Why are teenage rape survivors considered criminal for saying mean things on the internet while adults creating media with which they can be re-traumatized or backslide into their abuser's arms with can send harassment campaigns and try to intentionally trigger people? Why can adults excuse their behavior with the arguments IRL child rapists use while teens are considered to be saying nonsense because some of them are mean?
You can say “I’ve never seen this happen”, but I can say that 90% of shippers in the discourse do this, and you wouldn’t have the power to contradict me, because that’s proving a negative. It’s virtually impossible to say “most antis/shippers would never do this and those that do are a vocal minority”.
Let me be a little more clear here. I was raped as a child, repeatedly, and as a teenager, shippers made rape jokes and drew adorable rape shota porn. This made me think what happened to me was fine. This made me stop IDing red flags in the people around me, made me stop hearing about a 15-year-old dating a 20-year-old and thinking ‘that’s awful’. This is my experience. A lot of people have the same history. To contradict this is to say 'the danger you were put into doesn’t matter’.
You can’t say that it’s okay something is a danger because call out culture is bad. I’m not participating in callout culture. I’m sending asks you can reply to privately calmly explaining that I’m aware there is a danger and being angry on the behalf of grown adults not being able to post whatever they want and not on the behalf of survivors and children being unsafe in fandom is narrow-minded. Shippers constantly tell me that being raped is no reason to be mean just for saying so.
ARE they being harassed? Or are they just nervous and attacked because too many people at once dropped by to tell them that they hate what this artist is doing, for very valid reasons? You don’t know. You aren’t there to see what the actual proportion of harassment vs calm discussion on either side looks like. I see shippers harass more than antis, and you see vice versa. We can only judge based on what little we do know. What I know is something I have personally experienced.
You don’t have to try to stuff words into my mouth to prove that yes, there are always negative, hurtful people in the world who do terrible things, shipper or not, anti or not.
However, it’s not my responsibility as a creator if a rape survivor sees my work that contains rape. It’s not my responsibility to protect you or bend to your triggers in what I produce, though I will always advocate to give someone the ability to avoid your works through tagging or similar. That is up to the person viewing the content to protect themselves and their internet experience, as it always have been.
I’m deeply sorry for the trauma you endured in life–that is however, the fault of your rapists for doing that to you, and nobody but the people who did the acts to harm you or contribute to such abuse and trauma. It does not give you the ability, nor anyone else, to censor someone’s work, written or artistic. Do I enjoy rape shota porn? Absolutely not, but I can’t stop someone from creating it–but I can sure as fuck blacklist that shit so I don’t need to. Adult creators aren’t excusing anything, because they haven’t committed any such act. A creator of content containing rape does not equal a rapist. A creator of age gaps does not equal pedophile. A creator of incestuous works doesn’t equal condoning of rape or nonconsentual incest.
Again, I’m sorry you went through such an event, but you can’t place the blame on others, especially very self-aware creators in the current creative culture, in something like that. It’s not that children or survivors are unsafe in fandom, it’s that they need to learn how to filter their viewing experience of the internet. That’s how the internet works. You tailor your own experience of the content that you seek, and no matter what, it’s not the responsibility for a creator to do that for you. It sounds really harsh, but that is the raw truth to the internet in reference to the consuming of fictional creation. This is true for children in fandom, though many things are already in place to protect them–safesearch, tagging, filtering. Especially with the new implementation of tumblr censoring nsfw content for underaged bloggers–regardless, the user is always responsible for curating their own internet experience, and not for a creator to be obligated to curate to or worry about.
Also yes, creators are being harassed. They have been doxxed. They have been threatened (you can see plenty of that with someone like @lvtro, who is probably one of the most prolific in gaining hate and harassment for enjoying ‘problematic’ content). Some have had their lives ruined, a couple simply for having their name accidentally mentioned in massive rumor-spreading or callout posts. What I know is also what I have experienced, and I am not nor ever obligated to use my past emotional or sexual abuse as a weapon against creators. There is content I don’t like, content I will never be able to look at because of my past experiences, but that doesn’t give me the right to demean or vilify creators because they happen to create content that hits far too close to home for what I’ve been through.
I’m not responsible for the media that you consume; you are, and saying that does not dismiss or contradict sympathy to someone’s trauma. If you don’t like it, if it hurts you, if it makes you uncomfortable, then do not consume it.
