dni if you BOTTOM TEXT

Fandom Problem #14,969:

To be honest, I'm getting pretty freaking sick about hearing "but-but my ESCAPISM!!🥺" and "I just want to play with my digital dollies!!🥺" when people are just outright refusing to acknowledge that the very politically charged media the claim to be such big fans of does in fact include political themes.

I just think back to simpsons.

You are not mentally prepared or stable enough to always care about every little issue, bias, and political thing that crops up. You need to BREATHE and forcing other people not to is insulting, tiring some, and annoying.

Like...this isn't an either/or situation anyway, you can understand the themes of an art piece while also just having silly fun with it, and in any case, policing people's imagination is insanely rude, and forcing people to engage politically with everything all the time leads to activist burnout, which is really just more suffering in the world for no reason.

You're a fucking idiot if you genuinely can't tell the difference between a cartoon character and a real child and this mindset literally leads to innocent people who wouldn't hurt a fly beating themselves up over their intrusive thoughts 24/7 until they're trapped in constant OCD cycles, and some have even killed themselves because they couldn't live with the guilt anymore.

If you promote this mindset, then you are promoting hurting real people over their treatment of fake concepts that don't exist and you should feel fucking ashamed of yourself. If shooting pixels in Counter Strike doesn't make me a real terrorist, then no amount of thirsting over paper dolls can make you a real pedophile you dumbass selfish piece of shit moron. Maybe instead of sending bullshit like this to me you should work on the fact that you think how people treat Barbie dolls is some kind of real glimpse into a person's moral character instead of literally just mashing dolls together. The way you treat a literal inanimate object is apparently a real pressing issue in a world where Donald Trump became president of the fucking United States and has been using his power to rape real children for decades. How can you even CONSIDER your line of reasoning, especially at a time like THIS???

Start carrying a potted plant with you everywhere you go, please, because that's the only way to replace the oxygen you waste being a shaming tribalistic puritan.

If I write a story about a doctor treating patients, it doesn't mean I want to be a doctor in real life. If I write a story about a murder where the murderer gets away with it in the end, it doesn't mean I have some secret desire to be a real murderer. If I play Guitar Hero for hours a day, it doesn't mean I'm automatically going to be good at playing a real guitar. The violence in video games debate has long since been settled.

And if you can understand why T-bagging someone in a video game doesn't mean you like real gun violence, then why the fuck are the rules so different if someone is thirsting over cartoon characters??? Are you people going to address this fucking ludicrous double standard????

According to your logic, blow-torching a Barbie doll is some Fruedian slip that reveals someone's secret desire to create a real life burn victim.

And of course, let's not forget that this mindset is inherently queerphobic.

Plenty of lesbians have been attracted to male cartoon characters, and plenty of gay men have been attracted to female cartoon characters, and it doesn't invalidate their queer identity. Doesn't anyone remember the way Markiplier kept thirsting over Craig from Dream Daddy despite knowing for sure that he's straight in real life?? Let's also not forget that plenty of aroace people are still attracted to fictional characters, that's called being fictosexual, and you can have F/Os like that while still having no desire to tango with any real person in real life. It's actually quite common!

1, This is not a restriction that any writers in any other venue have to deal with, wtf, or the entire YA genre would be banished; 2, Excuse you, children of Tumblr, no one is thinking about you.

If other people in fandom are older than you, by definition, they have been your age. When fans write about younger characters, we’re not peering through a keyhole at young people now and creeping on them.

We are drawing on our own experiences, thoughts, feelings and memories of what it was like when we were that age.

No one has the right to ask older writers to cut themselves off from their own past just because young’uns don’t want to acknowledge that people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, all of them, were also young once. I’m 41, but I remember vividly what it was like to be 14. If I write a high school AU, it’s about my high school experience, even if I were to set it in the present day and decorate it with some (probably comically out of touch) Stuff The Kids Are Into Now. If I write a high school AU with sex, it’s because I remember that too! I’m not thinking about kids today, why would I– I have my own experiences to draw on. And honestly, sometimes there are things about being young that you don’t really understand until you’re much older and have some perspective– and that’s worth writing about.

1) We’re making them uncomfortable by writing teen characters

2) there are all these adult characters we should be writing about instead

3) they’re here for escapism and don’t like being reminded of ‘things like that’

To which it must be said:

1) if you’re uncomfortable, stop reading it. It’s not our job to babyproof fandom for you. It’s your job to recognize personal boundaries and protect yourself. Fandom is a shared space. Get used to it.

2) we write about the characters we find interesting, same way you do. Age has very little to do with that. I know you don’t believe me now, but I also know you’ll understand when you’re older.

That’s it, that’s the thing that gets me the most.

Here’s one small example that I recall from years ago: someone barely out of their teens raided an adult artist’s private account after gaining their trust, deliberately found adult erotica of animal characters, and shared it with other teenagers claiming it was to protect them and that the artist was dangerous. Then a bunch of these teens fabricated accusations, doxxed the artist, nearly got them fired, and began harassing, bullying, and threatening similar artists. The private art had been properly tagged. It would have had to have been a deliberate act with malicious intent to hack them, steal the art, and then expose it to minors. The bullies backpedaled when caught and decided to double down in the name of “it’s gross and making us uncomfortable so the artists deserve to die.”

That seems to be a trend: Threatening death and cartoonish physical harm to anyone who writes, reads, and even doesn’t mind sexual content, particularly if the characters are attractive to the antis themselves. “If I can’t have these fictional characters, nobody can” taken to a new level. They don’t seem to want to redirect their energy toward reporting actual predators, many of whom are in their own community.

Antis are dangerous. They are dangerous people. They are protofash at absolute best. They have gotten terminally ill people denied end of life care. They have gotten people sent to prison for writing books. They are trying to get me put on the sex offender registry for doing ageplay with my wife who is older than me.

If you are friends with antis I do not want you near me and I absolutely will not put the members of my server in danger because you want to be friends with people who are pro harassment and think people should go to prison over how they play barbie dolls.

The definition of ‘anti’ is ‘someone who is pro harassing others and pro getting them in legal trouble over fiction’, the end, there are no other definitions. If you’re okay with being friends with people who are pro harassing others over fiction you aren’t safe to be around.

The definition of proship is just ‘even if I don’t like it I don’t think it’s a crime nor should anyone be harassed for it’, there are no other definitions.

You're a fucking idiot if you genuinely can't tell the difference between a cartoon character and a real child and this mindset literally leads to innocent people who wouldn't hurt a fly beating themselves up over their intrusive thoughts 24/7 until they're trapped in constant OCD cycles, and some have even killed themselves because they couldn't live with the guilt anymore.

If you promote this mindset, then you are promoting hurting real people over their treatment of fake concepts that don't exist and you should feel fucking ashamed of yourself. If shooting pixels in Counter Strike doesn't make me a real terrorist, then no amount of thirsting over paper dolls can make you a real pedophile you dumbass selfish piece of shit moron. Maybe instead of sending bullshit like this to me you should work on the fact that you think how people treat Barbie dolls is some kind of real glimpse into a person's moral character instead of literally just mashing dolls together. The way you treat a literal inanimate object is apparently a real pressing issue in a world where Donald Trump became president of the fucking United States and has been using his power to rape real children for decades. How can you even CONSIDER your line of reasoning, especially at a time like THIS???

Start carrying a potted plant with you everywhere you go, please, because that's the only way to replace the oxygen you waste being a shaming tribalistic puritan.

If I write a story about a doctor treating patients, it doesn't mean I want to be a doctor in real life. If I write a story about a murder where the murderer gets away with it in the end, it doesn't mean I have some secret desire to be a real murderer. If I play Guitar Hero for hours a day, it doesn't mean I'm automatically going to be good at playing a real guitar. The violence in video games debate has long since been settled.

And if you can understand why T-bagging someone in a video game doesn't mean you like real gun violence, then why the fuck are the rules so different if someone is thirsting over cartoon characters??? Are you people going to address this fucking ludicrous double standard????

According to your logic, blow-torching a Barbie doll is some Fruedian slip that reveals someone's secret desire to create a real life burn victim.

And of course, let's not forget that this mindset is inherently queerphobic.

Plenty of lesbians have been attracted to male cartoon characters, and plenty of gay men have been attracted to female cartoon characters, and it doesn't invalidate their queer identity. Doesn't anyone remember the way Markiplier kept thirsting over Craig from Dream Daddy despite knowing for sure that he's straight in real life?? Let's also not forget that plenty of aroace people are still attracted to fictional characters, that's called being fictosexual, and you can have F/Os like that while still having no desire to tango with any real person in real life. It's actually quite common!

Fiction amplifies reality. Jaws didn’t manifest a never before seen fear of sharks, it played on existing misconceptions and existing fears, and amplified them. The fear of sharks already existed. With or without Jaws we feared sharks, then a scary movie came out and those fears became amplified. 

But amplification isn’t exclusively bad. 

Nabokov’s Lolita, aka the most famous pedophilic story of all time and heavily censored for being “pornographic”, amplified our understanding of pedophilia, the kinds of people who commit it (charming, well educated, attractive people), and brought that conversation from hushed rooms to national attention.

Fifty Shades of Gray should have caused an uptick of relationship abuse and misuse of BDSM (and maybe it did), but it also caused a nationwide conversation on abuse, stalking, cult behavior, controlling relationships, and healthy BDSM. 

A lot of young girls first encountered female masturbation through Judy Blume’s Deenie (one of the ALA’s top 100 banned books of all time and a 40 year old woman writing about teen masturbation, a big tumblr no-no). Deenie’s impact was so important that it’s often cited as an invaluable validation for women and queer women who felt that their exploration was somehow immoral. There’s an entire book full of letters from readers to Blume about how important that book was to them. 

Take a scroll through some ‘top banned books’ lists and count to yourself how many of them were banned for specifically exploring sexual content in a liberating way. Or how many were banned for questioning the system.

Every single censorship movement and every single banned book has an army of people insisting that “fiction [only negatively] affects reality”. Books like Perks of Being a Wallflower for daring to talk about child sexual assault by a woman and depiction of a gay teenager. Or Speak for exploring the sexual assault and suicide attempts of a teenage girl. 

In reality, these books amplified reality and gave voices to the voiceless–those who felt purposefully stifled by society. Visually represented by this comic. 

I also remember my church talking about how “that’s why it’s banned! It teaches rebellion! It teaches you to question authority!” I nodded along and assumed that those were bad things.

And then I read the book. I read it and I realised something.

The thing that that book taught me the most? Was to wonder WHY a book had been banned. Because once I read it I realized it wasn’t JUST about questioning authority, it was about questioning a system that enforces ignorance and conformity. Something that requires censorship to begin, control, and spread.

I’ve had moments in my life where I saw a piece of media and cringed. Where I was sick just knowing it exists. There are books and shows that I feel strongly against and have had passing thoughts about how they should be banned.

And then I remember reading Farenheit 451. And I remember to ask, “why do I want to ban it?” and “Who does banning this benefit and who does it harm?” as well as “If this is banned, what comes next? What else can be classified this way but is vital to society and the vulnerable people in it?”

Because fiction? Is an important exploration of humanity, good and bad. And it might amplify what’s already there in a bad way sometimes, but it also shines a light on the dark places that we can actually do something about. And if you take away that light, it doesn’t make the bad things go away, it just makes bad people able to hide in the dark.

Fiction reflects reality, and reality reflects fiction. Glorifying things isn’t a good idea because that will absolutely attract the people who also glorify those things. It happens with popular things, it happens with published fiction. It happens with online stories. And if you keep saying “well it’s just fiction” you’re protecting those types of people.

Fiction that glorifies the worst of the world attracts the worst of the world. They will always search it out. To justify themselves and to brainwash others into believing their “side”.

If you define glorification as “I’ll know it when I see it” you’ve just opened a very convenient door for anyone to rip fiction spaces apart in the name of “glorification of problematic ideas”. 

Do you know who suffers the most when we tear down “bad” fiction because it “makes bad people”? Survivors. Always. Far out and away, survivors are always the first to be ripped apart. 

It’s why Speak is banned, it’s why Perks of Being a Wallflower is banned, it’s why Looking for Alaska is banned, it’s why during strikeout that the far and away biggest group affected was sexual assault survivors,  CSA survivors, and queer spaces. Always. That’s why I told you to look through the banned book list. All of it is “bad” fiction. But all of it empowers vulnerable groups. 

Listen, I’m with you, underage fic gives me the skeevies, but I also know the answer isn’t “no depictions of minors in sexual situations” because you cross out teens exploring sex healthily through fantasy, you cross out adults looking back on their teen experiences, you cross out most of YA lets be real. 

Then maybe instead we say “no depictions of minors in sexual situations WITH ADULTS” for one, a good deal of CS abusers are teens themselves, but whatever, let’s pretend that doesn’t exist, you’ve just really effectively silenced survivors (teens and adults) from looking at their experiences through text.

Okay okay, let’s say “no depictions of minors in sexual situations with adults EXCEPT FOR SURVIVORS” kay now in order to not be harassed, a survivor has to tell a stranger who wants to harass them (or worse lbr) that they are indeed a survivor. AND you’ve just made a scenario where you are HAPPY and RELIEVED to hear that someone was sexually assaulted. I cannot begin to describe to you the level of gross that is.

Okay… @saltherpgnerd, as a survivor myself? Who was groomed using various pieces of media? Shut up.

Fuck this noise. Fuck all of it. You. Don’t. Get. To. Choose. What. Changes. The. World. Your personal opinion on whether something is good or bad means NOTHING about whether or not it has a place in the world.

I was groomed using media that, today, I would definitely consider skeevy (which I’m not naming because I’m not having that argument today). I would absolutely not give it to a kid to watch or read these days, but I also would NEVER demand it be banned. 1. Because there are about a billion harmless pieces of media that could fall under the same umbrella that would end up gone as well. 2. The stuff itself wasn’t the issue, it was my abusers. The shows didn’t abuse me, they did. And 3. I HAVE SEEN WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY BANNING THINGS. It’s guaranteed to get out of hand.

I do not care what some evil asshole thinks about a piece of media or that they can pervert it to their purposes. The very idea that the entire world has to suffer the loss of information because of a group of sick fucks offends me more than any piece of problematic media ever could.

Banning and destroying things that “glorify” gross things will ALWAYS be subjective and thus will always lead to vital things being thrown away and hidden. This is just how it works and as long as people are people, it’s how it will always be. We’ve seen it over and over again and it has never once ended up actually doing anything good for anyone. Abusers still abuse, they just find other methods. Like was said above, works that teach people how to identify and avoid abuse will also get defined as glorifying that shit and will end up banned. I may hate some shows with everything in me, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to let them disappear forever, if only so that people don’t come up with the same idea later and call it new and then we have to do this all over again.

You know how I finally realized I was abused and started to heal? Seeing my own abuse depicted in fiction. In a story that many, many people would consider glorifying abuse. I might be in a much different place if I hadn’t had access to it. I may have never found my way out of that place if I hadn’t had a chance to rewatch the shit from when I was younger after having my realization.

Media teaches us about what we are and aren’t willing to tolerate in our lives. It exposes us to new ideas and gives us a safe space to evaluate them. It let’s people explore the best and worst parts of themselves without making it anyone else’s problem. Even the very worst media out there serves a purpose.

You don’t protect someone by never letting them know what can hurt them. You teach them to protect themselves by exposing them to what exists in a controlled environment so they’re prepared. If no one tells me that arsenic is poisonous that doesn’t mean that it can never harm me. It just means that I might end up in a situation where I consume it just because I don’t recognize it.

And you know what? If nothing else? Gross media gives us an easy way to identify gross people. If a male has an unironic love of Fight Club on a surface level, I stay the fuck away. A guy tells me he relates to Rick Sanchez? I run all the way away. Problematic media drawing in shitty people is a feature, not a bug.

Along with being validated in the media they consume, survivors can also write about characters going through trauma, and getting the comfort and recognition that yes, what they went through was horrible– that they can’t/don’t get from people in real life.

Writing therapy isn’t just limited to journaling, it can be projecting your trauma onto OCs, writing poetry about it, headcanoning it happening to your favorite character, along with many other things. 

All of these are therapist approved ways of dealing with trauma. It’s extremely accessible, because you don’t necessarily have to have a therapist to do it.

Hey anon.

I am feeling very stalked by you right now, because I do not have the artist for my ao3 pfp written down or listed anywhere.

So it's kind of creepy that you would presumably track down anyone who is using this person's art to show them a callout post. That's cyberstalker behavior.

They recognized the art and or tracked down somebody, did a background check, then made it their duty to go and bother unrelated people.

Like my god, what an incredible waste of time over meaningless shit.

But the answer is that a real human life is worth NOTHING to these people, because they don't see black or trans people as humans worth fighting for. They really don't care even if the person is cis and white if they aren't some rich investor, but good fucking luck if you're not white and/or trans. Everything is just worse for you if you're in a group that has normalized discrimination against them.

Trans woman are literally banned here DAILY for offenses that cis people get away with all the time, and there's famously now a tirf psyop to tear down trans men as if all men are the same type of evil.

Racism is often even worse, with non-white people recieving the brunt of harassment, smear campaigns, pedojacking and more. The kind of harassment I've seen against black people on the internet alone is seriously horrific, and it needs to fucking stop.

This is not acceptable. Keep the pressure up.