A library story
So when I was a kid, probably 12 or 13, I checked out a compilation of post-apocalyptic science fiction stories from the public library. It looked like every other book on the shelf. It was fic from a dozen different authors, and the blurb on the inside cover was pretty vague.
Of the stories in that book, 2 were R-rated. One had surprise rape. One had surprise inter-generational incest. For the shock value. To make the reader ~think. Dude authors. Do I wish I hadn’t read it? Yah. Kinda. It lives in the back of my head with the other gross detritus of the world, all the horrible upsetting shit I’ve read. I read a Star Trek licensed novel with animal torture in it, to illustrate the horror of sociopathy, and I wish I hadn’t read that too.
During the summers of middle school and high school I read voraciously and while I managed to steer clear of MUCH upsetting content I sure as hell stumbled on some doozies.
If my library had been Ao3 I would have gotten a pop up asking me — hey, kid, there’s gross shit in that book, are you old enough to check it out?
And if I was a dumb kid I still might have said ‘yes’, but I would have had a heads up.
Quick personal statistics!
Surprise incest I’ve read in paperbacks I bought in a store or checked out from the library: I’m going to say…. half a dozen instances? Dozen? Surprise rape, at least double that. What is it about the fantasy genre that brings out the creepy writers, and why do they consider sexual assault ‘gritty realism,’ could they fucking stop.
Surprise incest I’ve read on Ao3: none. It has warnings and I avoid it like the plague.
Surprise rape I’ve read on Ao3: none. It has warnings and I avoid it like the plague.
Ao3 is one of the safest goddamn places on the web to read fiction because it has a standardized, mandatory labeling system. Is there appalling content on it? Oh god yes. Does it do a better job of warning you about that content than any library or bookstore? Oh my god yes by ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE.
I vote funding for my local library every time it’s on the ballot, even though there’s gross shit on the shelves, because I think it’s a resource that’s important to have.
I donate to Ao3 even though there’s content I find fucking appalling archived there, because I think it’s a resource that’s important to have.
Because I know that defunding libraries won’t stop gross dudes from writing gross shit and calling it ‘thought provoking literature’, and I know shutting down Ao3 won’t make creepy fic vanish from the internet. It’ll just take the warning labels off it.
Tag: rape mention
👏dont 👏tell 👏real 👏people 👏to 👏kill 👏themselves 👏 over👏 an 👏imaginary 👏ship 👏
👏
this
👏doesnt
👏excuse
👏 incest
👏or
👏pedophilic
👏ships
👏I mean nice job missing the point
👏THIS 👏 DOESNT 👏 EXCUSE 👏 INCEST 👏 OR 👏 PEDOPHILIC 👏 SHIPS👏
you disliking something someone is doing doesn’t excuse you telling them to kill themselves
Incest and pedophilic ships harm people dumbass it’s not my personal preference.
who *in real life* do they harm
and even if they DO harm someone telling people to kill themselves is never okay
Did you just fucking ask how PEDOPHILLA harms people?? Are you shitting me?
oh my god, how does shipping a fictional thing harm real life people you fucking moron
Pedophilla triggers people who have trauma?? Oh my god?? Incest is the same?? Don’t act like fiction doesn’t effect reality??
So don’t read it if it triggers you.
Should war histories be banned for triggering veterans? Should movies portraying coca cola be banned because some girl was once beaten with a bottle of coke and get flashbacks when she sees people holding them?
I will never cease to be confused by “I have PTSD, therefore people must make it the case that i must never encounter things that trigger me, ever. OH BY THE WAY, I am going to devote large chunks of my online time to yelling at people who make the things that trigger me.”
??????
imaginary stories of the dynamics of underage fictional characters in an also fictional relationship isn’t pedophilia and the insistence of tumblr to call it such actually makes it hard for me to do my job as a social worker because i deal with real breathing living children who are being abused like i was
hey everyone. i’m back and i will start here. i took a break because well, teens on tumblr were telling me to kill myself because i disagree with them about things, mostly about… my own rapes! luckily i have a good support system. people who actually care about helping survivors.
story time yall massive trigger warning for everything below
i don’t want to say i was in a cult but. my family was part of a cult in the 80’s and 90’s. all my childhood and adolescence. this cult had a trade system. this cult had pedophiles. i mean real pedophiles. real ones. real ones doing real things to real kids. when i say pedophiles i mean adults who routinely and “for business” sexually assaulted prepubescent children, real prepubescent children, knowingly and for their own entertainment.
a young adult reading and producing harry x draco or, i don’t know what the kids like these days, naruto x sasuke, voltron whoever the heck fan content is not a pedophile. in fact, to call them a pedophile and to call such content pedophilia feels like a spit in my face
let me be really clear and direct at the risk of sharing some really personal things:
there were tapes of me and my siblings and the other children in our church. and photo albums. this was mostly in the 80’s and 90’s, remember so we did not have tumblr. we were real children being exploited and traumatized. this was pedophilia.
and now i hear all these young teens on tumblr insisting that fanart = pedophilia and the fanartists = pedos. you are wasting resources for your own personal gain and popularity and wokepoints on fictional people while i, having now become an adult, am a therapist, social worker and activist. i use my experience as essentially a child sex slave to help others recover and process and to help law enforcement when i feel that intervention is necessary to prevent someone from being harmed more
do you know how hard they would laugh if you tried to shove gay teen anime boys at them and call it pedophilia? do you know how hard some of them would cry and tell you to stop wasting their time? an officer i talk with regularly had to take months off because he was so shaken by one of the cases. shit like this affects all of us deeply.
a fan liking the way two characters mesh is no more pedophilia than a writer writing a murder scene is an actual murder.
and don’t use “grooming” as an excuse/weapon. you know what i was groomed with? uwu purity christ worship and sock puppets. stickers. care bears. know what i wish i had access to growing up? fanfics. or just sex scenes in movies. hell even teen nick shows about normal stuff like crushes. even just sex talks on sitcoms. SOMETHING to let me think about what was happening to me in a context outside of “this is what the lord made me for” and “we must be pure pure pure even if it means harming our own” something to help me think about real life through the lens of characters who might be very different or very similar to me
not once has an anti ever spoken to me as a human. they treat me like i’m “the wrong kind of survivor” because i’m not part of their crusade to suicide bait and call for the murder of perfect strangers because of imaginary things.
the worst part is that as a therapist who specializes in csa related ptsd….i have so many young kids thinking they are evil for wanting to fantasize about their assaults in contexts where they are in control. let me repeat, a lot of the survivors like to fantasize about what happened to them as an “au” where they were in control, or aged up, or even enjoying themselves. sounds pretty fucked up right? well that’s the brain for you. for a lot of us, it’s the only way to process some of it.
you do harm when you equate a drawing or a fiction to the actual violence we endured.
please. i am begging you. please stop. you aren’t helping. i can’t get people to take me seriously about csa as an issue when i talk about it online in professional settings. because they think i’m a crazy purity wank asshole when literally my job is to help others like me. please. please. please. we cant take it anymore. you have turned pedophilia into a scary buzzword to drag people with instead of a word to describe something real that we are trying to fight.
i already lost a friend to tumblr. you lot convinced her she was evil and perpetuating her own abuse because of a fucking voltron ship. you told her it was her own fault for being raped and that she was the same as her attacker. you know who you are and you’ll have to live with it forever. may whoever meets you in the afterlife have pity on your misguided souls. you’ll have a lot to answer for. all the people you told to die, to “piss yourself” (ableist as fuck).
please please please go outside and get a grip on reality. if you can’t, then stop pretending you care.
if you cared and if you really believed it was bad enough to wish death upon people you would be saying that people are murderers for drawing or writing about death because how would you be able to excuse death? murder is a huge problem all around a world. so why isn’t fiction featuring murder held to the same standard, as “normalizing” murder and “romanticizing” death and “triggering” people who have lost someone to murder or who have almost been murdered.
don’t you dare say death is better than being a survivor. don’t you fucking dare.
An Australian game reviewer got sick and tired of young boys trolling her and threatening to rape her, so she did what any self-respecting adult would do — she told their parents. [via]
This is awesome!
yes more of this pls
Good for her!
I hope this scared all the other kids out of ever doing anything like this.
Marshmellowmilktea 