100% salt

Tumblr user: “Ow!  Hay!  Did you just bite me and make me forget it happened?” Dracula: “Yes.  Yes, I did.” Tumblr User: “That’s a violation!  It’s akin to sexual assault!” Dracula: “That metaphor was established over a century ago, yes.” Tumblr User: “But it’s wrong!” Dracula: “That’s the idea.” Tumblr User:  “Do you plan to turn me into a vampire?” Dracula: “Either that or simply kill you. It all depends on my whim.”

Tumblr User: “What about what I want?  Don’t you care about my agency?!”

Dracula:  “Um…  No.”

Tumblr User:  “This is very uncomfortable. I’m only eighteen, you’re like six hundred.”

Dracula: “Good, that’s how you’re supposed to feel.   You remember I’m the antagonist of this story, right?  

Tumblr User:  “But this is problematic.  And in (insert fiction here) you’re supposed to be sympathetic!  I can’t tell if the author wants me to see what you do as okay!” Dracula: “As I’m usually the villain and even when I’m a protagonist I’m usually still a questionable one, I’m fairly certain the author does not agree with my actions.  Also…  Bitch, I eat people!   I’m SUPPOSED to be problematic!  The fact that you didn’t realize I was problematic when I was eating your friend says more about you than it does me.”   

Tumblr User: “But…”

Dracula:  “No! I’m not supposed to be perfect, modern, woke, and enlightened!  I’m supposed to be creepy and stalkerish, old fashioned and menacing!  I’m f–king Dracula!   If you somehow find that attractive and it makes you ill-at ease to find it attractive- good.   Now you know how I was originally written in 1897!      

Tumblr User:  “But it’s probl-”

Dracula: “That- is- the- point, my dear.”

Tumblr User: “Now you’re being sexist and throwing around terms of endearment with too much ease.  I am not your ‘dear.’   You don’t know me.  You don’t get to call me ‘dear.”

Around eleven or twelve, I checked out my first smutty book from the library. I had no idea it was smutty, and very little on the cover or inner fly indicated this. It was called The Book of Shadows by James Reese. I read it during my lunch breaks at school. Inside was the following (that I can remember):

A woman bleeding to death from her vagina

Underage lesbian sex between an intersex girl and a cis girl

Bondage rape of the underage intersex girl by an incubus

A threesome between a cis man, the underage intersex girl, and a succubus

Sex in a church between a priest and a woman, who later were turned into the incubus and succubus

Graphic descriptions of torture and death

Around thirteen, my grandfather gave me a book. He had no idea what was inside. He just knew it was a scary book, and that his little granddaughter loved scary books. It was called The Laughing Corpse by Laurel K. Hamilton. Inside was the following (that I can remember):

Graphic depictions of gruesome whole-family murders

Discussions of children being taken along to their father’s visits to the red light district

Discussions of handicap fetishes

Discussions of extreme BDSM practices such as extreme knifeplay

Human sacrifices

Around fourteen, I found a book at a bookstore while on a very boring vacation. I convinced my mother to buy it for me, and she did so without looking very closely at the cover. It was called Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Inside was the following (that I can remember):

A boy my age deepthroating a grown man, complete with descriptions of what his semen tasted like

A dog giving oral pleasure to a young boy

Massive, and I mean massive, amounts of emotional abuse

A teenage boy seeing his mother getting oral sex from another woman

The same teenage boy seeing his mother and another woman having sex in a bathtub full of glass

Multiple attempted rapes

I read all these and more. Much more. This was before even fanfiction.net existed. They were easily accessible at bookstores, libraries, anywhere you might find books. Literature has always been full of this kind of material - and it needs to be. It is a place for humans to purge themselves, to safely explore that which cannot be explored elsewhere, to deal with the strange animalistic impulses that make us so deeply human. That last book? It was a memoir. Those things actually happened to Augusten, and literature was the place he went to safely purge the horrors that he experienced and witnessed as a boy.

Fanfic is no different. Fanfic, in fact, is even safer than regular fiction, because it has a much smaller and more niche readership. Much of the bad stuff in fic you can’t find unless you specifically look for it. Not so with regular fiction. I had no idea what I’d picked up when I checked out The Book of Shadows. The sex scenes and violence blindsided me. There were no tags, no warnings, nothing. I had been a kid in search of spooky stories, and I got rape and death.

But here’s the kicker: I have no hard feelings against the writers of those books, or against the books themselves. They did nothing to me. My parents probably should’ve looked a bit closer at what I was reading, but they didn’t, and I have no hard feelings against them either. I was the one who, when at 11-14 I came across material I knew was too much for me, kept reading. I knew I should’ve closed those books and stopped reading. I didn’t. That was my choice, and mine alone.

That aside, back to my original point: all this happened well before even FFN existed, let alone AO3. And it’s always existed. It always will exist. It needs to exist. Those Purge movies have one thing right: humans need outlets, places to explore the animal darkness that still lingers inside us. Literature is one of the few places where that can be done safely.

a) an intentional marketing scheme to stir interest in the project and attract certain fanbases (lgbtq people and young women) vs. 

b) members of the creative team genuinely wanting to write queer characters but the corporate side of things force them to tone it down but they still leave little hints vs. 

Are there adult men who like men who id as antis? Very, very few. I’ve been in this fandom since the beginning and seen probably less than 5.

So what antis, who are mostly female, with very, very few mlm, are doing is going around and telling dudes that like dudes that they are supporting pedophilia.

Follow them, don’t follow them.  Personally, I’ve blocked them.  Do not send them anons.  Do not threaten them.  I will block anyone I catch doing either.  Just drop them, if this isn’t the kind of person you want to follow.

And this is what they said when deleting.

screenshots submitted by a dear disciple, but the dear disciple was not the one who screenshotted them just fyi

“I’m a safe anti!” ≠ “Haha it’s so fun to pretend to be an adult & a minor in a pedo relationship & tweet obnoxious stuff to make other people look bad because we can’t find actual proof of Sheithers being pedos”

What’s next, “safe” klantis pretending to be sheithers in cosplay photoshoot of kid Keith tied up in the back of nasty Shiro’s white van?