ao3 made me sick!
the day before yesterday I was casually scrolling through ao3 trying to find a fic when I stumbled upon the most disgusting and atrocious "fan"fiction of all time. the description was something along the lines of "X is an elementary school teacher and gives his student Y his first ever orgasm". the tags only said extreme age gap. I was genuinely so disturbed that I had to go and see what the comments said, so I went straight to the comment section without reading any of the story. I couldn't believe my eyes. they were all like "loved it 😍". and it was straight up child pornography. child molestation. it made me sick to my stomach. that author is a criminal! so are the readers. they're sick in the head! I immediately left ao3 and later when I couldn't stop thinking about how foul it was, I wanted to see if I could report this to the ao3 staff. guess what! they don't ban authors like this unless they upload actual or photorealistic pictures that contain child pornography. they only deem it as immoral but don't do anything about it! how sick is that! genuinely never touching that platform ever again. bye ao3.
1) don't say child pornography when what you mean is child sexual exploitation material. The problem with child sexual exploitation material, as the name implies, is that real children are sexually exploited to produce it.
2) this is not that. Zero real children are involved. Nobody is hurt. The thing about fiction is that the characters are not real people. I'm going to need you to read that again until it sinks in. Fictional characters are not real people, and fiction in which characters are hurt or even killed harms zero real people.
3) you don't specify what the fic's (mandatory!) archive warnings are, but if they include 'creator chose not to use archive warnings' or 'underage sex', the author is within Archive guidelines and frankly, you seeing this is on you for not filtering out stuff you knew you didn't want to see. If neither warning was used, yeah, report that, it'll be retagged, and then it's fine.
4) I would not read that fic. There are a lot of things I won't read, including vore, quiobi shipping, RPF, most modern AUs, and anything with vampires or alcoholism content. I'm glad those fics exist, because their existence shows that they fill a need people have, and I'm grateful to the authors who tag and summarise them well, but I acknowledge that as a grownup it's on me to stop reading, or not start reading, stuff I don't like.
5) The point of AO3 is that fics that do not break the law in the hosting territory do not get taken down. End of story. The reason this is the policy is very long and very old and you sound like you're probably too young to have been around for much of that. Also, I guarantee you that that is not the most atrocious fic on the site, and I love that people feel safe to post atrocious fics. There are almost certainly things you enjoy that other people would find atrocious, and you're safe to post those things too.
6) Part of being a responsible adult is not deliberately and pointlessly making yourself outraged. You did that by opening the comments on a fic whose summary and tags told you it wouldn't contain anything you wanted to read. "Don't like, don't read" has been a staple aphorism of fan spaces for decades.
7) Decent flounce. 6/10. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
you are so pressed and for what?? I get that there are certain fetishes and what not but it honestly feels like you are defending something that is most definitely NOT OKAY. it doesn't matter if the characters are fictional or not. its just extremely immoral and should not be normalised in any way. there doesn't need to be an outlet for this kind of stuff. if you even think about insanely sick stuff like this firstly you keep it to yourself and then you should realise that "oh! maybe this isn't normal thinking. maybe what im feeling are not regular feelings. I should get help!". I agree that I didn't use the right terminology so I thank you for that, but other than that I didn't like your response.
RETHINKING
I have come to the realisation that the original post was just me rambling without actually laying out the things that were bothering me. I have a lot of thinking to do about this subject but that may take me a while as I deem this a very difficult subject. if I responded to anyone rudely (which I know I did) I apologise and I want to explain that I was so far up my own ass that even though I posted my thought online for everyone to see and comment on I didn't really want to accept any other thoughts.
