#i put slenderman stuff on there cause its stuff ive been wanting to talk about for awhile

[deepfriedseagullfeet]

actually how about this

[ask-s-offenderman]

why did you create sexual offenderman? and why do you still use his image today like that’s not completely morally fucked

Arc: started off during the time of early creepypasta days when people were jokingly making slenderman spin offs based on any name they could put together that rhymed with slenderman (so stuff like trenderman, blenderman, menderman, defenderman, etc.)

It was also the time when there was a big meme going around of people selling erotic audiobooks about Slenderman and it causing a big fuss in the fandom because of how this was misrepresenting Slenderman and his spooky horror vibes. So I got the idea “what if they used a different creepypasta instead of slenderman? that way everyone would be happy right?”

and fleshed out the name Sexual Offenderman into a usable character with the intention that people who aren’t an asexual artist only interested in doing superhero comics like i was could take it and run off with it.

cus like, I wasn’t going to be making any porn or erotic fanfics or whatever. so give the character away and become anonymous and have it just be one of those mystery parody pastas that nobody knows where it came from (which was also pretty popular at the time)

but people were like, “okay, this is a pretty cool design, but it’s pretty vague, before i do that thing where I take it and run off with the concept can you make some more concept about how the character behaves so i have more to work with?” and im like “sure i guess that would be okay?” although I don’t do porn stuff, so it probably won’t be super accurate to how i expect other people would use the character.

so I make the first fic for offenderman as a reference for this random internet person who said they would use the character to make fun of people making inappropriate porn of slenderman.

and then interest in the character starts to explode, as people go

“yoooo.. wtf? this isn’t just a creepypasta parody, this is like legit creepypasta? who knew all these porn tropes and horny meme shit that usually makes other creepypasta horror monsters become less scary, could be so frightening on its own?!? you gotta do more of this stuff!”

and im like

“uhhhhhhh......i dunno. I kinda wanted to get back to drawing obscure comic book and cartoon characters from the 80′s-90′s? besides, I don’t really do that porn stuff, you guys were supposed to take the character and run off with it to do all that weird erotic stuff?”

“but the lack of the weird horny stuff is the best part!” and im like,

“????”

“yeah! with the other stuff, it’s all treated as an excuse to get to the weird porn stuff, but all you do is talk about the stuff around the weird porny stuff that usually doesn’t get talked about! and that’s stuff we need! that I need! it’s making so big a difference with the trauma of being a sexual assault survivor to be able to talk about the stuff around the topic without it devolving into just porn stuff! your treatment of this stupid sounding tentacle rape monster is exactly the nuance that has been missing from pop culture’s treatment of these topics!”

“It is?”

“Name one other example.”

“I literally don’t follow porn stuff, but if the fans can find a comparison  then i’ll.... uhhh... have a comparison???”

“Did they find any?”

“no. but there have been a bunch more survivors of assault saying the same sorts of things you’ve been saying and explaining it more, so uhh... I guess that makes sense? I don’t really know about that stuff though. but... I mean... know how terrifying it is to watch your close friends get worse and worse thanks to their suicidal depression? and I know how it feels to be trapped in a hopeless situation? and Ive converted my own feelings of homicidal depression, where i’m so depressed i want to violently lash out at the people around me, into an absurd ‘what would batman do‘ philosophy, so I can’t exactly take someone asking me for help like this laying down. Sooooo.... guess I’d better study and learn how to help y’all out better? and I can ask the other people drawing and writing about offenderman to try and do the same? but if someone comes along and does it better than me then I’m out”

and then nobody came along to come and do it better than me.

so now i’m stuck with this big glaring outlier of a tentacle rape monster among my usual creative works of stuff like old cartoons and good natured tim burton-esk spooky things.

like one of those musicians who get a hit song that’s completely different from the rest of what they do.

but yeah. the whole offenderman deal was a weird niche grey area, and i can’t really fault people when they don’t do it quite right.

if there’s anything ive learned from all this, its that if you actually look at the state of things on the internet, any greater amount of accuracy and nuance should be considered a victory when it comes to sexual assault and abuse and such.

and just saying “don’t talk about those topics at all” has it’s own negative consequences that must be dealt with, especially for those who would see a name like “Sexual Offenderman” and immediately be intrigued or triggered.

For the UWU teen fangirl who doesn’t have the context to understand their media consumption? even making the leap of thinking about stuff like rape from strictly erotica to saying “it can also be used in a strictly non-erotic horror context” is a big deal with how many overlooked people hold those sort of misconceptions. And harping on the fandom norm that “in order to be a real offenderman fan, you have to be able to respect him as a legitimately frightening horror monster on the same level as the other creepypastas.” they’re suddenly way more invested in the nuances of depictions of assault in their media because they’re actually being incentivized to do so, instead of blithely making fanfics about them being kidnapped and sold as a slave to a boy band they really like.

and for the survivors who are stuck in a downward spiral and trying to deliberately trigger themselves with harmful media because they feel they don’t deserve to be happy, end up finding a weird stopgap with a lot of offenderman content because of fans following my lead and saying “nope, that’s not how that works, in a story taken seriously and told honestly, it would go like this.”

though that sort of thing get’s diluted the further you get from the main offenderman stuff from back when i was ranting to the fans more.

but i can’t supervise everything forever, and any failures might as well just be another grain of sand in the staggeringly massive “rape culture as expressed on the internet” desert.

the offenderman stuff helped who it helped. it satirized as best it could. no point in trying to be retroactively dishonest about it or dismiss the potential it might have in the future to help the largely ignored demographics of people it was able to help before.