Anon...I'm going to be as patient as I can because you seem like a decent person and I'd hate to turn you away from the anti-censorship cause by being too hostile.
But like...the magic bullet theory has been disproven time and time again. Do you have this standard for anything else? People know that hurting children is wrong, it's not like this is some secret knowledge you need the Oghma Infinium to solve. You're essentially arguing that playing Mario games for too long will slowly make people start to believe that stomping on and killing real turtles is cool and good.
You claim that people are romanticizing child predation even though child predation is obviously wrong in real life, but that's not what's going on here. You can tell a fake fictional story where terrorism is just a sport where both sides have equal merit and everyone treats it like it's just a fun game and it says absolutely nothing about your views on real life school shootings. My brother has been playing Counter Strike since at least the age of 10, and shockingly enough, no amount of watching 3D models shoot and kill each other with pixelated bullets has made him believe terrorism is a fun game in real life. That's because most people have the ability to distinguish real life from fiction, and the mark of an intelligent mind is to be able to entertain an idea and treat it as if it were fact without actually accepting it as fact.
If writing a story about your own trauma with a totally unrealistic good ending is enough to change your real life morals, then I'm sorry to say you had flimsy morals in the first place.
This view is extremely frustrating to me. "predators preying on children is not some cutesy little romantic thing, and i’m sorry, but I’m tired of people acting like it is" Are people acting like it is? Or did you just take their fictional scenario at face-value and assume that was the author's actual real opinion completely unfiltered? I'm sorry, but that's a really fucking bonkers assumption to make. It would be like if you said, "I'm so tired of people romanticizing ripping someone's spine out and then whipping them with it until they die!" because someone in Mortal Combat has that as a fatality. No matter how many times I play the Dark Brotherhood questline in Oblivion, it will never make me believe that real murder is cool and fun, and it's not some Fruedian slip for me to enjoy video game murder as if that means I enjoy murder in real life of real people. I don't know how much more clear I can make it.
I'm getting really fucking sick of this false analogy, and it gets on my nerves so much because it downplays how serious real child predation is when you compare it to fake stories as if they're on the same level, or even just that the fake stories are worth worrying about at all. Do you have any idea how my brother would react if I condescended to him about how much he loves Counter Strike and scolded him for romanticizing terrorism? Does that sound at all hateful or dehumanizing? Does it sound at all like I'm making a mockery of real victims of real school shootings by comparing it to T-bagging someone in a video game?
On your last point, I would just like to say that children getting through trigger warnings and then upsetting themselves with the thing is not the fault of the author and it's not the fault of the people hosting the fic. If a child knows they're allergic to peanuts, and a package clearly says that it has peanuts in it, and the child eats the peanuts anyway and nearly dies from anaphylaxis, is it really fair to blame the people who made the peanut snack for making it in the first place and selling it in a store where children with allergies will obviously find it and skip the clear warning? How many safeguards would you propose to stop children from harming themselves on allergens without just banning those allergens altogether?
The problem here is that we've created a world where children are more infantilized than they've ever been. The solution is not to act like children can't read fiction, because that would be even more infantilizing and leave them even less prepared to handle a situation that might upset them in the future. The solution is not going to come from fandom, but rather from people who want to make a better world for children by teaching them how to handle discomfort and identifying when something is too much. Knowledge is power. As always, education is the best tool we have for combating problems. No amount of tackling symptoms of a corrupt system will make the system any less corrupt; You have to take a weed out at the root or it will just continue to grow underground.
I understand that "romanticized" depictions of child predation are upsetting to you. Trust me, they're upsetting to me too! But trying to discourage people from writing fiction in a way that's enjoyable or cathartic to them? That isn't a real problem that needs a real solution, beyond what I already outlined of equipping people with better tools for handling discomfort. You are going to run into things that upset you. The solution is not to remove everything that could upset someone. That is the logic of censorship.
