I am not policing anyone. I am saying that you have a moral responsibility (or at least you SHOULD) once you post something like that on the Internet. Warnings don't do shit. We all know that people are curious. Children are curious. No kid actually cares about the under 18 warning. They are impressionable and easily copy behaviour. I was like that, my friends were like that. I'm not saying don't post things like that. I'm just asking, are you ready to take responsibility for the aftermath?
You seem to be laboring under the misconception that I am responsible for internet teenagers’ poor choices. I’m not. Neither is any content creator. Do you spend your free time going after the adult film industry and asking whether they’re ready to “take responsibility” for teenagers that deliberately ignore the 18+ notification and click through to their weird diaper fetish porn?
I was a teenager on the internet once (I’m not going to say back in the day because I have followers that were on Usenet and that’s REALLY back in the day). We didn’t used to have any kind of content warnings at all. I say this jokingly a lot but seriously, back in my day, you could trip over xeno tentacle non-con in the middle of a fic that didn’t look like it was going in that direction, and it wasn’t labeled at all. Ever! You know what was labeled and warned for, left right and center? “This story has slash in it! That’s GAY KISSING!!!”
Seriously though, there used to be a time when the fandom and fic-writing atmosphere was so toxic to same-sex relationships that the content was usually hidden behind a splash screen with an obnoxious warning in cyan comic sans. Sometimes there were “secret instructions” on the disclaimer page - people would hide how to get into their website (“if you read the disclaimer you’ll know to click on the ^_^ face in the bottom left corner of the page to get to the site!” and such nonsense). I grew up in a time on the internet when it was easier to find graphic torture porn and rape-as-woobifying-backstory than it was to find fluffy hand-holding fic with my gay OTP.
And all I can hear when y’all roll up all “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!” is all the people who forced slash and femslash fans out of their archives, away from their internet space, and into the loosely-organized circle of Geocities webrings that defined fandom in the early 90s. Eventually we all started to congregate on LJ, where content could be locked behind a friends-only filter and people could gather in closed communities where we could be free from harassment by homophobic morons. When the Great Purge of FF.net happened and NC-17 was officially added to their rules as banned content, guess who was most reported to the moderators and most impacted by the policy change? Slash fans. And when Strikethrough happened, it disproportionately effected slash fans. Again.
Teenagers may not be old enough to have fully developed consequence/reward centers in the frontal lobe, but the average age for being able to discern reality from fiction is five years old. It’s horrifically condescending and disingenuous to pretend that teens are so delicate and fragile that reading some smut that disturbs them or isn’t to their tastes is going to drastically upset their psyche. The most that’s going to happen is they’re going to come away from whatever smut they deliberately clicked through the warning to read knowing that people have some weird kinks when it comes to sex. And you know what? YKINMKATO. The end.
We. Are. Not. Your. Mama.
I was an unsupervised teenager on the internet lo these many years ago. And I clicked on plenty of fanfic websites that wanted you to verify you were over 18,
You know what happened?
Nothing much. Sometimes I’d read something that made me feel weird and gross. Sometimes I’d close out of the window and clear the cache and stay off the computer and do something else for a day or two.
It says a lot, I think that I don’t actually remember the content of most of the fic in question. I remember the feeling, but from years later, I honestly couldn’t tell you most of the actual content that made me feel squicked and gross.
(I know the very first one I Noped out of when I was 11, because it was just, like. Ridiculously tame. But Hermione started to give Draco Malfoy a backrub, and I decided this was Inappropriate For Me. So I stopped reading it.)
I didn’t die.
It didn’t contribute to any of my myriad mental health issues - those are all either hereditary or a result of the actions of actual, real life people.
I didn’t “copy behavior” - the idea is laughable. I was a nerdy teenager with no IRL friends, you really think I was running out to … what, exactly? Manipulate or torture people with Unforgivable Curses/dark magic/alien brain slugs/insert-setting-appropriate-evil-thing-here? Have an orgy?
I’ve made bad choices at different times in my life, but none of them were a result of fictional characters modelling bad behavior. (Mostly they involved me not knowing how to handle something, or not being very good at boundaries.)
The people responsible for “dealing with the aftermath” are the kids themselves, and their parents.
