#EDIT: ALSO PEDANTIC ROMANTIC AAAA that takes me back I wonder how she's doin these days

[eternitylarva]

okay, so uh. danbooru anon. deciding not to be anon now. it's me! here's the full story, as much as I think I can remember and tell, at least. buckle up?

so this all started, I think, back in like... I wanna say 2018? we were having a hell of a bad time in our life because of being trapped in Mexico by our parents who were very insistent upon us learning Spanish and refused to recognize that we were horribly mentally ill (their fault mostly) and that spending months in an unfamiliar country when we were already scared to talk to people in the language we already knew, was, like, not helping anything, at all... Long story for some other time.

so while being there, lonely and shit, we started looking at various anime images when not, like, watching anime. Partially on twitter, partially on pixiv, and partially on deviantart. We were, for the record, like, 19, not yet egg cracked, not plural cracked, not any of these things yet. Nonetheless all these things were making us very hyperaware of our kinks and making us wonder what the fuck we even were. Our egg cracked after about a year of exposure, to which I credit a lot of things in hindsight, but they're all of or related to anime. Monogatari, houseki no kuni, Madoka, FLCL Progressive, that one scene from the second-to-last chapter of Bloom Into You being circulated online with a fan coloring and extremely confusing us and making us dysphoric, and the nail in the eggshell was joining The Pedantic Romantic's discord server and the many other trans people there making us wonder if maybe this trans of gender thing was how everything could be made some fucking sense of.

But also one other very important contribution to our Extreme Aaah Gender Feelings was one specific image of Nagisa Madoka Magica groping Mami's breast and nomfing her hair. We found this on deviantart, and, at some point, it went missing, the artist's account got nuked, and we were not able to find it again.

Except we were! thanks to danbooru! someone had saved it there. Here it is.

So, this particular experience convinced us that danbooru was instrumental in archiving anime fanart. Eventually we came across some different more active artists whose yuri shipping works were giving us more different gender euphoria, but no one was uploading it there, so I decided we'd best be the change we want to see. etc

Anyway this is where the problems start. Because it turns out danbooru is not an archival site. It's not run like one, it's not intended to be one. (or if it is intended to be one, then it fucking sucks at doing that.) It's a closed community of people (seemingly mostly lonely cis men) who want to maintain an ongoing gallery of the hot anime girls they like.

Consistent with this apparent aim is their (frankly fucking stupid) system of upload limits. You can read how that works for yourself, if you want, but in a nutshell, it means that as a new user you have to get your posts approved in the moderation queue before they're visible, and you can only have so many uploaded to the queue at a time. The more pictures you get approved, the more you get to keep uploading, and if your uploads go unapproved by the moderators, you get penalized with less permitted uploads. If enough of your images get approved and few enough of them are deleted (they're not really deleted per se, just, banished to invisibility in the site's search unless you specifically search for the deleted images), then, eventually you become a "Contributor" which basically means you can bypass this nonsense system and upload however much of whatever you like whenever.

They claim that this system is to prevent people from spamming the site with too many low quality images. But the thing is, the moderators aren't actually obligated to approve images, and most of them only approve an image if they like it. So, this results in a dynamic where, rather than uploading something that meets a reasonable standard of quality and being sure it'll go through, you have to guess what the moderators personally like, and hope to god that you're correct. If your tastes align with the mods, this is probably a cakewalk. If not, then, well, you have to fuck around.

I eventually noticed that there's a discord server, so, in an effort to get an edge in this piece-of-shit mind game, I joined there and got friendly with the regulars. Asking them and the admins for help helped me figure out what to put up there, and, it turns out, that if you're willing to talk there, you can just, like, share the image you want to upload and ask if it's likely to make it through approval. Sometimes you get lucky enough for a moderator to say "go ahead, I'll approve that". Easy win! kinda. if you ignore the having to join another goddamned discord server.

...still, for a little bit, it went fine, they seemed nice enough, I was open about my queer identity and none of them gave me shit about it, so I was like... this is fine, right? they're fine. they seem fine. There were at least a couple who seemed like good people, and I thought, yeah. Fine.

It was all going just fine and dandy, except that I didn't like having to talk to people, I found the whole process of getting approved tedious, and I was also noticing some of the site admins talking about how the immense backlog created by the general inaction of most of the mods was causing problems for like, the one or two moderators who actually try to keep up with the backlog and approve everything that's basically fine, and also even the regulars really don't seem to like this system, but not one person questioned... the need for the upload limit system in the first place? or why they couldn't just... delete spam on a case by case basis (I've looked time and again; it's really not that common, most of the shit that gets uploaded is just, fine), instead of screening everything for possible subjective spaminess?

Like, if Wikipedia, instead of reacting to vandals after they've done things (like they do here in reality) went and manually reviewed EVERY SINGLE EDIT for possible vandalism, and then y'know, a bunch of the Wikipedia admins took this as license to just, delete edits that say true things they don't like? And then everyone had to like, carefully police their edits to ensure that they fit with the personal views of the admins most likely to approve them? Like... that would suck for editors, and also would not fucking work and make a lot of unnecessary bullshit busywork for everyone involved, and also is basically exactly how danbooru works.

Honestly I am still flabbergasted that they just run the site this way. Like how has no one stopped and questioned this. Why the fuck are they still doing this. Sincerely: danbooru admins, what the fuck is wrong with you? You don't have to do this! I-agh. I didn't even get to the transphobia. Okay. uh

So anyway at some point in the discord server I took a swing at suggesting a more inclusive approach to tagging the genders of characters who appear in images (another questionable system that maybe doesn't need to exist, but whatever), Bridget Guilty Gear came up, many of the regulars openly complained about how a flame war over her gender tag starts any time anyone uploads a picture of her, and eventually, one of the admins responded to me like this:

I saw right then that there was no way I was winning this discussion, so I left an :| emoji on the message to express my disapproval and promptly exited the discord server. I then spiraled a bit for a few days, had an internalized transphobia panic attack that I manifested in a vent thread on bluesky, and then talked over my feelings on the situation with our girlfriend who expressed sympathy but also said "i told you so, y'know" and also emphasized to me, "you need to accept it's not an archival site. it's a closed circle of assholes" and I said, "yeah, I know"

Anyway, I uploaded a little bit more after that, and eventually got promoted to "Contributor" status, after which point (this was back in November of last year) I have uploaded a total of... maybe 60 times? give or take. The fact that I no longer need to go through the approval queue means that I do not need to fuck with the mods in any way shape or form, and, y'know, I prefer that. I do not like the site's community, but like, it's a thing I use, and I'm gonna keep making use of their servers to host my particular special little girls for as long as they keep the servers online, I guess. And I mean, also, I guess everything I post there is inevitably getting mirrored on some other site, so. Yeah

...I mean I guess it also helps that I know nothing about guilty gear and don't follow any artists who draw Bridget. At least not currently. so

I hope this has answered all of your questions!

Thank you very much for writing all of this up. It was a fascinating read! I've been a casual Danbooru user for over a decade at this point, just using it to search for art of characters I liked or posing/framing inspiration for my own creative outlets. I too treat it like an archival site, but I've always got the vibe that it was mostly run by what I can most charitably describe as weirdos -- and it's eye-opening to hear just how backwards their systems are. I'm sorry you had to endure all of that over the years.

As for Bridget, I was pretty dialed in to the discourse on the site when it cropped up. Though I don't ever interact with the community, there was so much debate about her on the comments of some pieces that I was compelled to seek out the forums to see what they were talking about. It was largely the same as the experience you had with that Discord mod, I'm afraid. Supposedly, you tag what you see, unless you know the character is a "trap", then you tag what you know, unless that character is Bridget and she doesn't have visible breasts, vagina, or trans colours/themeing in the art. Yes, that seems to be the current compromise as of time of writing. The 1girl/1boy/2girls/etc. tagging scheme is really bizarre and they really need better solutions. Penises are considered a boy-only feature in their tagging system, but "futanari" exists and it gets the girl tag still. Is that tagging what they see or what they know? But every so often the discussion comes up on the forums again and the regulars defend the status quo because, well, to them it's a "ain't broke don't fix it" sort of situation.

Anyway, thank you again for this. It's not a website I get to discuss often or think about much, but since it's been in my life for so long, it's been rather interesting to get another side of it. Keep up the good work on archiving your special blorbos! o7