#this is why children's fiction >>>> adult fiction

[proshipblackoutpoetry]

when proshipping is stereotyped online as children putting fictional adults and children in sexual situations , why do u defend it so vehemently ?? why not come up with a different term like holy fuck you wonder why youre harassed when your community is represented by people making nsfw headcanons of fucking south park characters and posting it publicly

[phoebe-the-autism-fairy]

Adult fiction: We're all sad adults living in sad houses and we get into affairs with each other and there's a court case next week and my husband cheats on me with his secretary

Children's fiction: I'm an elf living inside a toadstool in the forest and I eat dandelions for breakfast lol

[t4tpumpkinduo]

not to hornets nest again so soon but erm. ok. i love when ppl have many different hcs for characters, like with sexuality and race and the like! ithink it's valuable and fun and insightful, and there's just so much to chew on about how different lenses can shape and mold the subject of them. at the same time. however. i do think you have to mb unpack. how certain things reflect and how they can become coded. mb. like we should think about why we think certain things. in my opinion.

[karthara]

Ok, first of all, uncharitable take here. Fuck you. Don't bully queer people you think are 'weird'. Calling a group weird and obsessive and suggesting that they were once harry potter fans at some point if they are like this is mean. You are implying a threat to cut them out of the queer community by phrasing it like that. Exclusionists suck, don't be one, queer people have enough enemies. Now that I have that out of my system.

While I hate that woman as much as the next queer person, why do you have an issue with using a cultural touchstone as a way to understand the self and connect with other people? Maybe I'm getting caught up on the 'for preteens' bit here. It feels a bit too much like all the people who think you should quietly exit fandom once you hit the 20-25 age range and settle down and pop out and raise babies for the rest of your life instead of having interests and hobbies. I understand a dislike of commercial properties and not wanting to be chained to someone who can be easily swayed by profit margins, but I feel part of being in fandom spaces is delving into the stories and world building and picking up bits you love and letting ideas that may be new to you expand your understanding of the world. To me it doesn't matter if the stories in question were written a long time ago and some 'smart educated' people decided they were worthy or if it's some fan fiction someone threw up on the internet on a drunken whim. If you find a story that evokes thought and feeling, isn't that a good thing? Maybe it's my mental health issues, but I don't see any problem with clinging to something that brings you joy if you're not hurting someone else. Maybe because I was bullied a lot as a child I'm overreacting here, but just… why do you feel the need to needle people you think are being 'weird'? I know we all feel like we're safe here under our rock on the tumblrs, but it's still a public forum. The things you say do reach other people. Honestly you sound like someone who just turned 18 and is desperately trying to prove how 'adult' you are by setting aside anything fun. Why do you feel the need to try and lift yourself up by putting other people down? Because that's what you are doing here. Good for you if you're 'too grown up' to get into 'children's stories', but please don't shit on those of us who find something to enjoy. If people want to find or make a flag that is specifically for their lived experience, is that harming anyone? No. Let people have fun with things.

do you think that a certain genre of queer person is so obsessively weird about pride flag discourse becuase their flags fill the gaping hole in their personality where a hogwarts house used to be

[matchasilver]

Vent on being an adult who posts nsfw fanworks ///

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

I love fucked up fiction, and the more dirty and messy, the better!!! I don't want sanitized "pure" smut, like what IS THAT?? I have my perferences and squicks, but I don't judge if someone has smth I don't like.

There is no way to censor and be support of queers and free speech on the internet.

Simply tagging, warning, and blocking are healthy!!

[jinxpologist]

the amount of people into bloodweave who are in their late 20s-30s-40s and have said they haven't been in fandom spaces for a long time but have decided to take the plunge again bc of these two makes me so happy. even at 21 i'm really worried about not being able to interact with fandom anymore when i grow a bit older, or worrying that i'm "too old" (crazy, i know) to be involved with this kind of thing anymore. it seriously warms my heart to see people who are fully grown with fulfilling lives still enjoying being silly in fandom.

with the advent of the internet and modern social media, fandom has slowly grown more and more centered around children. and it's not a bad thing that a lot of kids have fandom spaces for themselves! i think spaces for kids are really important, especially with how much fandom can lend itself to 18+ content. but being a fan of something and being told by other kids around you that once you're an adult, it'll be not only cringe but predatory to be a fan, is pretty damaging.

fandom was made by mostly middle-aged women, and every time i see that legacy continued on despite changing demographics i get really happy! no matter how much the actual interest changes, fandom in general has been my home for a long time (like 8 years now), and i'm happy to see evidence that i can be here for a long time yet. i love it here and it's so fun. i'm less afraid of getting older when i see that i can still be the autistic nerd i've always been no matter how many years go by.

[oops-prow-did-it-again]

I am blocking on sight anyone that puts any fucking discourse over "moral" fiction or whatever the fuck on my dash. I have blocked 5 people in the last month. I don't care if I've been a mutual with you for years, if you engage in this kinda shit, especially on the side of believing that certain fiction shouldn't be allowed, then you are someone I have no respect for.

Unless someone is actually straight up committing a crime (I.E., posting *actual* photographs or videos of REAL LIFE PEOPLE, not fictional/drawn people, REAL PEOPLE, being harmed/sexually abused) I Do Not Care what other people read or write or watch or make. I Do Not Care. I do not trust anyone else's, especially on the piss on the poor website, to be able to determine if a text is "glorifying" something or if they are just uncomfortable with the subject as a whole. You people all suck at media comprehension and I am just flatly not interested. I keep seeing posts of people making good points and then people ripping them apart in the most bad faith possible. "Someone else's media consumption doesn't hurt you" "yes except for when abuse is portrayed as love, or-" no. shut the fuck up. You Missed The Point. You DO NOT KNOW, and you CAN NOT KNOW, why someone else wrote or created something nor can you know why anyone chose to engage with it. Also, sometimes the fucking point of a story is to portray something bad as good, to serve a narrative purpose. that doesn't mean the author thinks it IS.

I Do Not Care about icky feelings. If you can't tell fiction from reality, that's a you problem. Leave us writers/artists the fuck out of it. And if your knee-jerk reaction to this is "oh, you're just making excuses For The Freaks" you are part of the problem and I also have no respect for you.

FWIW, I am an abuse survivor and I find everyone's moral panic over shitty fanfiction stupid at best and upsetting at worst. You people freak out over fictional bad things happening to fictional people, to the point you waste the resources and time of people that actually hunt down predators by sending them loli fanart? You make me feel like you care about fictional people more than you care about the victims. Also, you'll be fucking fine if you hear about weird art or fic happening. Just don't fucking read it yourself. But knowing it exists won't fucking hurt you. You know what does hurt you? ACTUAL ABUSE. Like the kind so many of the creators you demonize go through, bc like I said before, you can't know why people make the art they make and you certainly can't know whether someone's a victim or not. And people shouldn't HAVE to disclose their victim status for you to make sure you're only attacking the "acceptable" people.

Maybe just don't fucking attack people over some fucking fanfiction or fanart. period. go the fuck outside.

You crave ruthless, vindictive justice more than you crave to help people. You are after the high of feeling good about putting people down, the "right" people.

And I Have No Respect For You.

[gildedmuse]

So, I just know all of Tumblr was wondering, "hey, you remember that really weird ZoLaw fan with the annoyingly overly stylized post? I wonder if she's seen this and if she has any theories or thoughts, an observation or two?"

Well, allow me to set your wandering mind at ease, fictional Tumblr fan. The answer is: No. No, I really don't.

I have like three hundred.

[I also spent time just trying to track down as many translations as possible. Is Tera A Criminal's Daughter or The Daughter Of Thieving Bandits! These are CLEARLY separate things and can ENTIRELY change how her utter nonpresence in Zoro's life shaped him! Though I can take comfort in knowing that, regardless of what kind of crimes her father was committing they were more important than anything his daughter ever did in her entire life.]

And, hey, as might as well jump right into that whole mess.

1. Wait, Zoro's mom is dead? Thank goodness, I was worried Oda forgot one!

(AKA: Stop. Murdering. Moms.)

I'll go first, I don't mind saying when I was wrong. True, in the past I may have suggested that the vast majority of female characters in One Piece come off as ever so slightly, "leaning into sexist tropes with unadulterated joy; it's the misogynistic tropes equivalent of a child running naked through a grocery store. It's right there, everyone sees it, yet people shut up and continue shopping in part because, well, these days you just expect most people to cover that junk! What would you even say? And if you DO speak up and call out the inappropriate, be prepared for blank stares and tantrums; but THEY don't mind! THEY don't think it's wrong! You're just being mean!"

More or less a direct quote.

However, I see now that I rushed to judgement and the reality of the situation is far more nuanced. With that in mind, I was just wondering if someone could help answer some of the questions I have.

Like: Why does Oda believe that it's illegal for (maternal) female characters to survive other character's backstories?

More importantly, why hasn't someone just reached out to explain the misconception!? It can't be that difficult. If nothing else, just have a lawyer or judge or other expert in censorship on hand. Or is the one of those cases where back in highschool his friends made something up and then kept pretending it was real to see if he'd believe you and not only did he fall for it, it took over 20 years before he learned that, what, no that's not illegal. That would be crazy if it were an actual law. Cause you know, after the first 10 years I think yeah you have to just lean into it. Pretend it's a creative decision on your part and definitely not because you were terrified of being sentenced to a slow and humiliating public death.

Just to be clear that's definitely what's up, right? I mean, I'm struggling to think of another reason....able excuse why a story that I really enjoy keeps playing the same old sexist tropes cards again and again to the point of absurdity. It would just help if I had a valid excus- explanation. I almost mistyped the word explanation.

....

....

So I imagine it went like.

"That's the third mangaka they've had to Publically Execute this week!"

"They've started taking this law way more serious lately."

"This one really deserved it though! I heard his main character has a mother in her late forties!"

"That does seem old to have your first child."

"No, he's the middle of three and 22 years old. The story even has flashbacks of defining moments in his childhood and never once did she try to sacrifice herself for him, get murdered by his enemies, or die in meaningless unrelated accidents."

"Damn, that's cold to be there for all the protagonist core moments and not die and help him develop and grow a character? They must have a very antagonistic relationship. Is she actually the villain."

"Not that we know, and when they asked about this being a possible plot twist since - obviously if she's evil no laws are being broken."

"Well, of course, that's the whole reason Statue 2-dash-57 exists; if creators can show they have consistently been building up to a surprise twist then the female character in question can continue to live so long as she continues to be unrepentant and unlikable until the resolution of her arch by the protagonist."

"That's the thing! Under oath not only did man present no evidence to support her identity as a secret villain, he went on the record stating he wanted to depict their relationship as one of a normal modern 20 year old and his mother."

"That can't be true! What publishing company would even print that!?"

"It gets worse. I told you he was a middle child? Well, according to those who've read the actual manga, his younger sister was really sick as a child."

"Oh, well, at least-"

"It was just a fish allergy. She's perfectly fine."

"Sometimes I feel this law is unnecessarily harsh but.... Then you hear stories like that, and you realize that some people really are monsters."

[tasmanianstripes]

Maybe it's the result of my main fandom for the majority of my life being one where canon just genuinely doesn't exist, where there are so many different canons and literally any sort of interpretation of a single character is correct and can range from a moronic maniac with a chainsaw to a depressed old asshole boss, but

Literally who gives a fuck about canon?

Especially when the character is practically a blank slate or if it's an AU

Like, I'm sorry, but if you're butthurt about a mischaracterisation of a fictional character in an Alternative Universe then I don't think you understand what an AU is

[samueldays]

You mean me, @feotakahari? I'm not part of Rationalist Tumblr.

I will accept "-adjacent" because at least one of my mutuals is a rationalist.

Fourth point to the above about data collection: data can be interpreted both ways even in a single source, like Ella Cockbain's demographic count of offenders found in British police operations against grooming gangs, from Offender and Victim Networks in Human Trafficking. High evidence threshold, but low N=55.

I saw the same study used by different people to argue for two contrary theses, briefly summarized as:

This is a native problem, because over 3/4ths of them had British citizenship

This is an immigrant problem, because over 3/4ths of them had Pakistani ethnicity

Personally, I find the second point more weighty, because the second disproportion is larger (only about 2% of people in Britain have Pakistani ethnicity), and the first point is a legal fiction. But I can see why some other people might put more weight on citizenship than on ethnic background.

I think it is hard to move people with data here. This is veering into being a values question of which personal attributes one prefers to emphasise.

feotakahari wrote:

“We’re not punishing sex offenders as hard as the government says we are” is not a question, it’s a statement that requires evidence.

Drop the word 'we' here. My stance is more like "Britain's government* has admitted not punishing Pakistani sex offenders as hard as it should", asterisk because the government is far from unified, evidence comes from other parts of the government, sometimes there's for example an Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham commissioned by the Rotherham Council, and it says things like:

By far the majority of perpetrators were described as 'Asian' by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.

and

In two of the cases we read, fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene. In a small number of cases (which have already received media attention) the victims were arrested for offences such as breach of the peace or being drunk and disorderly, with no action taken against the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault against children.

and

Child A (2000)6 was 12 when the risk of sexual exploitation became known. She was associating with a group of older Asian men and possibly taking drugs. She disclosed having had intercourse with 5 adults. Two of the adults received police cautions after admitting to the Police that they had intercourse with Child A.

Police cautions.

This sort of thing keeps happening. Failure, directives to not notice, non-response and mis-response, noted well after the fact.

Then a repeating pattern of the government going 'well we convicted some people and wrote about it, done now, shut up' despite the convictions being far fewer than the victims report and inquiry estimated the number of offenders at, and then another "Asian" meaning mostly-Pakistani grooming gang gets exposed, and another, and another, and ten more, and it's evidently not done. Telford:

It would in my judgment be wholly wrong, and undoubtedly racist, to equate membership of a particular racial group with propensity to commit CSE; That said, on the papers disclosed by key stakeholders, it is an undeniable fact that a high proportion of those cases involved perpetrators that were described by victims/survivors and others as being “Asian” or, often, “Pakistani”. The Inquiry has itself also heard such accounts from victims/survivors. In considering the evidence, and in particular the disclosed material, I have been cautious not to infer too much from names, which may indicate wider geographical background and indeed religious heritage, but are wholly unreliable indicators of national background and (in particular) religious belief. Even bearing that in mind, however, the evidence plainly shows that the majority of CSE suspects in Telford during my Terms of Reference were men of southern Asian heritage, including all the men convicted in Chalice, and Operations Delta and Epsilon.

More on Operation Chalice.

Ahdel Ali was found guilty of one charge of rape, 11 charges of sexual activity with a child, three charges of controlling child prostitution, one of inciting child prostitution, a charge of inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and meeting a child after grooming.

He got a nominal eighteen years for that, the longest sentence of the group, and was released after serving eight years. Even when the government manages to secure a conviction, it seems half-assed.

Again, I think the data question bleeds into a values question about process and severity, and a wider epistemics question: when does one infer that a set of convictions is "got most of them" vs "tip of the iceberg"? A similar question applies to complaints against the police, as with the Independent Office for Police Conduct doing an investigation into failures at Rotherham.

An eight-year investigation and report by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) identified examples of officers turning a blind eye or ignoring the plight of girls as young as 11. In one case, they failed to investigate an older man who was found undressed in a bedroom with one of his victims. In another, they did not act when a perpetrator handed over a missing girl as part of a deal not to arrest him. One victim’s father was told by a senior officer that nothing could be done to help his daughter because of “racial tensions” surrounding the investigation. In another case, a victim reported that a police officer had bought illegal steroids from her abuser. When victims tried to report cases to the police, they were often ignored or in some cases even blamed for being abused. After the scandal was exposed in 2014, the police watchdog carried out 91 investigations covering 265 separate allegations against the police, made by 44 victims of abuse and exploitation. Out of the 47 police officers investigated by the watchdog, eight were found to have a case to answer for misconduct and six for gross misconduct.

Is this a bad sign of the system having such failures, a good sign of the system noting its failures, or a false good sign of the system noting its failures without moving from "noting" to "fixing"?

But the final report, published on Wednesday, confirmed that not a single officer had lost their job or been prosecuted as a result of the scandal.

Again, [a part of] Britain's government says [another part of] it is not doing the job of punishing sex offenders properly.

My enemies are soft on child molesters.

My enemies are soft on child molesters for race reasons, according to government reports. The next question is whether this is softer on child molesters than "normal" - the British government's apologists still have the option to say that Britain is just a pedo state in general, don't let your kids out of sight.

[ @feotakahari ]

Okay, I found the point where I was confused. I didn’t realize coming down hard on sexual predators was supposed to be a change. I mean, isn’t that what courts do already?

As Americans, we keep getting reports that the UK are giving short sentences to violent criminals, letting them out early, or prosecuting "hate speech."

The problem with reduced trust is that the distance information can travel on the graph collapses. Someone will say, for instance, that "the critics are racist" because "there isn't enough data." Well, of course, the government can decide whether to create that data, can't they? And if they're still concealing the scale of the problem, they might use the bureaucratic tactic of just deliberately not creating the data, and then claiming it doesn't exist.

A defender might point to one example of an offender getting a long sentence, and that would help (it's a far sight better than just shouting "racist!"), but if someone on the outside thinks the defender would omit information about other offenders not being prosecuted or getting shorter sentences, then the defender can only establish that >0 offenders were properly prosecuted, and not that the problem has been "solved" and is no longer relevant to other politics.

Someone can demand infinite evidence as a political tactic, but this goes in both directions - someone can also say "he's just demanding infinite evidence!" (when the demands are not actually infinite) as a means not to do the work of being trustworthy.

This is a good reason not to exile people from the coalition for not being highly conformist. People who are a bit more disagreeable and independent-minded, who have a history of sound or at least reasonable criticisms of coalition leaders, can establish a path of trust to reach people who could not otherwise be reached.

Politics is about coalitions, margins, and thresholds.

If there were only one right-winger in the UK and he had 50% of the vote, then he could just refuse to cooperate. However, opposing political coalitions are composed of a large number of varying people, and not only are their personalities and life experiences not identical, but their beliefs are not perfectly inflexible.

People are human beings, not merely political units. There should be a focus on cooperating to create good policy, not merely building temporary engines of power, and where it is too difficult to cooperate, it may be necessary to first step back and see how it might be made easier.

[lesenbyan]

Scientists: want so badly for adult children who are friends with and/or still dependant on parents for money or a roof to be Bad that they are intentionally looking for detriment in the study results

Study results: so overwhelmingly positive they can't actually find the data needed to twist the narrative

Scientists: >:|

[misscrawfords]

3, 35 and 40 for the book ask :)

3. Already answered!

35. What do you think of Ebooks?

Mixed feelings. I much prefer physical copies of books. However, I am a book borrower not a book buyer and my library is extremely slow at getting new books, especially more obscure books not originally published in the UK, if it gets them at all. And then there's a really long waiting list. So I see online there's a new diverse romance come out I want to read - chances of my library getting anytime soon are practically nil. I started borrowing or buying ebooks which are cheaper and reading on my phone - not a lot but enough that I finally bought a Kindle last month. Do I feel good supporting Amazon? No. But it did seem like the best way to be able to read certain books and I was getting tired of reading a lot on my phone - a Kindle has better visibility. I can also see the benefits when travelling. Don't worry though - 90% of what I read is still paperbacks. If I had a choice I'd always go for that.

40. Has there ever been a book you wish you could un-read?

Yes, actually. Two spring to mind, both from my childhood. The first was a totally age-appropriate story about a boy, possibly called Luke, whose brother had leukemia. It was one of those children/YA (I guess it would be Middle Grade these days) books with a Worthy Theme that Kids Might Relate To to Help Them With Difficult Stuff. Not my sort of book even then but for some reason I got hold of it. It really, really upset me. I started becoming terrified of getting cancer, of someone I loved getting cancer, of dying, of loved ones dying...

The second was a biography of the cellist Jaqueline du Pre that my uncle bought me as a present when I was 10. My uncle has a habit of misjudging presents but I didn't know that and while this wasn't a kid's book, I guess it looked innocuous enough. This may seem totally different to the above book but it really isn't. Du Pre developed the condition of MS and the biography went into detail about her condition and its effect on her life including her sex life (which I found morbidly fascinating without really understanding it) and eventually her decline and death. Like the above book, this absolutely grabbed me and obsessed me and scared me.

Basically, I cannot engage with fiction that deals with terminal illness, especially cancer. I just can't. I can't watch medical dramas - I can't even deal with Call the Midwife! To this day I will not read any book that has this kind of plotline or theme. All through my teenage years, I refused to read any book that didn't have a happy ending. It was only when studying Greek forced me to engage with Greek tragedy that I started to let in a couple of "sad stories". Even now I will always take happy endings over sad ones, I avoid angst and I never touch misery porn stories. I can deal with the genre of Tragedy (as in Greek or Shakespeare) because it is not so much sad as inevitable, if you get the difference. Chekhov is on a very thin line. In real life too I find terminal illness, hospitals, doctors really awful, more than is normal, I think. A lot of my friends at school wanted to become doctors - I would do literally any other career. It's my nightmare. Whether my horror of these things came before these two books or not I don't know, but I do remember they had a really profound and negative effect on me and I really wish I hadn't read them at that point in my life.

[butchlifeguard]

I HATE FANDOM WANK YALL ARE UNHINGED. VERY NEGATIVE BTW

[cann1ballistic]

it’s wild to me that lewd art-and the artists who make it, by extension-is considered unintellectual by default when the people who criticize it rarely understand what makes sexual harm harmful

[chat-dank]

You have the right to like your Angbang intense. You have the right to like your Angbang fucked up. You have the right to like your Angbang unhinged. You have the right to like your Angbang harmful. But you also have a right to like your Angbang fluffy, too. You are not woobifying them if you like it soft or write a fic where they say they love each other or kiss or high five or take a bite from the same sandwich or whatever. You have a different interpretation, that’s all. You’re not committing some horrid unforgivable atrocity against your fandom. You’re not an “annoying fan” if you want your ships happy, even if other people dislike you for it, the same way you are not an “annoying fan” if you like your ships intense and other people dislike you for it. You’re not a mean person for having an opinion that the majority dislikes. You’re an individual human being who has an opinion and your opinion is worth JUST as much as every other opinion in your fandom. Because that’s how opinions work. You’re not disregarding canon any more than people who bend it to fit their other non-canon ships or headcanons or other interpretations of this ship or their interpretation of any other ship or anything else that JRRT or Christopher or the Tolkien estate disagree with. We all see a piece of media and interpret it differently. It doesn’t make any of us better or worse for it. Ship and let ship. 

[rotisseries]

very funny to me when people are like "why is this thing about teenagers" and you check the target viewer age demographic and it's like. 14-18