kink-tomato

[kink-tomato]

[kink-tomato]

Y'all.

Y'all.

What the fuck.

[kink-tomato]

We’re going to get the ending of X after all. This was all part of CLAMP’s master plan, I’m sure of it.

[kink-tomato]

This painting was in my social studies textbook in like fifth grade. They taught me in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL that LITERALLY THIS was racist imperialist propaganda. This is not some obscure ‘oops I didn’t know the context’ imagery.

this isn’t the first time the DHS has tweeted literal nazi propaganda but uuuhhhh I feel like things are going to get Very Bad unless we do something. about the nazis. who are running the US government

[kink-tomato]

One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of 'appropriate for children' content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it's happened incredibly quickly.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children' reaction, consider: would what you're looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?

[kink-tomato]

My romp through my old files continues to yield beautiful and terrible things.

[kink-tomato]

William Mortensen (1897-1965) - Untitled (Female Crucifixion), c. 1927

[kink-tomato]

When Seishiro is dropping truth despite being morally ambiguous at best:

[kink-tomato]

love telling people I'm not on social media as if it's not 98% of my waking hours. well I'm not on social media in a way that you'd recognize

[kink-tomato]

"I am going to get a good grade in ___________, a thing that is both normal to want and possible to achieve" drifts through my brain with positively alarming regularity.

[kink-tomato]

sorry if i'm gonna be quiet for a while. my country recently introduced laws that make it so that in order to use social media to the fullest (not being able to view ns/fw content and in a few cases, not even having access to dms), i HAVE to give the sites my id/face scan.

it goes into effect july 25th. it'll probably effect here too, since this place allows mature content (tho not full on ns/fw)

i'm very distressed about it bc i might end up not even being able to talk to my internet friends. i don't really have any irl ones

if i have to disappear on most socials by then, you know why.

[kink-tomato]

clamp characters as pokemon

[kink-tomato]

I have bad news about 2025 to 2030

the jump from 2015 to 2020 was 10 years but the jump from 2020 to 2025 was 11 months

[kink-tomato]

Another one from the vaults. It's always the old SeiSub stuff I've made and forgotten about that hits me directly between the eyes when I find it again.

[kink-tomato]

This quiz is dated 2024, millennials ARE over 40 🙄 I’m one of them.

Try this buzzfeed quiz it’s fun.

[kink-tomato]

PSA for fanfic writers

[kink-tomato]