marc--chilton asked:
"The term pedophile has become the anti’s number one ammunition in their fascist cause." please tell me that was sarcastic or ironic or something.
No, this is legit truth. You have no idea how many times I’ve seen friends and mutuals in the HTTYD fandom be called this just because of what they ship or write.
came across another child rper who thinks google is just to take images off.
‘i was in a rush’ is not a reason to not credit but some kids think it is,i see the ‘idk who it is’ or 'i forgot’ used alot when rping kids steal art, i hate when they do this, its not hard to make a google doc or pintest to save links to
——-
And yet, these kids think that they’re entitled to the art they find on Google. Like the other one who uses “I’m not selling it!” to repost. It would be so helpful if schools taught kids how to use Google properly, but they don’t. So they think it’s a free resource fairy.
[video]
you know what sucks? having people bombard you on a daily basis with terms like “paedophile” and “child pornography” and “grooming” when what they’re actually talking about is “a ship I don’t like” and “stories that make me feel gross”
because the words paedophile and child pornography and grooming all have specific, very important meanings and these people are warping those definitions to the point of being meaningless
I still have a very severe, gut reaction when I see any of those words. they are harrowing to me and hurt me on a visceral level - and as much as they hurt me, I don’t want to become numb to them. I want them to continue to impact me like that because the sexual exploitation of actual children in the real world should never happen and needs to be stopped
but the people who keep lobbing those grenades in my direction don’t seem to give two shits about real children who are actually experiencing horrible abuses. they only ever speak up about RPF or fanfiction about child characters. Or even characters who aren’t children! I’ve seen accusations of grooming and paedophilia when both members of the ship are adults with a height difference! Or a few years difference in their ages!
just say you don’t like the ship and be done with it. stop crusading under the flag of a cause you don’t even know the definition of
this is a rant, and I’ll probably delete this later but I’ve had a fucking horrible week and I just need to get this off my chest. and the worst part is? I know that the people who say these things will feel justified or even victorious for making me feel like shit. that’s why I rarely say anything at all
but I’ve blocked probably 700 people or more in the last 9 days and the fact that there are that many people who think like this is probably the most depressing thing of all
what radicalized me? being told I’m a paedophile because I use a fanfiction website.
(via athingofvikings)
To clarify on the latest reblog, no, I do not support pedophilia.
The term pedophile has become the anti’s number one ammunition in their fascist cause. If you ship teens with a year or two age gap, you’re a pedophile in their eyes. If you ship two consenting adults in their late teens and early 20s, you’re a pedophile. I’ve been on the receiving end of that for having dare said they were wasting their breath trying to police NSFW content. Basically calling them out means you’re a pedophile in their selfish righteous views of cleansing the fandom.
It’s become so extreme that they’ve exhausted the seriousness behind the word.
I try to stay away from a lot of fandom discourse, but since I’ve been seeing this on my dash again and in tags, I feel the need to make a statement on this, particularly for any young fans who follow me that might get drawn into this mindset.
Stay away from purity culture. Warn your friends away from it too, if you see them starting to fall for it. It’s very easy to get drawn into it
Almost always, it starts with one of three roots, pedophilia, incest and/or abuse. Usually it’s pedophilia. Funnily enough, that’s also what congress usually uses to try to justify passing bills that undermine online privacy & security. Because it’s an easy, extreme target, and when people attempt to argue against it, it’s nice and easy to say “Oh so you like pedophilia” rather then actually engaging with their argument.
The logic goes like this, although there’s many forms of it.
- “Pedophilia is bad.” -> Obviously, you agree with this. You’re a reasonable person, and the idea that anyone would do something like that to a child is horrible. This is a normal human reaction.
- “Because pedophilia is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.” -> Here you might hesitate, but it adds up, doesn’t it? The thought of pedophilia in any context probably gives you a bad feeling, that makes you inclined to go along with this logic.
- “Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia is also bad.” -> Maybe you pause here, or maybe you don’t. But still, it adds up, it’s a very easy flow. After all, we’ve decided that that is Bad, so why would anyone Good want to create something like that?
- “Since people who create content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia are just as bad as people who engage in pedophilia in real life, it’s okay to harm them.” -> Here’s where you might pause again. The argument might not win you over entirely, you might not be willing to do harm yourself, but you may be a lot more willing to turn a blind eye to harm being done to someone. Or to consider it ‘justified’.
- The pattern now repeats for anything else that’s considered “morally impure”, and “pedophilia” is expanded and expanded, often to ridiculous points, such as merely shipping two underage characters. “Abuse” becomes any ship that the person pushing doesn’t like, for any reason. And so on and so forth.
This is the foundation of “anti” culture, and it’s important to be aware of it so you can catch this false equivocation. Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity. It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions.
A very handy trick for when you encounter this sort of argument, is to replace whatever the selected purity term is with murder. After all, we can all agree that murder is bad, but at the same time, we understand that a murder in a book =/= a murder in real life.
Let’s see that argument again, shall we?
- “Murder is bad”
“Because murder is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.”
“Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of murder is also bad.”
“Since people who create fictional explorations of murder are just as bad as the people who commit murder in real life, it’s okay to harm them.”
Hopefully, it’s now easy to see why the above argument is fundamentally flawed.
Keep your eye out for purity culture in your fandom spaces, and when you see it, refuse to engage with it. Warn your friends if you see them falling into the same traps, although try to be kind about it; this is a very easy thought pattern to fall into. I don’t recommend trying to argue/debate anti’s. The attention only feeds them. Block them instead. Don’t let people control or shame you for what you create or consume, and don’t control or shame others for what they create or consume.
Also, as a note, let me be clear about something. If you are uncomfortable with any of the above discussed things, or anything in general in fiction (ie, underage ships, murder, incest, abuse, penguins, needles, etc), that’s perfectly fine (it’s also called a squick, for those that haven’t heard that term before). Absolutely control your fandom experience by blocking people, filtering tags, unfollowing, etc. However, just because you are uncomfortable with something, does not give you the right to control other people. Other people have no right to control what content you create or consume, and you have no right to do that to them either.
Okay?
I think there are two other important arguments antis use that should be debunked. They will say that fiction should be censored if it could either 1) be used/leveraged towards harm or 2) causes harm itself.
The typical example of the first argument is usually about abusers using fiction that depicts pedophilia or other abuse in order to groom a victim. It is true that abusers have used fiction as part of their grooming tactics. Antis will say that this means that that fiction should be censored to prevent this. This is a bad argument for two reasons. First, it misplaces the blame for abuse from the abuser to the tool/method of the abuser. Second, it misunderstands the fact that even “vanilla” or “non-problematic” things are used by abusers as part of their grooming tactics.
The typical example of the second argument is usually about traumatized people being triggered, “re-traumatized”, or otherwise very distressed about certain fiction. It is true that certain fiction can cause real emotional/psychological harm to certain people. Antis will say that any such harmful fiction should be censored for this reason. This is a bad argument for two reasons. First, whether a piece of fiction is harmful is dependent upon the individual, i.e. no fiction universally causes harm. Second, things that are considered “problematic” are not the only things that are potentially triggering–anything can potentially be a trigger, no matter how “innocuous” it is to people without that trigger. When it comes to topics that are more frequently distressing/triggering, the solution to preventing harm is to use tags/warnings so people can avoid topics that will harm them.
(via athingofvikings)
[video]
*parts a bead curtain as i enter the room, carrying a glass of lemonade*
hey….
nothing you ever read, watch, or participate in will be ideologically pure and without its problems. your quest to consume the most unproblematic material will be, in the end, fruitless. your enjoyment of anything will be sapped away, leaving you a husk starved for media.
it is okay to enjoy things that have problems to them, so long as you do it critically and with an open mind, and take care to consider others.
*leaves the way i came*
(via athingofvikings)
Big words coming from a guy who wants to bonk lion cubs.
——-
If only that were true. He may claim that he’s sorry for what he’s done. But then he’ll go back to doing it next week and target the next innocent person who didn’t want his crap attention.
Just a heads up. Gonna start reblogging articles on Fandom Antis since this fascist toxic mentality has leaked into this fandom as of recent. Will tag as #antis if you want to block the tags.