#but I turned out completely fine!!

[aceofwands]

Oh my god the dolphin fucking! I'd forgotten about that!! I was going to add a comment to a similar effect for anon to understand, as someone who has casually added a "lol yeah I sure read some inappropriate stuff as a teenager" tag to posts in the past, this is what adults who are in their 30s and grew up with the wild west internet in the 2000s mean.

We're not talking about rogue titty sightings, or reading smutty fanfic (which I sure was doing a lot earlier than 16 lol) - we're looking back like huh, I can see now that I didn't really have the maturity or emotional bandwidth to process reading that bestiality, or gore, or someone's smutty original fiction depicting an abusive relationship as romantic that you didn't realise was making you uncomfortable until you were 12 chapters in, or whatever the fuck it was. In the days before AO3 existed you'd trawl through the internet looking for random people's personal archives - the majority of which did NOT have the extensive tagging and rating system that AO3 does, so if you wanted to read some smut (slash especially) for a particular pairing you really had no idea what you were in for.

And yes, there was the back button - but again, knowing when you should use it was wisdom gained through lived experience. Because that's the thing, I don't think any of us who look back like, wow yeah I was looking at inappropriate stuff as a teenager, think that it ruined us! That's 100% the conservative Christian brainrot talking. We can just recognise now, in a way we couldn't then, that our younger selves were exposed to content that we didn't necessarily have the experience to handle. But it was only by having these experiences in the first place that then gave us that knowledge and lived experience to now recognise, oh this is making me uncomfortable, time to hit the back button and go do something else to scrub my brain of that mental imagery.

Like I can look back now and laugh at that core memory of reading "how I fuck real actual dolphins and you can too" as a teenager, comfortable in the knowledge that it didn't fuck me up at all actually (even though I'm sure most conservative Christians would completely disagree LMAO). But I also know that I have the experience now to recognise when say, smutty fanfic is depicting sex that would make me uncomfortable irl, in a way that I would have had no clue about at 16. SO I second all the other responses saying to explore real actual sex ed materials!! Smutty fanfic is NOT a replacement for proper sex ed any more than porn is. But they're both perfectly normal ways to explore your sexuality that you absolutely won't look back and regret reading/watching .... although you might cringe at your taste if you ever go back and try to read them again as an adult LMAO.

So I’m a minor (16 to be specific) and I frequently watch and read stuff with explicit sexual or 18+ content in it. I live in an extremely conservative Christian household and things like explicit fanfic are pretty much the only option I have for learning about sex that isn’t abstinence only. I do feel bad about it, especially when I see adults online say stuff like “oh i watched lots of inappropriate things as a teen that i really shouldn’t have” and it makes me feel like I’m ruining myself in a way that I won’t realize until I’m an adult? Right now I don’t see what the big deal is but i get the feeling that when i’m 24 or something I’ll wake up one day and be ashamed of this for some reason i’m not mature enough to know yet. Should I just stop and wait until I’m 18 to continue or what?

hi anon,

okay. I'm gonna hit you with something:

turning 18 does not actually change the way you feel about porn or sex or anything. the difference between being seventeen and 364 days and being 18 is nonexistent. there's not a magical switch that changes you as a person; that comes from lived experience. if you're 18 and your experience is still that porn and smut and what have you i something that you should feel bad about, it's still going to feel that way and a birthday won't change that.

look, the whole notion of "I saw [x] that I shouldn't have when I was young" is like. okay. so you saw something that was a little mature for you that you didn't quite get? awesome. did you die? no. most people's hangups about sexuality don't come from seeing a rogue titty when they were a teenager, they come from the culture that person was raised in that made seeing a rogue titty feel like something to be ashamed of instead of a completely natural part of life.

story time! when I teach my 4th-6th grade OWL classes (Our Whole Lives, great human development program) I always start by holding a meeting with the kids' parents. I've been doing this for seven years, and every time without fail some of the parents will recall seeing porn for the first time as a kid. these guys were kids when printed porn magazines were still a thing, so they were discovering them in all kinds of places - the bedrooms of their parents or their friends' parents, at bus stops, in the woods, once even stowed in some farm equipment. and they remember it feeling illicit and exciting, sure, and possibly making them confused or even horny for the first time in their young lives, but like... that's it. none of these people are irreparably damaged by seeing porn. in fact, they've grown up to be the kind of people who go out of their way to make sure their young kids are enrolled in a queer-friendly, body-positive, diversity-embracing sex ed class to counter stereotypes and misinformation they might receive elsewhere.

looking at things that arouse you is morally neutral. it can be a great way to help you learn about what turns you on, and even if it's not the best source of factual, realistic depictions of sex, it can still help you discover things - hell, I only figured out what the clitoris was by reading Young Justice fanfic (shout out Snaibsel).

you can't ruin yourself, at any age, with the media you like to consume. what makes you uncomfortable and anxious is the attitude you've been taught to have about that media, which is something that has to be actively unlearned, because it's certainly not going to just disappear on its own when you become a legal adult.

tl;dr obviously no one is making you watch porn and you shouldn't if it makes you uncomfortable, but if you drop it right now and come back when you're 18 don't expect to feel any different if you haven't done any more unpacking re: the conservative Christianity of it all.

[lucabyte]

A belief in Nominative Determinsim

[alligaytorswamp]

cavalry captain toying with eleventh of the fatui harbingers

[introspectivememories]

im sorry but i choose to believe that tim drake is the most insufferable "my man, my man, my man" girl about bear. he does not shut up about him. steph is cooking smth in the kitchen? oh my man can do that. bear cooks really well. dick triaging some poor victim on an emergency site? oh my man is really good at that. mhmm, bear is on his way to becoming a paramedic. damian building something? oh my man is really good with power tools. have you ever seen him build ikea? it takes him less than an hour. for our anniversary, he built me a coffee table. mhmm isn't he amazing? yeah my man did that. yeah my man, mhmm that's my ma-

[dustykneed]

not a SINGLE day goes by where i don't think about that post with the photo of andrew's death grip on alex's waist. you know the one

(i have, regrettably, once again, lost the damn post. if anyone has any clue as to its whereabouts i would be much obliged if you could drop the link lol. but at the very least i had the presence of mind to download the photo so here yall go xDD:

[dieselpvnk]

let's not forget Inv is one of the only two slugcats that can maul

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

Emily and the extra realization that an angel had her wings torn off and eye gouged out and halo repossessed and was left for dead in hell- why exactly??

Emily: "A child."

Lute: "A filthy little sinner."

Emily: "You did all that to her, because she showed a moment of mercy to, a C H I L D?"

Lute: "Yes."

Emily: "And then you tried blackmailing her with this??"

Lute: "Yes."

Emily: "That's terrible."

Lute: "I'll admit it didn't work how we wanted it to, but the broken look on her disgusting little demon fling's face was still worth it."

Emily: "I meant that it was a wrong and terrible thing to do TO her. And to Charlie!"

Lute: "They've probably already broken up by now. That traitor will spend her final hours alone and wretched with nothing but her own failings to keep her company."

Emily: "How you can SMILE while saying that!?"

Lute: "Oh don't worry, she'll be out of her misery soon enough."

Emily: "..... respectfully Lute, I hope she fucks you up a little."

Lute: There's no chance in hell.

Lute: (comes back sans arm after getting a little fucked up by vaggie in hell)

Emily: "HA!"

Emily: "Anyway have you met our newest angel Sir Pentious? Sir Pentious is an angel now. He arrived here fresh from hell. Did you know sinners can be redeemed and Charlie was right and you were wrong and Vaggie did the right thing and Sir Pentious was just telling me allllll about how they made up and it was very cute and they're probably going to be in love forever? Meanwhile, YOU on the other hand- oh I'm so sorry, Lute. Too soon?" :)

[iizuumi]

Side effects of wearing your Kaiju suit too often ,,,, Part 3

[scourge-sympathiser]

SCOURGE SUNDAY 005/???

lykoi 01

[lovesickeros]

obligatory childe post ft 4.2 archon quest spoilers and also my incomprehensible ramblings (read at your own discretion)

fontaine left me with a Lot of thoughts about childe even if his screen time was kinda pitiful

it's been opening up a lot of implications for childe's potentional importance to the greater, overall plot of the story though and its driving me up a WALL but more importantly it's made me pick apart his character

which brings me to Fontaine actually being PERFECT for him to have featured in, actually. because the whole damn nation is a theater, a stage for its archon. Hydro has never fit him better because the parallels of focalors/furina to ajax/tartaglia aren't exact but it's pretty damn close. a separation of the "other" (divine in case of focalors, whatever is wrong w childe in his case) and human.

I just think a lot about how Tartaglia is only ever Ajax with family. you really don't see his old name anywhere, he's pretty openly adopted Tartaglia (kinda childe too) as his name literally in every other circumstance. which you can chalk up to just like. well, he's usually on fatui business, of course he'd use his fatui name, but. even with traveler, it's childe.

so. you know. makes me wonder if as far as he's concerned, Ajax is dead. "Ajax" died when he fell down that crack in the ground and something else crawled back out.

which makes me wonder how he'd feel about the Creator calling him Ajax.

conflicted, probably. because you know him well enough to know his old name..but he's not Ajax anymore, is he? he's not the child with a sword in hand trying to play adventurer, he's a Harbinger. he's Childe, he's Tartaglia.

conflicted because he has doubts, even if he'd never voice them, that maybe you like "Ajax" more then Childe.

[aimishix]

My birthday is tomorrow 🎉💖💖

[atypi-cals]

>i join a server for systems

> the rules dictate what my littles can and cannot do "for their own safety because they're literally children"

> i leave

[ahaha-ahahaha]

yeah new favourite little guy. no don't look in my reblogs.

[immortalsins]

should i attend a risqué event

[blujayonthewing]

I wish I had any way of knowing whether people have gotten Weirder™ about my name in recent years or if this has been happening behind the scenes the entire time

I've been going by Jay since I was 11. At the time nobody objected to or questioned this, at least not to me; I found out many years later that Jay is supposedly a "boy's name," but nobody ever said 'you can't use that as a nickname, it's a boy's name' and it went completely uncontested by anyone when I switched. Lots of kids announced some manner of name change at the start of a new school year in middle school; it was all normal and fine. My mom and, you know, grandmas and other relatives kept calling me Jessica, which was also fine! I didn't make a big family announcement or correct any relatives on this, I just wanted to differentiate myself from the half dozen other Jessicas in school.

For twenty years!! This has gone on being perfectly normal! My Real Name™ is an increasingly obscure bit of trivia I get to spring on friends who didn't realize I had one, which is always funny (my brother in law didn't believe me and demanded to see my driver's license). My mom and grandmas have largely still called me Jess, and that's also fine! It's nice, even! There's a particular intimacy there of having a name only my mother uses-- but, crucially, I have never asked her not to, or said that I don't like it. And as FAR AS I KNOW, this has all been true and fine for TWENTY YEARS.

My own feelings about it have never changed, and feel, to me, very straightforward: if I tell you that my name is Jay, and you decide that no it isn't, that is a problem. That's the rule. That's literally it. I had a high school teacher who asked on the syllabus for us to write down if we went by something other than our full name, who was nonetheless UNIQUE among all of my teachers from 6th grade onward in always and only ever calling me Jess, even though I signed all my work Jay, all the other teachers called me Jay, he literally asked whether anyone wanted to be called something else and I answered Jay, and I had him for two semesters. I met a work friend of Justin's once who asked upon introduction whether Jay was short for something, and when I told him it was short for Jessica he took it upon himself to call me Jess instead. This isn't me having a problem with any particular iteration of my name, this is just asshole behavior! I told you what my name was and you said 'no it isn't'. The problem here does not seem complex to me?

But within the last [hand wiggle] handful of years I feel like it keeps getting weirder? Apparently my dad and grandma argued about it at my wedding rehearsal-- she, dramatically, insisting 'I don't care, her name is Jessica, I'm going to call her that ;n;' and my dad angrily defensive that no it isn't, I go by Jay, that should be respected. And I'm sitting here listening to my dad relay this in utter bewilderment like. Well dad I love the energy but I have never been bothered at all if grandma calls me Jessica. I have never even once asked her not to or complained to anyone that she does. But also this is the grandma who HAS called me Jay more often than not?? My mom's mom never picked it up, but I was astonished to hear my dad's mom was acting like this was some New Dramatic Change that she Hated and not a thing she's literally already been doing for, again, twenty entire years. Why are you suddenly making it weird! Last weekend Justin's stepmom mentioned seeing my mom at the hospital where mom works, and how she said something like 'yes I'm Jessica's mom-- wait, no, Jay, she hates it when I do that' and I just?? I literally don't, the only problem now is that people who know me won't know who the fuck you're talking about

all of this and I'm just. I am literally just sitting here. why are we inventing problems out of this two decades later. what is going on

[uncanny-tranny]

I think as we grow up, we have to be really conscious of romanticizing the world we grew up in in order to scorn how the next generations are growing up.

Nostalgia isn't inherently bad, but especially in political spaces, be very wary of this idea that there is an Ideal Past we must Harken Back To.

It sucks to feel left behind, but such is the human condition. It isn't bad to feel nostalgic, but that doesn't mean that these new generations are inherently "lost" and "need to be saved (by you)", and I think that is very important to remember and try to be conscious of.