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/ / I was online at age 14 reading an adult writer’s incredibly fucked-up noncon torture fanfics about harry potter characters. they were all properly marked to make people like me avoid the content, but I chose to read them anyway and came away from the experience very upset.
/ / you know what I did? said nothing to the author and quietly accepted the responsibility of exposing myself to content that was clearly tagged as things that would upset me, closed the page, and moved on. never did I once think I should harm the author for MY choice.
/ / I can still find that author’s website (they host their fics on their own site and never posted to places like http://ff.net or anything) from memory because their content burned their author name into my brain. I’ve reread the fics as an adult and appreciated them.
/ / but they’re still some of the most abhorrent fan content I’ve ever read in my life. truly gross shit. and I fully accept the responsibility of seeing their tags and the description, but reading it anyway. it’s not their fault and I never once felt anger toward them.
/ / like, I’ve grown up online. I have been online since the early 2000s and have experienced some truly heinous shit because of it. not once in my life did I ever want to harass or threaten someone else for what they did online regarding fictional characters.
/ / I can’t even understand where that impulse comes from. I was online when it was the wild fucking west, content regulation was barely a thing, and if you saw some shit you didn’t like, it was on YOU. these kids are growing up on an internet that is 1000x more mindful of
// keeping them from seeing shit that might upset them. tone indicators, content regulation, adults actively working to block minors from their nsfw content, comprehensive tagging systems, warnings on fan content, empathy. that shit barely existed when I was online as a minor.
/ / and yet they refuse to curate their online spaces with all the tools they’ve been given to do so, and instead feel emboldened to level the most vile abuse at people who are quietly creating PROPERLY TAGGED content for themselves and fellow adults. wild.
/ / when I was online as a minor, I had almost no barriers between me and content I shouldn’t be seeing, and straight up adults grooming me and trying to bombard me with nasty content I never asked for. the responsibility to avoid bad content was 100% on me back then.
/ / minors online do not understand how good they have it now. all you have to do is take one ounce of responsibility. blacklist words you don’t want to see and block accounts you don’t want to see. move on. choosing harassment and threats instead proves you don’t belong here.
/ / anyway I’m old and I remember the days when going online meant you just had to cross your fucking fingers that you didn’t accidentally see horrific gore or have creepy men trying to cyber you when you wanted to go on neopets or whatever the fuck
