Call it irony, perhaps?

[bladespark]

So, the other day I started an all-ships, all-kinks, Hades discord. Because I got told off for daring to say I preferred "PZA" to "ThanZag" on another server.

Sigh.

Fandom. Can't live with them, can't live without them!

And of course this has me now having flashbacks to the time I got more or less chased entirely out of Good Omens fandom for being a "dangerous predator".

Which all goes to say, that I feel like talking about the reason why when I say "all kinks" on my server, I don't add in the one exception I see in most kinky spaces, the "but no pedos!"

Why not? Firstly, I'll say VERY CLEARLY up front: If you mean real world pedophiles, then yes, I would ban them. People who prey on children, or on teenagers, are not welcome in any space I host. (It's moot because it's an 18+ server, so predators won't go there to hunt, but yanno, still.)

That's not what the "no pedos" rule actually means, though, in fandom spaces. It means "nobody who might use the underage tag or write a story with teenagers who have sexual urges or engage in sexual behavior." It's become such a truism among fandom that those people are pedophiles that hardly anybody questions it, but since I'm one of those fucking people (read on, folks, read on, you'll see) I have some words to say. Because ironically, I get labeled with "pedo" quite literally because I'm NOT one.

Let me explain.

I am a trans man. I was raised as a girl and I went through a feminine sort of puberty (and was a late bloomer and religiously repressed on top of that.) I am also not taking T, for various reasons. I have never experienced masculine puberty. I have never whispered with my friends over somebody's borrowed Playboy. I have never woken up discovering I had a wet dream in the night. I have never had the alluring-uncomfortable experience of seeing somebody I found attractive and having my body react without my meaning it to. None of that. I missed it all.

I am obsessed with it.

So I write it. I write characters who are me, going through it. Teenagers, discovering what sex is.

But I am, as I said above, not a pedophile. The idea of looking at a teenage boy and finding him attractive is, frankly, laughable. Come on. Teenage boys are just...gods. No. Please. Save me. Keep them away. I don't even want to interact with most of them platonically, augh!

This means, though, that when I write out my "but what if I'd been a cis boy, god, please, I wish?" fantasies, I pair my self-insert characters with people I am attracted to. With adults.

And there it goes.

Every last one of those stories, totally reprehensible, according to the keepers of purity, because I write about grown men and teenage boys having sex.


If I were a pedophile, I would probably write stories that were teen-on-teen, and in a supreme irony, be considered "better" and "safer" because I would be writing things that should exist in the real world.

It's all fiction, people. It's all fiction! I no more want anything to do with molesting children than everybody who enjoyed, say, Godzilla wants to kill thousands of people by leveling a city, that's the degree of "reality" there is in those stories. And yet, of course, somehow everyone understands that the people making Godzilla movies aren't mass-murdering terrorists, but I'm a dangerous predator.

I sometimes think that the entirety of western culture needs to be tossed out the window.

But this is all to say that when I say "all kinks" I really do mean "all". If they're kinks (which means either fantasy, involving no real, living people (the gods aren't real and Achilles is dead, he's fair game, lol!) or 100% consensual) then they're allowed. No tags barred.

Comments

[dreamwriteremmy]

Mood. We& hate the fandom purity police of underage characters in relationships = CSEM. Just because your [generic you] abuser used childhood cartoon characters who were underage to groom you does not mean everyone who does so in fandom is exploitative. -_-;;; see also consensually arranged kink with an age-regressed partner is not necessarily abusive if done with *proper arrangement and boundaries*.

[silveradept]

I have to *headtilt* at the idea of Achilles, Zagreus, and Patroclus in a ship being anything other than "one of the original m/m ships and the god that finally brought them back together again," but I feel like I'm missing context as to why, other than ship war reasons, that would be considered bad. (Also, if we're talking Greece, even a fantasy version thereof, that's a culture that praised the idea of young boys having stable older men to guide them through the arts of becoming a man, of I recall correctly.) Fandom, yeah?

I am intensely curious, however, as to how the truism that people tend to create works that have at least some amount of themselves in them has been transformed into "if you write [Z], you must think about and desire [Z]." It's a ridiculous assertion, and a lot of the time, it seems like the sort of thing someone says when they're trying on what being an adult feels like and are enjoying the attention they get from it.

[bladespark]

It's ship wars. That's all it is. "This is a ThanZag server, we're trying to keep the topic on that ship." So they've started cracking down on even mentioning other ships existing, except in the one other ships channel.

I was told I'd made people "uncomfortable", I guess by forcing them to briefly think of their perfect monogamous saint Zagreus (this is a joke, he's canonically poly) with Patroclus and Achilles instead of with Thanatos.

So dumb.

[silveradept]

And again, we are talking about the Greek pantheon here, gods for whom even being closely related to each other isn't necessarily a taboo against them hooking up. A lot of ship war stuff seems pretty silly in a broader context.

I haven't made it all the way through the romancing yet, but I can see how things are going to shape up toward getting there, and Zagreus does not seem to be the kind of person who would solely stop at one, but I do not claim to know the minds of others.

[hitokage]

the irony of the fandom purity police parroting ye old religious right ultra-conservative anti views is ... not lost on me, someone who grew up hearing that rhetoric all the damn time. but it's too exhausting, so I just ... quietly avoid those spaces and keep writing my dark fics anyway.

[the_siobhan]

And of course this has me now having flashbacks to the time I got more or less chased entirely out of Good Omens fandom for being a "dangerous predator".

I didn't know that happened. That's fucked up.

[bladespark]

I didn't let it put me off my GO loving friends, but yeah. Got banned from 2/3 servers I was on, and the mods of those two tried really hard to pressure the mod of the third, really tiny server, to ban me too.

[the_siobhan]

This is just so bizarre to me. I have dealt with predators in actual real life and the idea of conflating the things they've done to people with somebody who writes stuff I just happen to find distasteful... Well I don't get it.

[nia_kantorka]

👏 I’m with you on all of this regarding fandom police. I can’t say anything about being a trans man, but you do whatever brings you joy. I’m sometimes despairing over this whole internet bubble of people (often kids imo) who seem to have no clue about kinks, the freedom of the mind and so on. It’s exhausting. But I’m happy to see posts like this still exist. 💜

(frozen)

[general_radix]

The problem with allowing pedoshit and teen porn is that, due to the very nature of these things, they attract more predators than most other kinks. (Remember those "MAP" bastards who nearly took over tumblr? They looooove to prattle on and on about how it's "just fictional" while creeping on kids behind our backs.) And in my observations, even the ones who aren't predators tend to display an appalling lack of compassion towards CSA survivors, creating a hostile environment where no one can express discomfort. I don't want any of that in spaces where I'd have administrative control.


(...I will also say that current fanfic discourse is pretty fucked in any direction but "I hate pedoshit/incest/etc. but also condemn harassment". Do I get labelled a shrieking puritanical dipshit for the above bit, or do I get ripped apart for drawing and writing "yaoi" despite not making inappropriate remarks about queer men? :U)

(frozen)

[bladespark]

Mmmmmhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Because it's 100% impossible to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and there's NO way to notice somebody acting predatory who's lying about only wanting fiction. None. Whatever. There's no difference. Watch me rolllllllling my eyes SO HARD. But hey, I guess I have no compassion towards my own fucking SELF because, yanno, people who like "pedoshit" don't, according to you.