#todays batshit tumblr history is brought to you by 'I followed ptsd suggestions(the founder) and then this happened'

[monsterqueers]

YO I remember the ChiRe shit that was such a mess. And then the million other forks that were all the exact same thing but no they're totally different dude trust me. ddlgre cglre chire kidcore kidspace littlespace.. some of these words were their own thing before that whole debacle too which made things extra confusing. And then there'd be general stim blogs just trying to reach a wider audience and would use multiple tags only to have one group or another hounding them for "cross tagging." The content can be exactly the same but if you tag it with two different words that's a no no. you were expected to just know all this automatically even if you weren't part of those specific groups and it was impossible to keep track of because a new one popped up every other week. It was not a fun time to be kinky and autistic.

The worst part is that it started from a mostly genuine and reasonable space; There were indeed traumatized folks who were coping in a non power dynamic way by doing 'childish' things as a therapeutic reparenting thing that wanted and needed wholly nonsexual spaces and there were indeed plural folks with headmates who were young who wanted spaces they could be visibly younger than the body. They shouldnt have been combined AT ALL into one community, much less one operated like this, but it wasnt wrong for these folks to want spaces for them that werent kink spaces. The line between fascination and kink is blurry. Thats fair.

But it had integral problems from the start in radfem logic that just got worse as time went on. The major ones being;

These sorts of spaces they wanted to build could not be made safely in tumblr's environment of public tags, aesthetic-based interaction, and poor nsfw filtering ability. A private forum or DW community would have been better suited.

These spaces of 'involuntarily and also actually cognitively a child younger than the body' and 'pretending to be a child for various reasons' should not be crossed and will get people hurt because they need different things.

These spaces were founded in a very specific trauma culture that without a grounding influence were easily radicalized and manipulated because of said trauma

The minor situation. Which, while yes there is a difference between kink and fascination, the line is very blurry and courts wont make a huge distinction. Allowing minors into places that appear like a well-known kink or involve a relationship style or power dynamic shift is a bad idea that is unsafe for everyone. While the 'caretaker' concept didn't kick off until later, it still appeared enough like a well known kink that people probably could have gotten legally in trouble.

I watched it come into being and lurked in hopes the promised essays and conversations about trauma and body age and voluntary vs involuntary experiences would happen and they never did and instead we got a lingering scar on this hellsite and autistic spaces in general that will probably take years to iron out if it ever does.

The tagging situation also started so reasonably. People on tumblr have no boundaries, and even when asked to knock it off, a small minority of kink blogs would roleplay or comment something nsfw on people's non nsfw posts. Many of these people were minors. Some of these posts were posts about personal trauma. This is an undeniable fact that it happened, and I myself had to block people when I was a minor over people doing this. So the community, who was getting this kind of sexual interaction on their posts that they didn't want would type 'dont reblog to a porn/kink/nsfw blog' or 'no nsfw interactions'. A fair and reasonable boundary that keeps people from making people uncomfortable by mistake. However typing this would get the pornbots on you because of the words and censoring them was irritating, so people made the banners. But then the banners became a byf in image form and the language changed from 'dont reblog to a porn blog pls' to 'dont interact if nsfw/kink'. The person become the problem, not the exposure to the thing. It was at this point the radfem infection became terminal.

When ChiRe splintered due to drama, the crosstagging problem- which was originally just 'dont crosstag chire with the cgl tags' got really wild.

About at that time the stim blogs caught wind of the banners and the community in general as many traumabloggers were autistic and often were in both circles, which spread the banners and tagging culture there and then it breached containment and spread to the whole fuckin site.

See I think if tags werent treated by one faction of people as a community and the other as just a sorting category it would have been less of an issue, but they were. It was a mess.

Being hypersexual+kinky and being autistic and traumatized AND being plural with an ageslider headmate made this a unique and very distressing hellscape to navigate for me.

It was THEE worst community I have ever lurked in. No fandom will ever compare to that cesspool of drama and stress and bullshit and puritanical policing. They did more callouts in their tags then they EVER did actual posts of substance.

Aside note- Kidcore was just an aesthetic tag, often used by toy collectors and such before the ChiRe thing, ChiRe took it over and made a mess.

Littlespace was a term for cgl first and I dont think many ChiRe and other related spinoffs used it? I think it was just 'sfw littles' and ddlgre and cglre folks, and they were widely hated by the rest because they werent totally anti kink.