To me this sounds like a case of the reader interpreting the text in a way other than the interpretation that the original author intended.
Which is always totally fine. The author is “dead” after all.
This is exactly the reason why you can’t assume you know that someone is trying to “glorify” or “glamorize” a dark topic when they write about it.
The text is always up to interpretation. The text can always be read in a way the author did not intend.
Children who deliberately violate their own boundaries and then cry that someone should have stopped them from being able to do so don’t get any sympathy from me.
It’s like, do you want agency, or not? Why do you want people to take your agency from you?
Fandoms can’t be categorized by age, only the content created within them. And if antis go looking at explicit content and then get mad about it that’s not my fault.
Antis can’t accept that once something is out in the world, you have no control over how others perceive it or interact with it.
Honestly it’s not just antis who act that way though, sometimes.
By “stop this cycle of abuse” you mean stop bullying and harassing people over their fiction and art, right? Right?
Oh that’s not what you meant??
That’s a hell of an imposing strawman you’ve got right there. Gonna bring him to life with some magic powder?
Dear antis:
You can’t see into a writer’s mind, and you can’t know the intentions they had when writing something unless they state their intentions directly.
When you read something and you feel like it is glamorizing, glorifying, or promoting the material it portrays, that’s your own perception.
You are the one interpreting the material in a way that makes it seem appealing, when that might not be the intention of the author at all.
If you think something is glamorizing dark content; its because you’re the one who felt like that dark content was suddenly appealing.
The funniest (and worst) thing I have seen is antis who write fiction involving sexual assault, but claim that its fine for them to write, but its bad for anyone who calls themselves proship to write because proshippers “romanticize” it.
Oh my god, we’re really doing this again? Are we? Are we really doing this again?
Anon, I am tired. I am so fucking tired.
I’m really sorry, whoever this is, I don’t even know you, and you may be asking this question in good faith, but I’m unloading anyway because I am sick and tired of this fucking question. Feel free to tell me if I read more hostility in your question than you intended, because I’ve done that before, and I apologize if I have.
That being said, literally think about the moderation you are suggesting. Where do you draw the line between talking about bad things and romanticizing bad things? Wattpad said that it would remove all fiction that romanticized rape, but in practice it actually just banned everything, including threads where survivors talked about their experiences. Sometimes, the line between simple depiction and endorsement is extremely thin, and everyone has different ideas for where that line should be.
In fact, it wasn’t just Wattpad. FF.NET went through a similar purging, and so did LiveJournal, where Strikethrough occured. Millions of stories were simply wiped clean, including stories where people overcame their challenges and found a way to heal. Even if you actually did find the line between depiction and endorsement that more than one person could agree on, how could you reasonably enforce that over thousands or millions of stories? The only way is to read them from start to finish and then decide based on your own interpretation wether or not it actually broke that rule. Even then, plenty of stories leave the moral up to interpretation on purpose! How could you get an entire moderation team to agree on the correct interpretation fast enough to actually moderate an entire website!? Do you know how impractical this solution actually is!?
And don’t even get me started on terms like “written cp” or “pedophilia porn” as if comparing fiction to real people getting assaulted is not insulting enough already. You people seem to think that written underage fiction is the same as (or at least encourages) illegal photos or videos of real children being abused and exploited, so you think that CSEM is illegal because it’s gross or romanticizing abuse. That is so fucked up, I don’t even have words for it. Think about hated child vlogging youtubers like Daddy of 5 and the Ace family, people who are rightfully hated for making money off of exploiting their children, but nobody seems to have a problem with writing fictional children getting verbally and psychologically abused. You wanna know why? BECAUSE FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ARE NOT REAL AND CANNOT BE HURT.
Have you ever actually been in a library before!? Probably not, because you think this only exists in fanfiction and not in published fiction, so Steven King can write a child clown orgy and get away with it scott-free while tiny teenage AO3 users recieve death threats every fucking day just for daring to write a sex scene between two consenting 17-year-olds, as if that is far more of a sin than the child orgy.
Jesus Christ, it’s like antis just heard from someone popular that “written cp” is just as bad as real abuse or exploitation materal, so they turned their brains off to clog up the cyber tip line with false tips, ignore examples of real child exploitation, act like AO3 is worse than public libraries when you aren’t even technically allowed on the site til you’re 13, act like making them uncomfortable is enough of an offense to have media censored, ignore real CSA victims who are insulted that they compare what they went through to cartoon drawings, and send death threats and suicide baits to people who did nothing wrong!!!
The modern day proshipping phenomenon is really just people who are sick and tired of having their fanfiction censored because some harpies with internet access want to bring back the Hays Code. I know you probably have good intentions sending me this ask, but personally, I’ve had enough.
“keep it to themselves if thats what they get off to” as if that’s not the same as saying, “Victims should suffer in silence, and victims who can’t write aren’t allowed to cope at all.”
Don’t assume that something you don’t like is just meant to be porn by default. Also, don’t assume that fandom is full of kids anyway. Kids shouldn’t even have unsupervised internet access. I would understand this ask if it was sent in like, 2007, back when googling “my little pony” was basically the reddit 50/50 challenge, but for god’s sake, tumblr is rated “Mature 17+” on the google playstore, even after the porn ban.
It’s not my job to babysit you. If you don’t like things in the main tag, then learn to block tags you don’t like, or ask your parents to do it for you. This is a space made by adults for adults, and it’s not our fault that children and teenagers invade our space and ignore layers of warnings put in place to keep children out just so they can complain that we aren’t “family-friendly” enough.
We get one site, ONE SINGULAR SITE, that allows this kind of problematic fiction, that allows queer fiction, that allows cope fiction, etc. We got our spaces decimated one by one, from Wattpad to LJ to FF.NET, and you guys want to take that away too, because it makes you, personally, uncomfortable.
Because yes, every time a fandom purge like this has happened, it has led to very predictable results. SFW queer fiction is censored too, because our existence is explicit to the vast majority of the world right now. I don’t know if you noticed. Non-religious and Anti-Christian sentiments are censored too. Some people are killed for even hinting at opposing Islam. Etc.
The only way to avoid censorship altogether is to allow all bad fiction, except in very specific cercumstances where real people were harmed.
And I have my own opinions about what kind of fiction should be permissable, but that’s a different discussion; One we can’t have until we stop playing this pointless game of offense.
In conclusion anon; Let people write what they fucking want. Video games don’t make school shooters, so fanfiction can’t make a child predator.
Just because someone ships something doesn’t mean they believe that that relationship is healthy, ideal, desirable, or sustainable.
People can ship things just because they’re interesting.
Shipping something doesn’t mean you think its good or right.
People don’t owe you an explanation of why they ship something.
We talk a lot about how antis don’t seem to understand that the things that make them upset are comforting to some people, and the things that are comforting to them are upsetting and traumatic to some people.
We also talk about how it’s okay to block anyone for any reason.
Yesterday we had to block someone who was a frequent poster in one of our favorite fandom tags.
This person was not doing ANYTHING wrong by posting their content. It was all correctly tagged and 100% legal, and allowed by tumblr’s TOS.
But their posts were extremely triggering to Toko, to the point where he was getting extremely upset any time we’d see their content in the tag, which was frequently.
What were they posting?
Posts about loving, happy, normal nuclear families. Posts about pregnancy, and babies, and being excited to be a mother. Posts about being the mother of small children.
Totally normal, twee, cutesy, heteronormative comfortable family and romantic posts.
And they had Toko on the verge of a breakdown due to his own trauma. Seeing that particular kind of content, over and over again, specifically for certain characters was extremely triggering for him. Made him feel nauseous, anxious, upset, and genuinely unsafe.
So we blocked that person.
They were not doing anything wrong.
You NEVER know what kind of content is going to be upsetting or triggering for someone. What is extremely wholesome content to you might be extremely repellent and upsetting, and triggering to another person.
Just because you are uncomfortable with one type of content doesn’t mean someone else is.
One person might be triggered by violent, sexual, aggressive or strange content, and another person, like us, like Toko, might find that same content comforting and safe.
Another person might be triggered by what you think is wholesome.
Please think about that before you try to tell people what kind of content they are or aren’t allowed to post according to you.