Snatched to the Heavens @victors-edges - Tumblr Blog

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nikathesiren

Teenagers hate being called “babies”, you know? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

#otayuri

kirikagey

Antis: Stop shipping that!! You disgust me!

Me:

victors-edges

lol. y is this me?

#otayuri

creemsicaal

FINGER BITES♥

Happy Welcome to the Madness, everyone. I want Yuri’s hair to be messy~ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

#otayuri

tenaflyviper

You can stop saying that cartoon fan art and fanfiction is “illegal” now.

And before you cry about anyone “supporting pedophilia!!!”, the point here is that what you’re complaining about (aka, shipping teenage cartoon characters, which has been a thing for decades) IS NOT PEDOPHILIA. Literally no one else has ever even considered it to be that before, and you’re abusing what that word means.

According to the 18 U.S. Code § 2256 (yes, the same code that antis have been using a screencap of, but omitting the last part of in order to conceal the truth):

“The term “indistinguishable” used with respect to a depiction, means virtually indistinguishable, in that the depiction is such that an ordinary person viewing the depiction would conclude that the depiction is of an actual minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. This definition does not apply to depictions that are drawings, cartoons, sculptures, or paintings depicting minors or adults.”

Also note the phrase “recognizable as an actual person” in 9ii.

(For real though–I have to laugh if you’re gonna tell me cartoons and anime characters look like real human beings. Like, who the fuck has eyes the size of fists and heads the size of pumpkins??? You guys are idiots…)

This is also further upheld by the Supreme Court ruling of Ashcroft vs Free Speech Coalition, and again in Ashcroft vs American Civil Liberties Union (the PROTECT Act has also had related portions–specifically 1466A, which antis love to parade around–judged as unconstitutional on a federal level, as was a result of United States v. Handley, in which the defendant was convicted due to a guilty plea bargain, and not actually convicted on the initial charges of obscenity. The plea bargain was made under the belief that the jury chosen to judge him would not acquit him of the obscenity charges if they were shown the images in question). Handley’s case is the only one so far that dealt solely with drawings of characters that did not exist in real life (as in, without further discovery of more serious content in the defendant’s possession–or ties to illegal sites–which is what occurred with other cases that antis tend to cite).

Also:

13-17-year-olds (aka minors) only make up 15% of this site’s user base. Meanwhile, the site has always allowed adult content. This means that staff is trusting you to browse appropriately, and to take responsibility for your browsing using the tools they have given to you (like blocking, and filtering search results). They are allowing you to be here under the assumption that you are mature enough to handle it. Your behavior is only showing staff that they might want to raise the minimum age limit (which is 17+ for mobile users, by the way). When faced with the choice of either trying to monitor/control millions of people, or simply adding a new age limitation, a company will always choose the easier option. Don’t ruin the site for all the teens that aren’t huge, easily-offended pissbabies.

No, fiction does not affect reality the way you want to believe. The statistics for rape, child abuse, assault, murder, etc. have all experienced a dramatic decline over the past few decades, in spite of our media becoming more graphically violent, and pornography being more easily accessible. Your logic just doesn’t hold up to the facts (by the way, this also applies to stories with mature themes like rape or murder, or stories with abusive or taboo relationships. IT’S JUST FICTION, PEOPLE. It’s a reflection of various aspects of our humanity, which includes the things we most fear. Writing and reading about them is one way we can strip them of that fear and power they hold over us. It doesn’t mean we stop recognizing those things as morally wrong–it’s just a way of reconciling their existence, and coping with it).

No, children wouldn’t find truckloads of porn in Google’s Safe Search. In fact, for most fandoms, you’ll have a hard time finding adult content even with Safe Search OFF. Google tailors its results to your browsing. If you’re finding “problematic” content, all that proves is that you were searching for it in the first place.

The internet is not a babysitter. Small children shouldn’t be on it unsupervised to begin with. If you wouldn’t let them go to Columbia by themselves–the drug and murder capitol of the world–then they shouldn’t be online by themselves. Public spaces are not “safe”. It’s not the job of millions of strangers to constantly look out for other people’s children (nor are they obligated to look out for you, for that matter). That’s the responsibility of their PARENTS. PERIOD.

An abuser can groom a victim without ever using anything sexual whatsoever. It’s about trust. It can be something as simple as an interest in model airplanes–does that make those “problematic”? As for those abusers, chances are that they’re not some random stranger on the internet, but someone known to the victim. You may not want to hear this, but the greatest threat to children statistically? It’s their own mothers.

Antis only came about within the past two years. Before that, there was no real drama in fandoms beyond the occasional shipping war, which no one treated like anything but a shipping war. You are the ones that made fandoms toxic. Fan art and fanfiction didn’t affect any of us the way you’re claiming before. Hell–people have been sexualizing cartoons for literally as long as they’ve existed. That’s almost 100 fucking years, and it hasn’t caused a goddamn thing. You’re abusing and trivializing extremely serious issues in order to use as leverage to threaten and silence others, and you bloody well know it. You choose the things that you’re aware that everyone hates: Pedophilia, abuse, etc. You know that just mentioning these things causes an instant knee-jerk reaction–one that few people will bother to look into beyond the initial claim. You’re deliberately emotionally manipulating others. Those are the tactics of abusers (and don’t even say “UM you’re calling survivors abusers!!”, because those who have been abused are the biggest demographic at risk for becoming abusers. No, it doesn’t mean every abused child grows up to be an abuser, but the number of serial killers that were abused as children is hard to ignore).

Adult content of fictional characters could actually help prevent cases of child sexual abuse. But then, we all know this was never about children for any anti, or you wouldn’t limit your concern to just the cartoons that you’re personally interested in. Honestly, I would think you’d be more concerned about the fact that sites like Pornhub and Redtube require no age verification, account, password, or credit card to access.

Point blank: What you are doing is called “crying wolf”, and it has real consequences. For example: Anti-vaxxers. All it took was one man claiming a link between vaccines and autism, and now diseases like polio are turning up again because of people who refuse to vaccinate their children. If you make claims of pedophilia where it doesn’t actually exist, you are hurting legitimate claims of pedophilia.

So, anyway, if you could stop accusing teenage girls (yes, the majority of the people you’re harassing are young women–usually minors themselves) of being “pedophiles” over something that’s 100% legal (which is shaming them during a period of their life where they’re using fan art and fanfiction as a safe means of exploring their own sexuality, and is honestly misogynistic as hell of you), and that was going on long before you came along without any issue, that’d be super.

Oh, and by the way–if you choose to falsely accuse another user of pedophilia, that IS enough of a violation of the Terms of Service for staff to delete your account. I’d tell you to just ask “bipolaramyrose”, but well…she no longer has an account for that very reason.

I’m going to tag a few blogs that may be interested in this:

@educating-antis, @shippingisnotactivism, @shipwhateveryouwant, @antisdontdoshit, @antiantis-saltmine

Feel free to tag anyone else you think might find this useful. Lemme know what tags I should add to the bottom for better exposure as well.

victors-edges

they get it.

aftgonice

I'm 14 going on 15 and I hate how so many people who take a character that was just my age, and make creepy art and fic about him. I'm about to turn his current age and have been propositioned since I was 11 and was always told that adults who try things like that are perverts. So why is it when a bunch of 20 somethings pushing a teen who is around my age into a sexual relationship with an adult and do explicit crap, it's not perverted and gross? What about the teens who are feeling sexualized?

First off, thanks for writing me and being polite in your message.

The first thing I want to address is this: you should never be made to feel sexualized. Unless it’s with someone you want to be sexual with, like a crush of yours. Even with someone you consider a crush, if you don’t want to feel that way and don’t want to do anything that can be considered sexual (be it even a kiss), you should never feel forced. This is not just now because you’re a teen, this is something that all of us go through and need to keep in mind even in our 20s, 30s and so on.

I’m so sorry that you feel that way in real life because some adults are absolutely disgusting. They are. Adults that prey on children are absolutely disgusting and horrifying and you should call them out, tell your parents or your teachers or the police. I’m not kidding here. I know it’s hard and you might feel like you’re going to be made fun of, or that they won’t believe you, or that they will side with the adult, or that will belittle you and tell you it’s not a big deal. If you tell someone you trust, they won’t do all those things. Go with your guts. Tell, even if someone only threw nasty words at you or catcalled you (and I really hope you never went through anything heavier than that). In those cases there won’t be much that you can do, but telling someone will help.

What I can tell from your message, is that you (subconsciously or not)equate sex with generally being nasty and perverted. This will probably be unnecessary, but I’ll say it anyway: sex is not inherently gross or disgusting or creepy. If you feel that it is, then it means you’re not ready to enter a sexual relationship, and that’s perfectly fine and normal. I won’t tell you that that’s only because of your age, because some people never (or very rarely) show any interest in sex (it’s called asexuality and it falls under the LGBT+ spectrum). Whether you do end up growing to want sex or not doesn’t matter here.

What matters is that now you clearly don’t want to see sex and anything to do with it in your fandom experience and that’s fine. Tumblr offers you ways to make your experience better and show you only the content you want to see. Block any nsfw tag. Don’t follow blogs whose description clearly states that they post nsfw (like mine). Tumblr is a big and scary place if you just take everything it throws at you (be it ship hate, nsfw stuff, etc). The thing with it is that it can’t cater to everyone’s tastes, so you have to be active about blocking the stuff that YOU don’t want to see. Other 14-going-on-15 year olds might be okay seeing nsfw fanart and posts and that will be their Tumblr experience, but you should definitely take measures to protect yourself from what you don’t want to see.

Now, the thing about Otayuri is that no matter how you twist it, it’s not illegal to ship it, even in a sexual way. You should definitely read this post about it, because the thing is, as much as we can project our feelings and real-world stuff into anime characters, they’re not real.

I assure you that if Yuri on Ice was a flesh and bone show things would be different. I don’t really watch any current TV shows with teens in them so I can’t speak for what other fandoms do with their ship, whether they’re sexualized or not. I can only speak for this silly and amazing anime that’s been consuming my life for the past seven months or so.

Anime and cartoon characters are a safe way to explore things about real life. Whether it be sex or depression or anxiety or simply falling in love, we can all identify with an anime character and see our flaws, our fears and our history in them.

The thing you have to remember is that we (I’m speaking for the slightly older part of the fandom since I’m in my twenties) have been Yuri’s age. We’ve very likely had crushes on boys or girls that were a bit younger, our age or slightly older (like Otabek is). So I think for most of us, shipping Otayuri is a way to remember what it feels like to be a teen and be in love/have a huge crush. We will never be that age again, and maybe there’s things we regret not doing, crushes we wish we had confessed. By shipping Otayuri in an active way (meaning: drawing fanart or writing fanfiction) we can explore things we experienced as teens (or wish we had) and pour a little bit of ourselves in Yuri’s (or Otabek’s) character.

Those things might involve anything from simple fluff or rough sex, because, accept it or not, some people at 15 or 16 were (are) having sex of all kinds. Sweet, loving, rough, vanilla, kinky, you-name-it sex. So not to explore that aspect in a healthy way (through fics or fanart) would be lying about what reality is, it would be denying that we ever thought about or had sex at that age.

Much like with blocking tumblr content, you can choose what kinds of fanfiction you read. Only read General and Teen and Up tagged things, read about fluff and about falling in love in a sweet innocent way. Read anything tagged “Ace!Yuri” (it means asexual, the thing I was telling you about before).

But please understand this: when we sexualize Yuri, we’re mostly sexualizing our (often past) selves. Not other teens, not other real-life people. Yuri doesn’t exist in real life, and many of us see bits and pieces of ourselves in him. When we write about him we really write about ourselves, be it because we want to see how we (maybe a little sassier and bitchier version of us) would have confessed a crush to our best friend, or would have handled the aftermath of having just shoved our gloved fingers in said best friend’s mouth in front of thousands of people. Fanfiction is a study about versions of ourselves that never existed, but might as well have.

Another thing I need to make clear: Otabek is not an adult. I assure you that the morning of your 18th birthday you won’t feel like an adult. You’ll feel like the you from yesterday and it will be anticlimactic af, you’ll be like “That’s it?” and yeah, it will be it. Just because the law in some country or state says that 18 is the age of consent (which is set to 16 or 14 years old in many other countries) it doesn’t mean that you’re automatically an adult at that age. You can be 18 and have had sex since you were 14. You can be 18 and completely uninterested in sex. You can be 18 and have a 15 year old mental age, or you can be 16 and be mentally more mature than some 20 year olds.

What canon has shown us, is that Yuri and Otabek are much closer to each other’s mental age than the 2 years + a few months difference they share. I encourage you to find posts about why there’s no power imbalance between Yuri and Otabek, because they compete in the same sport and they have had similar experiences in life.

In conclusion, if you feel irked about nsfw fanart and fanfics and discussions when it comes to this particular ship, please don’t read it/watch it. But what I can assure you is that none of us are trying to sexualize you or your peers. When we sexualize pixels on a screen we don’t see those pixels as a flesh and bone version of a human, we only see an idealized character whose age we are or have been and whose personality and experiences we want to safely explore.

Also really important: when we write/draw NSFW, we don’t write/draw it for teens to read. I repeat: WE DON’T CREATE NSFW CONTENT FOR TEENS. We’re not your parents or guardians, we write NSFW for whoever feels like they can handle seeing nsfw content. If you’re a teen that goes on the nsfw tag and then complains about it (I’m not saying that’s what you did here, I’m speaking generally), it’s only your fault for going in a tag that you weren’t comfortable to begin with.

TL;DR:

Speak up if you feel sexualized IRL in a way you don’t like;

Learn how to use tumblr safely, block tags, understand that tumblr doesn’t do those things for you. Make your fandom experience exactly the one you want to see;

Don’t trust adults who tell you this ship is somehow illegal: it’s not;

Understand what’s behind fiction and fanfiction as a way we have to explore real life things (often too personal to write about as ourselves, so we project those things in characters we like);

Understand that adulthood is not something that happens from one day to another;

Learn to discern what content is meant to be consumed by a teen and what content isn’t;

Be safe.

victors-edges

LOUDER FOR THE CHILDREN IN THE BACK.

#otayuri #Yuri on ice