#mod daft posts

you know what, i'm bored, so i'll actually answer this one at length

let's set the scene. i'm fourteen years old and i have just seen the avengers for the first time and am getting into fanfiction, which i hadn't read much of before.

i sort the avengers tag on ao3 by most read, so i can read all the popular ones. i avoid most of the nsfw works except the ones marked "crack" or "humour" or something because to be honest i was uncomfortable with straightforward porn at age fourteen but was okay with comedic or silly stuff.

also, being someone who first started reading on ff.net and shifted over to ao3, whether something is labelled as explicit isn't something i particularly cared about because those labels aren't accurately applied on ff.net.

i am consciously avoiding triggering topics like sexual assault because i don't want to read that, and i'm fourteen, and also because a close friend of mine had been assaulted as a child and this had ripple effects on me.

i am reading any ship including loki/thor (although i am now deeply uncomfortable with works featuring incest) because the fandom line at the time was that since loki was adopted, they weren't really brothers (very much untrue, by the way)

this is what the listing for Hug Therapy looks like:

the first half of this fic is a silly work about thor deciding he needs to hug loki no matter what because hugging it out is important.

the second half of this fic contains a violent sexual assault which, while tame by the standards of some of the horrific shit i've seen on ao3, was pretty upsetting to me as a kid.

i mentioned this in my essay not because it was nsfw or even because it was incest (although this fic does go out of its way to make it clear that thor and loki do regard each other as brothers, which i found upsetting but should have expected given that it is tagged) but because the sexual assault is untagged.

i was deliberately going out of my way to avoid works with sexual assault and one of the founders of ao3 didn't care enough about the tagging system to use it to help people use the website effectively. for a website that brags about how versatile and useful the tagging system is, i found this one moment a great illustration of the reality of ao3.

you can laugh at me for being a kid and being upset by being exposed to sexual assault in fiction if you like. but i guarantee you this happened to a lot more people than just me, and brushing it off does kinda make you look like a huge cunt

It's definitely possible and I'm glad I can help! One thing that helped for me was going over what had numbed me to x thing (in some cases I could name specific fanfics I read that had this effect) and reevaluating it from a more objective outsider perspective. I wish you the best for your recovery.