First batch of easy answer images.
Easy to make and easy to use! Save these pictures and the next time an anti tries an overused argument, you’ve got an answer ready to go. Just post the picture instead of typing the same thing over and over again. Free for anyone to use with or without credit.
Thanks to @ship-is-love, @shipping-isnt-morality, @forest-of-stories, and @shippingisnotactivism for their contributions.
Some of these are good takes and some of these are trash takes. Like the idea that adults created fandom? Bitch, fandom is a collective enterprise, we all created fandom, STFU. Or the idea that NSFW and not safe for minors are synonymous. I wrote smut when I was 16. Or the idea that pedophilic art can’t support pedophilia. Listen, the problem with pedophilic art, or rapey art, or etc etc etc is that most people think these things are terrible horrible things on paper, but like, when they actually happen, people don’t even see it as a crime, because it’s so normal. Like prom rape. Like sure, write what you want, but media has an impact, and you should create art that makes the impact you want. Fun fact, did you know that designated drivers were invented by the media? There’s writing what you want, and there’s media illiteracy.
Adults created fandom in the sense that fandom’s been an ongoing enterprise for 50 years and therefore the vast majority of fandom creators are adults. Children and teenagers are certainly creators within fandom, but the “adults created fandom” meme is generally used as a response to the idea that adults should quietly bow out of fandom and let the kids have it… which I can’t help but think is an idea that was actually created by people who really do want to prey on and warp the opinions of young people and thus want to cut them off from having friends and mentors who are adults and don’t lie about it. Because I’ve never seen it before. My generation didn’t attack adults for existing in spaces that kids also exist in and neither did the 90′s kids and neither did the teens in the 00′s; the “grownups should get out of our sandbox!” attitude is ahistorical and bizarre, and comes at a time when there is plenty of evidence that various groups are trying to radicalize teens against things that were previously commonly accepted.
Agreed on “nsfw does not mean not safe for minors”, but in today’s environment where adults get called pedophiles for having friends who are teens, don’t expect many adults to feel safe standing up for that opinion. I’ve been arguing it my whole life, under my real name, so I’m willing to continue to say it. I feel that teens should have the legal right to consume whatever porn they want, because they can’t get STDs or get their heart broken or get pregnant by porn, and if hormones are raging and kids want to experiment with sex I’d much rather they did it in their own bedroom with the assistance of porn than to be exploited by an older person who just wants to get their own rocks off… and I think porn in fandom, where bad stuff gets tagged, is probably a lot safer and less likely to teach bad attitudes than mainstream porn is. Unfortunately, the way the law currently works, adults need to be very careful about allowing teens access to porn, because an adult who encourages someone they know is a minor to read fic containing sex could be charged with a serious crime.
The impact of fiction on reality is real but in general, in fandom, it doesn’t go quite the way people assume that it does. The fact that fandom expects you to identify that what is happening in your story or art is rape, and thus tag it, actually helps to prevent the kind of normalization of rape that you’re talking about when you bring up that “prom rape” is treated as if it’s not rape at all. What is bad about rape in fiction is not that it exists – rape is a real thing and like all real things, writers and artists have the right to engage with it – but when it’s treated as if it isn’t rape. Well, “write/draw what you want but tag it properly” is actually a direct counter to this.
When the book Lolita came out, many reviewers (I am guessing, most of them male, given the time period) called it a love story. I am not joking. If Vladimir Nabokov had had the ability to post tags on his novel like “Underage, Child Abuse, Rape”, idiots might not have been able to widely promote the idea that the book is actually positive on the concept of pedophilia or that the writer sincerely thought it was a love story.
Everyone in society thinks they despise rape and child abuse, but when it actually happens, they turn a blind eye by claiming that what happened wasn’t rape or child abuse. Writing stories in which rape and/or child abuse take place and tagging it as such helps to teach people that no, those things that they were told weren’t rape or weren’t child abuse? Actually were. The story itself doesn’t even need to explicitly tell us that the thing in question is rape or child abuse; if it’s tagged correctly, it tells us that the author knows damn well that this is a terrible thing happening and expects you to agree.
In my lifetime I’ve seen the proportion of casually rapey fanfic scenarios actually drop because instead of the standard within the community being that you only have to warn about “explicit sex” (of any type, so rape, consensual but rough BDSM, and loving vanilla sex are all the same) and same-sex relationships, nowadays you don’t warn about same-sex (you advertise, you don’t warn, because it’s not a bad thing people have to be cautioned about, but a thing some people are specifically looking for and some people are not. Like, you don’t warn that a book is science fiction but you do shelve it with the other sf books.) And you do warn about rape and rapeyness. I don’t think this change in community standards was driven by fandom itself, I think it was driven by social forces outside fandom and fandom just conformed to the new standards. But it does appear to have had an impact. I used to see a lot of fics that just didn’t seem to grasp the concept that what they were depicting was a bad thing, like the rape = love trope. That concept still exists, but now that people have to warn for it, I think there’s a lot more recognition that no, it’s still rape.
So yeah, “fiction doesn’t affect reality” is too simple a take, but “don’t ship pedophilic ships” is… a philosophy adopted by a bunch of people who really wanted support for their ship war, which has no concept of what pedophilia actually is and which actively denies teenagers any sexual agency and fails to recognize where the law actually falls. (I’ve seen people claiming that 17-year-old Peter Parker from Infinity War should not be shipped with Tony Stark because that’s pedophilia. It is not. The age of consent in New York, where both characters live, is 17. Is it gross? In my opinion, yes, very much so. Would I ship it? Hell no, I won’t even ship mentor/student if both are obvious adults. Is it pedophilia? No. Does it describe a relationship that’s illegal in the place where the characters live? Also no.) It’s a lot better to tell people they can ship what they want and then require that they tag things, because there are a lot of perfectly legal relationships that some people consider entirely morally acceptable that other people consider to be disgusting and predatory, so why not tell people (like me) that if they don’t want to read a ship with a big age gap between a very young adult and an old one, or with a mentor/student power differential, they can identify those with the tags and avoid them?
Steel Phoenix Studios 