#i do admittedly but im not the main demographic

[rottmnt-residuum]

part 13

splinter is an interesting character. i went back and watched the show and do you know how many times this mans stopped himself from saying shitty shitty things to his kids? a lot! like visibly. and when he doesn’t this guy actually apologises?? i dont understand the fandoms beef with this guys parenting, he’s better than most parents i’ve met man istg

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[emeraldvagabond]

I remember discovering the Acotar book in the library of my freshman highschool campus. Other students were constantly recommending it. Somebody requested the library staff to get the third book when it had just came out and it was in the library a week later. I usually read crappy fanfics on Ao3 and Wattpad when I was 14-16 years old but I understood that it was just for guilty pleasure reasons. I was drawn to these books because they reminded me of the smut and other unfiltered stuff that I was regularly seeing online and sort of validated those toxic themes. Seeing this stuff published for my age group changed my perspective from “this is just guilty pleasure fanfic” to “this is how men legitimately act and how relationships work”

That’s probably why Bloomsbury and SJM thought it would be okay to publish her books in YA, cause a lot of young teens are already reading this stuff online. But there’s a huge difference between a kid sneakily searching smut fanfic vs reading it from a published book made for their demographic. I hope that all made sense. Now that I’m older and a couple years out of high school, I’m baffled that not enough people are talking about these books and the issue of them being in YA.

Right. And not to mention- when i was reading darkfics at 13-14(getting my mf phone taken..)I was aware of what i was reading and that it was wrong. The tags would say "hey! this is bad! so-and-so is being abused! toxic relationship! bad dynamics! dubious consent" so on and so forth.

But these books just....didn't have that acknowledgment. These books spun all those things that I had considered bad and toxic before, into this "freeing" relationship about "mutual respect" and "love" and I didn't have the ability to say woah hey this is literally the same thing im reading on ao3 because it wasn't presented or acknowledged as any of those things. This was supposed to be her healthy relationship after her toxic one. This man saved her. Yes, he hurt her before, but sometimes people have to get hurt for the greater good, and he's very hurt that he had to hurt her. Not sorry, exactly, but it did kind of upset him! So it's ok! This is actually a very loving healthy relationship!

and like...now I can understand that none of that is true, because i'm older and i've been in relationships, bad and good, and i've developed the ability to understand what isn't written directly on the page, to see things as more than what they're presented to me as...but as a child and pre-teen i didn't do that. Admittedly, I had this idea, from reading fanfic and so on, that bad things were going to be presented as bad off the pages even if the main character couldn't see them that way.

Uhm, clearly I was wrong but....bleh.

It's their responsibility to recognize that just because some teens are already finding this stuff doesn't mean that it's good or a healthy dynamic- and that, if they are going to direct it at YA(which really they just...shouldn't) then they have a responsibility to explain that these scenarios are unhealthy and abusive. But alas, sjm actually just thinks it's sexy and that Rhys is hot so that doesn't happen.