#-goes to cheese convention- WHAT THE FUCK THERE'S CHEESE HERE?? IM LITERALLY A MINOR

[diamondcitydarlin]

'time for round two of making teenagers uncomfortable on the internet'

Listen. No one is shipping beetlebabes for the sole purpose of 'making teenagers uncomfortable on the internet'. Unless the adults in question are your parents/guardians, none of them are responsible for the stuff you might see while being 'on the internet'. None of them are responsible for your discomfort from what you might see. None of them are obligated to stop having fun in their own fandom spaces simply because a teenager exists 'on the internet' who doesn't like it (who is also perfectly capable of staying out of places they don't want to see, I PRESUME) no more than adults at a bar are obligated to not drink because there are people under the age who can't (fittingly, most bars in the US don't admit people under the age at all). You know who is responsible? Depending on your age of teenagedom, it's either to some extent your parents/guardians, but also you. Yeah, sweetie, you. I've been on the internet since the late 90's when I was NINE and I'm here to tell you right now that learning how to cultivate your own experience online is an extremely important tool. If you don't learn now how to keep your nose out of things that you don't like, you're going to have a very hard time filled with round-about arguments and constant drama and maybe worse when you could just be having fun with the things you do like and ignoring the stuff you don't. You see, my sweet summer child, feeling 'discomfort' about something benign does not inherently give you the right to shit all over whatever it is that made you uncomfortable or make up insinuations about the consenting adults participating in it. Unless there are people dropping shipping art into your inbox against your will or something (there aren't) it actually is none of your business at all, and doesn't concern you in the least. Like my goodness, you kids have ALL kinds of protections you can use to weed out things you don't want to see that we didn't have back when I was a 'teenager on the internet', blocking, blacklisting, browser extensions that can help with that, etc, and yet somehow we seem to have better understood back then how to mind our own business and stay out of fandom spaces we didn't want to be in. Nowadays all I see are children running into the devil's sacrament uninvited and claiming to be personally affected by said sacrament when all of us are wondering what the fuck they're doing there in the first place when there are clear signs denoting what sacrament this is. You don't have to see the movie, you don't have to see shipping content, you don't have to be 'exposed' to any of this at all; in this day and age, you choose to be, which makes any discomfort you feel as a result of that your own responsibility. The only person making 'teenagers uncomfortable on the internet' in this specific instance are the teens themselves.

And again, a little crash course in history here since the education system probably failed you, but using simply the existence of children as an excuse for why adults can't do consenting adult activities with each other has historically been used as a way to demonize and weaponize violence against marginalized groups. Yall are literally just stealing pages from homophobic/misogynistic/racist/transphobic conservative playbooks. That may not be your ultimate goal in coming after fandom spaces, but it's where that kind of behavior and thinking always ends up in the end. If you think alt-right entities won't harness that sense of youthful moral outrage for their own ends then I have a bridge to sell you.

Anyway, point being, no random adult on the internet or IRL is responsible for you. Random adults on the internet or IRL are not your parents/guardians. They have no obligation to eschew their own interests just because kids are wandering into places where they shouldn't. I honestly worry for any child on the internet who thinks this way, because there are absolutely predators out there that will abuse this sense of 'every adult is responsible for my comfort'. They aren't, and I'm sorry the adults in your life that actually are responsible for you failed you so much as to not teach you otherwise. Unlearn this now before you get hurt, please.