be a crackheaded exploration of tragedy, disease, terminal disease, and how people react to such an extreme circumstance. It was never meant to be anything more than a thought experiment.

That is the aspect I neglected, simply because of how posting art and writing publicly works, I could never be certain that my intent came across. Unfortunately, there are too many pedophiles on the internet. And a lot of people for whom rule 34 fetishising youth, innocence, pre puberty etc is the point. And an outside observer could not discern whether I was one or the other. And I think this is what a lot of so called "pro shippers" neglect to address, the same way "anti shippers" neglect to address the part where a lot of characters simply are unreal enough to not register them as an actual 16 year old.

Authorial intent is crucial here; you have to discern whether or not the art is fetishising youthfulness and naivete, whether it's getting off on the taboo of intra familial sexual assault. And as an adult on the internet it's gonna be extremely difficult to filter out all the kids, and as a kid on the internet you are understandably shocked when exposed to these things without prior warning, and your brain is literally half baked, so how are you supposed to discern someone being polite to someone who wants to take advantage of you, or comparatively calm erotica from hardcore degradation?

I think it's unfair to compare me to the motherfucker that wrote an incestuous orgy between the dreemurr and holiday siblings or mister ultra breast expansion, yes. I've also taken distance from a lot of the other people mentioned at the time in the post for other reasons, mostly political falling outs (like I said... a LOT has changed!) And in that process, I have understood there is an entire screening you have to do with anyone who draws NSFW for how porn addicted they are or how aware they are while they make and consume erotica, and not everyone is going to be willing to do it with every single person; on top of learning about fetishes like early porn introduction, a method by which actual pedophiles groom minors online, and realising i just didnt account for how much malice there is out there.

While my intention was the exploration of relationships and scenarios, the idea that someone could use my drawings to groom someone else honestly makes me sick. That is one of the ways in which my mindset has changed, and I'm not willing to share erotic art so nonchalantly anymore for that reason. Once things are out there they are very hard to track down and move from computer to computer with ease, so there is probably no undoing what has been done. In that regard, I can be at peace knowing everything I drew was extremely inoffensive. No hardcore fetishism, no sadism to it at all.

I think, at this point, that many things are true:

no drawing of a fictional character will by nature ever be 1:1 harmful as actual photographs and videos of children, nor will written pornography ever be as 1:1 harmful as taped; this is simply because the creation of the latter necessitates a child/woman/person be abused and then footage be recorded, which is not true of any drawing or writing. There are physical actions taking place in the real world when there are photos or video.

Simultaneously,

2. You don't know what the intentions of people who save and share your art are. Though you may not have ill intent, others do, and they will use what you have made, which unfortunately gives you some level of responsibility,

3. Discerning authorial intent from language is crucial. Is the author truly trying to explore darker topics as a pure hypothetical, or is there a fetishistic component of allure and taboo in the way things are depicted?

4. In the end, people on the internet can't read your mind, nor will they always believe you when you express your intentions. That is inevitable.

5. No matter what your intentions were, collaterals exist. Though the art I drew was extremely moderate to the point there was constant jesting about how vanilla I am and whatnot, there is a chance that someone saw it and was upset by it, and that is another inevitability that gives me some responsibility.

I don't share that art anymore for those reasons. It is only for my friends to understand my intentions. I also know I curate my friends carefully, and can say with pride currently I'm surrounded by wonderful people who similarly have creative intent behind all that they do. My general stance on porn itself has also changed and hardened, because of its impact on youth and how it alters people's perception of women, racial minorities etc, but that's for another day.

But yeah, I don't have a guilty conscience, I just grew up. This is true of many things. Heck, I know there's probably people who will only read the ask text, not bother with this answer, and be upset. It's whatever. I have no control over any of it, but I know what I believe and why I do.

People need to be okay with heinous villains getting the cutsey treatment from fans a la chibi fanart or whatever.