lazy, drunken, Irish. but not lazy, and not drunk

But I need to do it because it's affecting my life negatively already

I was trying to explain this to my friend and used this analogy:

'It's like......I've been running from a monster that was always at my heels tripping me and clawing my back until I was exhausted and had to stop

But now I'm turning to fight and getting the shit kicked out of me atm

And my friend, who is the literal best but wishes to be anonymous right now, replied furthering the analogy with something that I think a lot of people need to hear

You're getting beat up by the fear and those feelings of breaking habits and doing new and unfamiliar things. The abusers aren't landing the scratches and hits like they used to, and the cuts they kept leaving are finally starting to heal. Continuing the metaphor, as you get better at fighting it will get easier, less scary, and you'll realise your winning and the old wound are healing up because they're not being reopened constantly. It takes bravery and practice, and sometimes when you throw a punch the shoulder injury will hurt more, and even reopen a bit, but that's why we try to partially fight and partially just shield (eg cut contact) so we're not overdoing it and losing feeling in your arm. And eventually your shoulder will get stronger too.

So for anyone struggling as I am with the process of confronting your past abuse I hope you take my friends words to heart and keep fighting

But that can wait. Your guest is tired, jumpy, and understandably in need of time to rest and recover. You won’t need her help for the warfare aspect anyway. You ensure your demonic servants will protect her with their lives and make her feel safe and welcome. Then you set aside some time in your busy schedule of conquest to check on the poor girl. Purely to determine whether she’s in prime condition for manipulating, of course. Your future puppet ruler will be more likely to cooperate if you build a solid foundation of respect and trust, after all.

Years of serving as the Dark Lord have taught you that your minions work harder when you treat them well. So you provide your young guest with everything she requests, within reason of course. She says she hasn’t slept well lately because her stuffed animal was left behind when she fled home. You ask if there are any other things of hers she misses from her old home. With a now completed list, you send your most covert operatives to the enemy palace to execute a most wicked heist of a stuffed animal and the princess’s dog dubbed Sir Meatball, as well as a few books she would read for comfort. You congratulate yourself on how evil it is of you to steal a dog. And just for good measure you have your minions perform reconnaissance on the palace. You’ll have to invade it soon anyway. May as well multitask.

The interesting thing is the hero the enemy sends to fight you. The chosen one it would seem, although it continues to baffle you how young he is. Young and impressionable. He barely knows how to hold that magic sword he wields. It’s barely light enough for him to lift. You send your winged minions to carry him toward your evil castle of dread and terror. You greet him at the landing pad on the roof. He insists on dueling you, even as his sword shakes in his sweaty palms. The prophecy says he will defeat you in a one-on-one duel. Very well, you decide. If something goes wrong you have medics on hand. You wouldn’t want someone to die from a friendly duel. He’s no match for you, you soon find. You humor him for a while. He obviously came a long way to duel you after all, and you can tell he’s trying very hard to hit you with that sword. You give him a few passing tips as you fight, and he thanks you awkwardly.

Then the princess interrupts your duel. “Maximus!” She chides, “you promised to take me dragon riding this afternoon!”

You turn to your dark secretary of doom, Jerry, who squints at the evil schedule of hopelessness and cries out. “Ah! She’s right, my lord. My sincerest apologies.”

“That’s alright, my faithful minion,” you say while holding the tip of the chosen’s sword between two fingers. “This whole duel thing was a bit of a spontaneous thing, and I should have looked at the schedule first.” You look down at the boy. “I’m sorry, child, but it seems I have a commitment to fulfill with the dear princess. Can we reschedule this duel for a later date?”

“Wh-what? No! The duel has already started, you can’t just back out like that!” He says, trying with all his might to pry his sword free from your grip.

“Very well,” you say with a sigh. “In that case, I forfeit, and you win the duel by default. There, that fulfills the prophecy. Would you like a ride home?”

The chosen one blinks with shock. “I-“

“Oh, what am I saying? You’ve come all this way, you must be exhausted. You ought to stay for dinner later. We’re having doom chicken soup of eternal darkness! It’s absolutely to die for.”

The boy looks at the princess quizzically. She assures him it’s just normal chicken soup. You vehemently deny this, saying you’re evil cook of evilness Frederick is supernaturally good at his job, and to refer to the fruits of his labor as “just normal soup” would be an insult to all the work he puts in.

You take the princess dragon-riding, and later that evening during dinner the chosen one breaks down crying. You ask him what’s wrong. He opens up about his confusion. He’d spent his entire journey up on this point dreading the responsibility thrust upon him. He’d barely survived several encounters with monsters and demons and now that he’s here, he’s questioning his entire perspective. After all, he says, you’ve been treating him better than anyone ever did back home and despite the spiky black armor you seem so genuinely kind. He doesn’t know what to do, he confesses.

You reassure him that no one expects anything of him, and that he can stay as long as he’d like, or he could simply go back home in the morning. You won’t stop him. He says he still has to fulfill the other half of the prophecy, freeing the princess from those who would cause her harm. The princess assures him that she is not in any danger where she is, and that if he really wants to fulfill the prophecy he ought to help you overthrow her parents.

Nor should it be.

If you want to live in a “Children of the Corn”-style bubble of innocence and purity, well, to me, that’s a startling approach to adolescence, but every generation’s got to find its own way to reject the one before, so: do as you will.  But you can’t bring the bubble to the party, kids.  Fandom, established media-style fandom, was by and for adults before some of your parents were born now.  You don’t get to show up and demand that everyone suddenly change their ways because you’re a minor and you want to enjoy the benefits of adult creative activity without the bits that make you uncomfortable.  If you think you’re old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised, then you also think you’re old enough to be working out your limits by experience, like everybody else, like I did when I was underage and lying about it online.  If you’re not old enough to be roaming the Internet unsupervised and you’re doing it anyway, then that’s on your parents, not on fandom.

If you were only reading fic rated G on AO3, if you had the various safe modes on other media enabled, you would be encountering very little disturbing material, anyway (at least in the crude way people tend to define “disturbing” these days; some of the most frankly horrifying art I have ever engaged with would have been rated PG at most under present systems, but none of that kind of work ever seems to draw your protests).  In the end, what you really want is to be able to seek out the edges of your little world, but be able to blame other people when you don’t like what you find.  Sorry.  Adolescence is when you get to stop expecting others to pad your world for you and start experiencing the actual consequences of the risks you take, including feeling appalled and revolted at what other people think and feel.

Now, ironically, fandom’s actually a fairly good place for such risk-taking, as, for the most part, you control whether you engage and you can choose the level of your engagement.   You can leave a site, blacklist something, stop reading an author, walk away from your computer.  Are there actual people (as opposed to works of art, which cannot engage with you unless you engage with them) who will take advantage of you in fandom?  Of course there are.  Unfortunately, such people are everywhere.  They will be there however “innocent” and “wholesome” the environment appears to be, superficially.  That’s evil for you.  There are abusers in elementary school.  There are abusers in scout troops.  There are abusers in houses of worship.  Shutting down adult creative activity because you happen to be in the vicinity isn’t going to change any of that.  It may help you avoid some of those icky feelings that you get when you think about sex (and you live in a rape culture, those feelings are actually understandable, even if your coping techniques are terrible), but no one, except maybe your parents, has a moral imperative to help you avoid those.  

Basically, all of this boils down to a generational divide on how we were raised. Like, I could have told you that, but. Really. Basically every line in this article is solid gold, and completely explains the phenomenon we’re embroiled in right now. The article specifically talks about how playing in “dangerous” playgrounds helps children mature and learn how to safely take risks. Well, fandom has long been called a sandbox for a reason, and the parallels are so close it’s bizarre.

Like, navigating your way through fandom spaces that have explicit content or disturbing themes?

“The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage.”

Or

“At the core of the safety obsession is a view of children that is the exact opposite of Lady Allen’s, “an idea that children are too fragile or unintelligent to assess the risk of any given situation,” argues Tim Gill, the author of No Fear, a critique of our risk-averse society. “Now our working assumption is that children cannot be trusted to find their way around tricky physical or social and emotional situations.”

Or

Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia.

Basically, the problem is this: the 14 and 15 and 16 year-olds on this sight have been, largely, helicopter-parented for every moment of every day of their lives. Many of them have never had to take care of themselves, or navigate difficult emotional situations without parental guidance. When I was a kid, the internet was the wild west, and parents universally told us that everyone on the internet was a pedophile who wanted to kill you, so you had to keep yourself safe. Now, kids always expect there to be a parent there to take care of their emotional needs, and when they go onto online spaces, the just assume that the nearest adult will fill in that role for them, whether that adult is interested or not.

Now, kids are out here saying shit like “i dont know how you dont know that as an adult its your responsibility to maintain a safe environment for children, just as much as it is their parents. for ex not swearing around kids or letting teenagers drink alcohol like every adult knows that.. “

I am not your mother. It’s not my responsibility to ensure that there isn’t underaged drinking. If I walk past a couple of teenagers drinking beers on the street, do you know what I’m going to do about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, because I don’t care and I’m not their mother, and I’m not your mother either. I’ll watch my mouth if I notice that there’s a kid near me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t swear in public, even if there could be kids around me that I haven’t noticed.

This expectation, that every adult is there to monitor you and watch out for you, and if they aren’t willing to do that then they’re a bad person?

“in all my years as a parent, I’ve mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.”

Or how about this chilling factoid?

“When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”

These are the kids on here shouting “I need an adult!” and then getting offended when no adult rushes in to take care. It’s baffling to me, honestly, but. I didn’t grow up this way. My parents taught me how to make good decisions, take care of myself, and navigate difficult situations, both in the “real” world AND online. I… don’t really know what to say to kids whose parents didn’t.

[ID: Screenshot of Brandon Mull’s Instagram featuring a post advertising the final book of Dragonwatch. Centred is a quote, “Nothing aches like regret.” attributed to The Traveler. A gold bubble on the graphic announces October 26th as a release date and a gold banner encourages one to pre-order. The image is captioned “Truer words have never been spoken.”]