fullsludgeknightranch

[orchidbreezefc]

is the ao3 donation drive still going? did i miss it? well, whatever. i’m sure everybody can agree that special time of year makes all social media fucking insufferable for its whole duration. i’ve been thinking a lot about the whole anti vs anti-anti debate for, ohh, a year now? just really putting a lot of time toward reconsidering my preconceptions and revising where i stand on that particular hellish scale. and i think ive finally reached my final verdict. here it goes. ahem.

...

i don’t fucking care anymore. this fight has never gone anywhere or achieved anything except making everyone very very upset. nobody is helping anyone by arguing like this so quit it.

you really want to help people?

educate them.

(strongly worded elaboration to follow)

i have grown to despise both sides of this debate, less because of any moral conflict and more because neither side is achieving anything except making things worse with their current approaches. let’s talk about both.

one side preaches that ‘fiction is not reality’ and writers and readers know the difference. in theory this neatly absolves them of having to take responsibility for anything, because under that logic, there’s no real problem, and any time the ‘antis’ take umbrage with fucked up shit in fanfiction, they’re just being puritan book-banning types, overreacting and espousing the type of censorship that led to the fanfiction purges of yore.

the problem there is that not everybody can tell the difference between fiction and reality. it’s cool that you are knowledgeable and careful to not internalize the shit you read and write as normal and okay, but have you heard of the jaws effect? do you remember the sort of behavior western culture decided was incredibly romantic from a boyfriend in the wake of twilight? hell, have you actually literally been groomed by predators and abusers with child porn and suchlike? because i know people who have been. i was too, to some extent. believe it or not, it does happen.

so what’s my answer? education. if you have no specific training or experience, especially if you’re a minor, it’s actually really fucking hard to look at dark writing and effectively identify and separate which parts are fucked up and should stay fictional vs which parts are in the fic because they are normal aspects of real life relationships. we need to teach people the critical thinking skills to do that.

for years i was a teen in an abusive relationship that heavily featured consumption and creation of adult/minor porn and similarly fucked up stuff. in all that time i never saw a single post meaningfully and practically explain how to keep a healthy and critical attitude for your safety when you encounter shit like that. hell, i’m not sure i’ve seen a single post like that since.

there were NO tools immediately available and accessible for me, a teen on tumblr up to my neck in child porn and abuse, to educate myself about it and engage (or disengage) from a more informed standpoint. i’m sure those resources exist, but they aren’t on my dash, and if today’s fans are anything like i was, they won’t embark on a google expedition to learn skills they may not even know they need.

yes, i was one of those minors that clicked past ‘18+ only’ banners; no, i do not feel authors should be held responsible for the fact that those minors will always exist or crucified for people irresponsibly reading their comprehensively-tagged content. you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, etc etc--but the horse should still have access to water. education should be available, regardless of how many people will use it to become more responsible.

everything follows from there, really, so if youve got the point you can probably dip out now, or skim the rest. but fair’s fair and i don’t want to let the hardline ‘antis’ (BIG scare quotes) off the hook about their own terrible approach. while anti-antis want to pretend there is no problem, antis are so focused on the problem that they won’t implement moderate solutions that might actually do anything because they don’t want to practically deal with the problem as it exists, they want it to be Gone. their solution is ‘nobody should write bad shit and nobody should be able to read it’, and nothing but.

think anti-gun folks. anti-gun folks so firmly believe that nobody needs or should have guns that they usually dont talk to their kids about gun safety. why should they? they don’t need to! except sometimes kids go to sleepovers with a friend whose jackass brother has a secret gun and now they dont know how to be safe around it. now it doesn’t matter whether you’re actually right about guns or have the moral high ground--you’ve made your kid less safe around them.

or think abstinence-only education. folks don’t want kids to have sex in circumstances they don’t approve of, so they don’t tell them how to do it safely in hopes they will be so scared of the consequences they cannot effectively avoid that they simply won’t have sex! of course, kids do it anyway, only with less knowledge of how to protect themselves. all you’ve done is withhold maybe the only reliable, safe information they could have had.

there will always be bad shit on the internet. even if ao3 went against its whole purpose and did ban content, another site would appear to host the banned shit, so we’d just have a more highly concentrated area of toxic content. and there would still be worse elsewhere, and there would be worse than that irl. mounting an impossible crusade to ban everything dangerous so nothing potentially damaging EXISTS to hurt anyone will never work and--given that ao3 hasn’t budged yet--the effort hasn’t actually helped pretty much anyone in the many years that tumblr has been on-and-off insufferable due to this argument. isn’t it more practical to give readers the reading comprehension/critical analysis tools to handle bad shit when they do inevitably encounter it?

tl;dr: educate people. putting the onus on authors who are ALREADY tagging/warning (as they should--that is still important!) doesn’t work. individual authors can take great pains and add a disclaimer or a helpline number on their fic, which might help the maybe 300 people who read that particular fic. but give a man a fish, teach a man to fish. if you use a blogging platform, which is more suitable for conversation, to teach people to read critically and safely, they will use those skills to be safe in every fandom they engage in from then on.

this is the number one thing we can do to help the most people over the longest term. teach them to make their own decisions. teach them to keep themselves safe. regardless of which side you’re on, you should be able to agree to do THAT. maybe put more effort into that than screaming at the brick walls that you are toward each other. it’s less sexy than Being Right, but it might actually protect someone.