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Consumption of fiction is like consuming food: if you have allergies or complications, you make sure that whatever can harm you will not harm you https://twitter.com/Bagel0001/status/1286155299447959554
If you have peanut allergy and you go to a restaurant and order food, you make sure to ask them if there are peanuts in the dish. Then you ask if the cookware used for the dish has been used to cook peanuts. Then you ask if the ingredients have ever come into contact with peanuts
You intensely, extensivel, exhaustively make sure that what you eat is safe for you and won't trigger your allergies, without removing the allergen from the restaurant menu because other people are okay with consuming peanuts
The same is true with your experience in fandom and fanworks. If you find an aspect of the fandom as hurtful towards you, then you block, mute, and move on.
"Oh I don't like this ship, it reminds me of thag relationship I had that hurt me. I better block it from my settings"
"Oh I don't like this ship, it reminds me of thag relationship I had that hurt me. I better block it from my settings"
On the other side, some people may be consuming that problematic topic because for one reason or another. Let's say it helps them with their trauma via exposure. This way, it's like a person who just underwent major surgery receiving physical therapy, or easing into solid food
They're trying to face they're trauma, working on fixing their psyche, and that's working for them. It's massively different to look at the suffering they went through and equate that to fiction, as fiction did not harm them, but people in the real world.
"I experienced molestation as a child, and reading about it in fiction helps me realize that what happened to me was not my fault"
It's this idea that CSA survivors are trying to tell people: that fiction is not reality, and any fictional aspect cannot be equated to reality
It's this idea that CSA survivors are trying to tell people: that fiction is not reality, and any fictional aspect cannot be equated to reality
To say that a ship, a fanfic, fanart, or fandom that has underage characters included in it are ped*, toxic, or such, is to say that these lines of code, this pixels that shine on the screen, these words that we read, are equal to human beings harming human beings is absurd
