#I unfortunately started as an artist on deviantart at a young age so I saw some. Weird Things

[yamujiburo]

I'm so thankful for you sharing the importance of protecting minors from sexual content. My parents and I didn't have much knowledge back then and I was exposed to this kind of stuff too early. I developed bad habits. I somehow deceived my family into trusting me way too much and, when I saw I had lost control and I asked for help, I saw my family was also hurt and they spent a lot on therapy and my anxiety medication. I have forgiven them for not knowing back them. But I still haven't forgiven myself for getting them through all that stuff. It's important to understand how much we need to protect minors from sexual content. Family members and artists, please pay attention to the content young audience is exposed to.

Of course! I can relate a lot to this. My parents were really good at monitoring what I was doing online for a while but they started trusting me more and I unfortunately started seeing a lot of stuff I shouldn't have but would keep it secret. Gonna talk about my experience a lil bit under the cut just bc I've been reflecting on it a lot recently (tw for grooming)

I gained a following of around 25K on deviantart by the time I was around 15/16. It was in the worst fandom too (mlp). I'd have a lot of much older men talking to me, drawing/writing nsfw of my characters who were underaged (they'd draw nsfw of myself and my sonas as well). It was so normalized for me and I didn't see anything wrong with it at the time.

I'd shipped Spike and Rarity at the time (very much do not anymore) and adult men would use that ship as a basis for trying to talk to me or get in a relationship. "We're just like Sparity! You're young but you're very mature for your age, so it's fine." I remember one guy trying REALLY hard to try and get me to move in with him. I was pretty creeped out then, but like holy shit that's SUPER creepy and I'm fortunate that he didn't keep trying after I gave him a hard "no".

It bled into my real life a bit when I met a 22 y/o man who asked me out when I was just 16 just turning 17. Luckily the relationship was NOT long lasting (I think he realized that I'm a very boring person LMAO) but I think about how I thought that that was a perfectly normal. I'd date go on to date people who were probably too old for me.

Also around when I was 16/17, people started shipping me with another artist in the fandom who was several years older than I was (side note: nothing wrong with an age gap! but it's very not okay when there's "waiting" for someone to be of legal age involved). I did end up dating said artist after I turned 18 and it was fine, I wasn't hurt or anything but I did find weird that we were shipped when I was still a teenager looking back (there was also nsfw drawn of us together before/when we were dating)

I just had such a warped sense of reality for a long because of this shit. I'm glad there's more conversations about this stuff and it's more known that adults should have little to no personal interaction with kids on the internet and vice versa. There's way too many stories of kids getting taken advantage of in fandom spaces. I think I got off fairly lucky all things considered. But bottom line YES kids need to be protected online and their exposure to sexual content/adult spaces should be limited or monitored. It's also really tough though because not all kids have adults in their real life that they can trust or go to to ask questions about sex so they seek solace in adults online and it's just a constant cycle.

I'm honestly unsure of what to do about that and I don't have all the answers but I ultimately just don't want kids online to end up in similar positions I was in when I was younger. I just do my best

[eye-of-enigmatic-thought]

2019, a retrospective to this year and decade

Long post in-comin’

I’m gonna be honest, I’m not really sure how to describe this year and by extension, this decade, I guess that’s to be expected in a way, so many things can happen in 365 or more days to the point of a information overload, but I suppose the best way to describe this year was ‘complicated yet also stale’. Not much happened in the beginning aside from therapy and support group appointments, which were pleasant albeit I don’t remember much from them aside from drawings I’ve done that I showed to the other members, nothing of significance happened that I can recall during the middle of the year, and around near the end I took part in art therapy groups that I managed to make a few friends out of (though I sadly don’t chat with them often), at September I was beginning to try and get into college after being out of education for a year and managed to enrol (though court issues made me miss the first five weeks that I had to quickly catch up to), most of my memories of this year actually came from college.

College has been going good, so far! I have been learning a lot and my tutors are very kind, of course it can get stressful due to the long days I have and also due to some of my more rowdier peers, but I’ve managed to also befriend a few others that I am very happy to have met. Currently I’m in my break and I will use it to advantage as much as I can to post as much art as I can.

Also, I’ve just recently been exploring my gender, and well, I’m now transmasc rather than a demigirl, I still go by whatever pronoun and still see myself as nonbinary, but I am more masculine leaning now? I guess I might be a ‘demiboy’ but I still feel a bit more ‘fluid’ than that, sooo... masculine leaning demifluid? I dunno, but overall I’m not a girl anymore! :D

Rebirth is still being rewritten, admittedly I haven’t been focusing entirely on it due to some things in the way, but some of that is now gone so really my only enemy is my lack of motivation and poor time management, but even times where I’m not writing and/or editing the rewrite I’m still thinking of how I want certain scenes to go or what things I want the characters to say, so it’s still being worked on! I do feel incredibly bad that I haven’t been doing a lot of my Undertale-related stuff lately or even attempting to at least finish off the HS’ blog’s first arc (I at LEAST wanna finish that arc before I go on a official hiatus to fully know what to do with it), but you can rest assured that I have NOT forgotten about it and I do want to continue on with it, I guess that’s probably one of my goals for 2020, ‘more Undertale fanart’, yes, good, very good, mwahahahaha.

And now, a little something more personal, mostly in regards to this decade as a whole. Warning for mentions and discussions of pedophilia, bullying, suicide, and trauma for the next three or so paragraphs.

(Warning starts here)

My memories from around the beginning of this decade are hazy, but very notable, I’m not going to sugarcoat it by saying that from 2010-2013 were some of my worst years of my life, I was only 11-14 around this time, but when I wasn’t going through awful bullying at school that the teachers did nothing about, I would come back home to a toxic friend circle on DeviantArt that was filled with constant irrelevant drama and some REALLY creepy adults that would do smut rps with the minors in our group. Thankfully I never was a victim of this due to mostly staying in my corner and didn’t interact with others much, but I saw it happen to many of the other minors in said group, it left me disturbed but I rationalised it by thinking it was just some ‘teenager thing’ that I was too young for (because I was a little cretin that lied about my age and said I was 13 when I was really 11 when I first signed up haha), it was only when I was late into being 17 I realised ‘Oh my god the people who I called my friends and RP’d with were pedophiles and groomed the other minors what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck’. 

This whole shitty ordeal with that dA friend circle and the constant bullying I went through in secondary school were so bad that it literally led me to have a suicide attempt at the age of 13, I survived of course, and I’m really glad I did, because I wouldn’t have met friends that through them I would manage to get away and abandon the old dA group because ‘fuck you guys I have BETTER FRIENDS NOW!’ Unfortunately all of that dA friend circle are now deactivated or are no longer active with all the evidence deleted so there’s no use making a callout or name dropping any of them or even searching for the other minors in attempt to rekindle with them (and I don’t think my heart would be able to handle it in that regard...), but I did find out that one of them who was a pedophile apologist at one point commissioned a ton of Darkrai pregnancy porn with one of it being fucking mpreg, so I can at least get a laugh from that shit, doubt she’s reading this but if you are... 

You may be gone, but your darkrai mpreg porn will live on FOREVER... Forever for ME to laugh at!!! >8DDD  So anyway get rekt and suck my non-existent dick you fucking creep.

(Warning ends here)

Phew alright, all that nasty stuff out of the way...   2014 was where things began to improve, I had moved secondary schools and I switched from a mainstream to a specialist school for other autistic children and I found the people who would become my closest friends, through one of them I also got a tumblr blog, and when Undertale came around (so late 2015 to around 2016 when the fandom was most active), through it’s fandom I managed to gain really kind and lovely friends that I love dearly, it’s somewhat strange to me, in the beginning since childhood I never had any close friends and the only ‘close’ ones I had were ones that either kept me around out of pity (because I was a awkward autistic kid), kept me around to constantly bully and push my buttons, or (in this case with the dA friend circle) were potential predators that I thankfully was never THAT close to, and actual close ones I lost contact with too quickly, to this day I’m so thankful for these friends and I dunno if they’d be comfortable with me namedropping them here, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are <333.

I of course had rough patches throughout the years, recovery from my traumas wasn’t easy and I was constantly having issues with pretty much everything from my mental health problems to environmental factors that were out of my control, I’m not going to go into detail on this one because this post is long enough already, but I am much better now than how I was when I was younger, I still have a long way to go, but I have definitely improved and I hope I can still improve, hell, I’ve even improved my art! Wanna see an example?

I drew this back in 2011 on mspaint on a mouse! Yeah! Can you believe that? Whilst to me my art right now isn’t exactly ‘artist goals’ I have definitely improved a lot since!! And I’ll keep on improving forever because that’s what this decade was like anyway! I’m not sure what the future holds, but I want to set these goals for next year:

Create more digital art Finish my unfinished short comic ideas and parodies Continue to chip away at Rebirth’s rewrite and finish Hissterical Scientist’s first arc. Work on my original stuff Continue to improve my mental health Get proper time management skills Learn to do commissions (I be gettin munz lol) Thank you to all my friends and family who have helped support me and stuck by me throughout all these years, I am so happy I get to spend a life with you and I hope we’ll continue to go through the future together, you mean so much to me and I can’t say thank you enough. Thank you to any followers who have sticked by me for so long and if you’re new, I hope we’ll make memories together! 

Onward and upward, and leave behind the pain! <3