So…explaining the moral panic against “anime pedophilia”. I know they just wanted to understand the link between the moral panic and culturally-left/“woke” politics, but to do that, I feel I need to explain the moral panic as a whole. https://twitter.com/Neo_Vinter/status/1362583138199891970

Strap in because this is going to be fucking long, as the moral panic is the result of several converging threads, and is kind of hard to untangle, but I hope you can bear with me. Also, mind some LARPy terminology, that’s just how my brain works in terms of labeling things.

The underlying factor in all of this is, of course, the personal disgust most “normal” people have around weird sex stuff. This is totally understandable, but for most people who see some weird or taboo or bizarre fetish, they’ll just say “ew, gross” and move on with their day

ignoring it and not actively seeking it out. It takes external factors to, so to speak, “activate” this personal disgust in order to turn someone into a crusader against “anime pedophilia” (loli/shota, sexualized “underage” characters, etc.)--

-- instead of simply someone who goes “oh, I don’t want to see that, I’ll ignore it”.

So how does this personal disgust become “activated”? Well, this is significantly harder to explain.

First, it’s helpful to think of two main categories of people involved in the moral panic — the “pushers”, people with large audiences online (ecelebs) who “recruit“ people into the moral panic--

-- and the “rank and file”, the endless fucking hordes of hundreds of thousands of people who make up the bulk of the outrage mobs. You can further break up the “rank and file” into two groups — the group I like to call the “fandom teens”--

--left-leaning teenagers (sometimes extending into their early 20s) mostly hanging out in online fandom subcultures

and “radicalized normies”, people who have no real connection to niche Japanese media, anime, or any of this stuff, but have been “radicalized” by one of the “pushers” into the moral panic.

At this point, a lot of the mobs full of “fandom teens” and “radicalized normies” are essentially self-sustaining and don’t need an eceleb to kick them off, but these mobs are at their root “spawned“ by the pushers to begin with, and the “pushers”--

--are still a major factor in why they keep growing in size.

With this out of the way, I can try and explain where the moral panic originates.

Among both the pushers and the rank and file, the simplest contributing factor is an existing widespread and constant moral panic about pedophilia in Anglo-American society, outside of this stuff. The Satanic Panic, Stranger Danger, QAnon, etc.

Recently this has been empowered further by the MeToo movement exposing predators in Hollywood, the Jeffrey Epstein elite sex ring, and other genuine cases of pervasive sexual abuse in society.

When the public is afraid of pedophiles lurking around every corner, they start hunting for them everywhere, and anything that even smells of pedophilia sets off their “radar”. Of course stuff like the lolicon fetish and the related “problem” of “underage” anime characters--

--is going to set this "radar" off.

However, it’s MUCH more complex than just an existing pedophilia panic happening upon a fetish for anime characters with childlike aspects. The moral panic’s roots are a lot stranger and more specific.

Let’s start with what created most of the “pushers”. The vast majority of “pushers” originate either from Something Awful or communities that are similar or adjacent to it.

A ton of breadtubers were goons, a lot of the reddit “power mods” who are against it (and there are a fuckton of these for some reason) came from SA, most if not all of the Chapo-style podcasters either directly came from SA or were heavily influenced by goon culture.

The ecelebs/“pushers” who aren’t goons — your twitter gimmick account dipshits, your gaming youtubers, etc., they simply got “recruited” by the goons and others of that mindset in the same way that the “rank and file” get “recruited”.

So why are goons into this shit? Well, it’s because the kind of “cringe culture” that used to be quite common on places like SA, parts of 4chan and reddit, the “lolcow” community around individuals like Chris-Chan, etc. in the 2000s and early 2010s is kind of old hat now--

--mostly only surviving on sites like Kiwi Farms that are no longer in the online cultural mainstream. This “cringe culture” no longer being “cool” has led to a lot of individuals who spent years marinating their brains in communities purely dedicated to obsessing over people--

--and things they found disgusting or repulsive (with a particular interest in unusual hobbies and sexual fetishes) continuing this obsession, but having to find new ways to express it.

This has had the largest effect when it comes to SA goons — they spent years being against all sorts of weird sex stuff, especially furry porn but all anime stuff too, purely because it was “cringe“ and unusual--

--but in the early 2010s, SA’s culture verged hard into a “woke”/cultural-left mindset. Many goons needed to find a new outlet for their revulsion towards unusual sexual fetishes, and so they went from the schoolyard-bully view that weird anime porn was merely gross and “cringe”

to the moralistic outrage towards its existence we see now.

It goes deeper than that, though. Most of these goons, as I said, used to be against ANY sort of weird sex — and their main target was always furries, not anime fans or lolicons specifically.

Why did they become so laser-focused against anime? Simple. Thanks mostly to 4chan, there’s a strong association between anime (and specifically moe and lolicon) with the far right and right wing in general. The reason that these goons are so against lolicon and anime writ large

while giving furry porn, vore, BDSM, and even other “””pedophilia””” fetishes like DDLG is because they perceive loli as a “right wing” thing in terms of online subcultures. If lolicon and anime in general were perceived online as “left wing”--

-- there probably wouldn’t be a moral panic to begin with. I’ve written about this phenomenon a lot more extensively elsewhere, so I’ll just link my thread on the topic: https://twitter.com/soarel325/status/1327967947575361536

Now onto the “rank and file”. I’d say there are two main threads here, one for the “fandom teens” and one for the “radicalized normies”.

For the “fandom teens”, the moral panic mostly has its roots in this idea of “fandom as activism” that was quite popular on Tumblr. A mix of half-understood academic “media studies”, a desire to turn one’s hobbies and interests into something genuinely productive--

--resulted in many of people involved in Tumblr fandom viewing politics and political activism all about “consuming the right media” and changing media to be in line with their desired political goals.

They have an obsession with the idea that “fiction affects reality” to the point where you can change reality simply by changing fiction.

(It’s a bit outside the scope of the moral panic against “anime pedophilia”, but this is also the root of the demands for censorship of sexualized or cheesecake stuff in video games).

They view everything through the lens of whether you “consume the right media”, and so to end pedophilia and sexual abuse, they feel they have to crusade against “anime pedophilia” among many other things (“problematic ships”, “fetishization”, “romanticization”, and so on).

Your typical “fandom teen” is far more neurotic and has a much larger "hit list" of weird or unusual sexual content they crusade against than your typical “radicalized normie”, who’s laser-focused against “anime pedophilia”.

And speaking of which, what about the “radicalized normies”? I think the root of their massive numbers is pretty simple.

In the 2010s, anime, manga, and niche Japanese media, beyond simply a few popular series like Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon, have become a popular, mainstream interset in the English-speaking world.

Prior to the 2010s, outside of a few “normie-friendly” series like those, niche Japanese media was something you might’ve been vaguely aware of but not really into unless you deliberately sought it out or got into it through a friend.

This method of getting in through introduction to a niche hobbyist community meant that new fans were, so to speak “inoculated” against their disgust being “activated”. They were getting into a weird thing that weird people liked--

--and they just kinda had to roll with the weird shit. Hell, they might even find out they liked it. With niche Japanese media going mainstream, though, this is no longer the case. For most young people now, their first exposure to this stuff isn’t from niche communities--

--but from the general public, so they don’t get “inoculated“ against the weird stuff. Hell, with how widespread the moral panic has become, their first introduction to anime might come through people who are already “radicalized normies”

who essentially “recruit” them into the moral panic right out the gate. It’s also worth mentioning that most “radicalized normies” are not even into anime or niche Japanese media themselves —

--they just heard their favorite eceleb (a “pusher”) or some outrage mob of other “radicalized normies” or “fandom teens” talk about what “lolicon” is and why it’s evil and dangerous and should be stamped out.

That’s why I call them “radicalized normies” — they’re not niche hobbyists and fans themselves like “fandom teens”, they’re people with no real unusual interests.

(I have written much more extensively about this “inoculation” phenomenon elsewhere, though I didn’t make a thread about it. I can elaborate further if you're curious)

On top of all this, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of the people getting into this stuff — especially the “radicalized normies” — are completely clueless about what they’re raging against.

The moral panic is laser-focused against “lolicon”, but most of the people involved don’t actually know what lolicon even is and what actually defines it. A lot of them they think it’s about character “age“, but also understand that it’s a visual thing

(mostly from their awareness of the lolibaba trope), so they often do bizarre things such as posting memes about how loli characters “look like a child” underneath outrage posts about regular anime girls with huge breasts that are “underage” in-story.

It’s also worth noting for the “pushers” that character-age obsession is a very easy way to put their hatred of any and all sexualized anime-style art into moralistic terms.

So yeah. The moral panic’s roots are, broadly speaking, in SA going “woke” and in Tumblr fandom coming to believe that fandom is activism. However, due to the process of “pushers radicalizing normies”, it’s expanded far, far beyond just the fandom teens and goons

and now a bunch of people who otherwise don’t even care about anime stuff have been turned into an army of rabid crusaders against “loli” — vaguely defined as it is to encompass character in-story “age”.