this blog stands with palestine and if you don’t you can get the fuck out. what israel is doing is genocide and i will not tolerate anyone who supports it.

LESS THAN THREE HOURS AGO: zionists were taunting a comrade at ucla's gaza solidarity encampment with a severe (possibly anaphylactic? with the context clues of "can go into shock" im leaning towards assuming it's anaphylactic) banana allergy by bringing bananas near the camp. i am genuinely of the belief that taunting someone with anaphylaxis like this should be considered attempted murder. this is fucking evil.

that was actually also ucla 🫠

two nights ago/the early morning of the 29th, zionist counter protesters did in fact release mice near the encampment. its claimed that the mice had been injected with something, i dont personally know how true those claims are, but regardless live mice were still released which is cruel and inhumane in its own right. i also saw a report of cockroaches being released last night, but i haven't seen a videos of that yet. i wouldn't put it past the ucla counter protesters though, theyve already proven to not care about seemingly any life, these creatures (and a comrades dangerous allergy) are just tools to them, everything they do seems like some attempt to "get back" at people who just want the genocide to end. these people are fucking cruel to their cores.

i also wanna mention some other particularly vile things zionist counter protesters at ucla have done, in recent days they have: called our comrades animals + said "go listen to your master", said they should "go to palestine" + "i hope they rape you", and even spit on our comrades + called them the n word. all of these things were caught on video. (all links lead to tweets with the videos of each incident.)

VERTIN twt layouts @autibf

A video analysis analyzing the difference between a dog joining a cat, and a cat joining a dog.

(via elphaba16)

Love that you can see the exact moment that Enlightenment™ occurs for this little dude. Good job, you did it.

Right there

like, i’m not saying that adults don’t have a place in fandom. they can and they do, and many are perfectly great people.

but if you’re an adult, say, in your mid to late 20s or older, especially if you’re in a fandom that’s filled mostly with teenagers, you do need to be careful about how you interact with young people in fandom.

you need to be careful about the content you produce or share, and if you do something that people take issue with, you need to be prepared to address that in an honest and meaningful way, instead of blocking the young people who are telling you you’ve done something wrong and going on a rant about how “it’s just fiction” and “ship and let ship” and “do whatever you want” and “i’m too old for this.”

if you’re an adult in fandom, you need to be able to recognize how the content you produce might affect young people, and honestly, you should be able to show maturity when dealing with it, because you are still an adult talking to many people who are literal children.

many of those young people will, by default, view you as a sort of authority figure based on your age alone, as that’s what they’re used to. be careful of the lessons you teach them.

Hm. Okay. Here’s the thing.

We all know who you’re talking about and which situations you’re talking about. What you really have an issue with isn’t anything to do with anyone’s age, it’s about people producing things that other people find hurtful, then not responding the way the hurt people would like them to when called out on it. That can and does happen anywhere, regardless of the ages of the people involved. It’s a separate issue that should be discussed and dealt with.

And yes, in some of those recent situations, the ages of the offenders or the offended were brought into the discussion, by both sides at different times. The age difference does complicate things, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the main issue.

You may be thinking “why do you care if I focus on age, it was a salient part of the argument for me, you’re trying to defend adults who don’t care how their words hurt children!” But here’s the thing.

You may not realize this, but in other fandoms adults have been doxxed, have been threatened, have been outed because they were creating things that someone, somewhere deemed “dangerous for minors.” 

Adults who were creating things that were not meant for minors, that were openly and blatantly tagged as being NSFW, explicit, as containing triggering material. I’ve even seen people who weren’t even creating the offending material being harassed, bullied, and threatened, for daring to stand up for the people who were. Not even just online, but in person. I’ve been a victim of it myself, though not to the extent that I’ve seen many others go through.

All because a segment of the fandom decided that because certain content could be dangerous for minors, it should never, ever be posted anywhere a minor might possibly read it. Adults who do post it are responsible for every bad effect it could possibly have on anyone who reads it and are horrible people for not willingly taking on that responsibility.

I know the situations you’re talking about are different. In many of those situations, adults chose to interact with the minors who were complaining about them, and yeah, when you’re choosing to directly interact with a minor you need to tread carefully. 

But once you go down the “adults in fandom are responsible for the minors in fandom” road, if lots of people start clinging to that mindset, that is where it can lead. And that is an extremely serious issue. It can literally destroy careers and ruin lives.

I am not in this or any other fandom to produce content for minors. I have asked many times for minors not to follow me; I don’t block them, but I know quite a few people who block any minor who follows them. I produce enough SFW content that I don’t mind minors being able to, say, reblog it from others on their dash, but I do not want them following me and getting explicit content directly from me, full stop. If it becomes an issue, I will start blocking people.

If you’re a minor, I’m old enough to be your mother. But I’ve got my own kid, and I’m not in fandom to babysit anyone else. When I create or reblog content, I do not and will not take the presence of minors into account when doing so. Because that is not my job. 

Now, right now I’m choosing to get involved in this discussion, which will involve people much younger than me, including minors. So yeah, I’m being careful about what I say and how I say it. And I agree that any adult who willingly engages in conversation with minors needs to do the same.

But I simply can’t agree with your last two paragraphs. Those “literal children” already have parents. If their own parents aren’t monitoring what media they consume, aren’t having conversations with them about problematic messages in media, it certainly isn’t my job to do so. Period. 

This is an excellent time for teens in fandom (and in general) to stop seeing every adult they come in contact with as an “authority figure” and start viewing us as human beings who are living our own lives with our own motivations, problems, desires, and inclinations that have nothing to do with them. That’s something that will serve them well in life.

How people interact with oppressed groups they aren’t a part of who complain about their representation of those oppressed groups is an entirely separate issue that is not about the age of the people on either side. Age can complicate it, especially in that it can be difficult to communicate across a generation gap when people on either side have such enormously different experiences. I think that that has caused some problems.

But any adult who is not willingly choosing to interact with a minor is not responsible for minors who consume their content, and conflating the two issues is downright dangerous.

@porcupine-girl nailed it 100% but this especially bears repeating:

This is an excellent time for teens in fandom (and in general) to stopseeing every adult they come in contact with as an “authority figure” and start viewing us as human beings who are living our own lives with our own motivations, problems, desires, and inclinations that have nothing to do with them. That’s something that will serve them well in life.

Fandom is a good way for teenagers to learn how to interact with people in different age groups as peers. Because that’s what we are, we are fandom peers posting on the same web sites and obsessing over the same shows and  no one in fandom has any authority over anyone else (no matter how much some people might try to claim it). I am not your teacher, your parent, your babysitter, or anyone in any position of authority over you or anyone with a responsibility for taking care of you. Nor am I willing to take on that role. The vast majority of the billions of adults in the world fit that description. Only a very few, ones you know in real life, are responsible for you personally - and soon that number will be none as you become an adult yourself.

I block anyone with an age under 18 listed in their profile if they try to follow me - not with any animosity, I’m just not interested in interacting with kids on a fandom level. This is a completely valid option and I think it’s a wise one. 

Plus the original post here is predicated on the assumption that fandom belongs to people in their early 20s and younger and the rest of us are just hangers on. Sorry baby, look at the demographics; you’re the minority. We’re not in your house. I, for one, am happy to interact with anyone I have interests in common with and bond over those interests; I think people of all ages have exciting perspectives and interesting minds. But I don’t want to be treated like a second class citizen by anyone, and as said above, I am interested in interacting AS PEERS ONLY. I ain’t your mommy and I have enough people IRL trying to leech emotional labor off me, I got none for strangers on the internet.

I have watched my friends raise their kids in fandom. Literally. Raise. Their. Kids. I’ve watched young things I met carried in arms toddle, walk, run, be 8, 18, 28, marry, come to a convention carrying young things in their arms.

It was assumed that everyone who knew the parent would keep a vague eye on the child because friends don’t let friends’ little ones run into traffic. But at NO POINT was it ever assumed or expressed that the adult fans had to stop being adult fans talking about adult things. If a minor walked into the “How to write explicit bondage” panel, then someone gently suggested that this was not the place for the kid to be. If the kid found the dick pics in the art show, they were told “go ask Mommy what ‘slash’ means.”

I get that the OP wants to protect children, but while it’s my job to make sure someone too little to take care of themselves doesn’t get hurt, it has NEVER, through three generations of fandom, been my job to be anyone’s actual parent or to stop adulting around adults.

Oh, and the line “I’m not saying adults don’t have a place in fandom; they can and they do” - that line? Child, ADULTS BUILT FANDOM. We created the cons and the fanzines and the webrings and the clubs and the fan sites and the VCR tape swaps and the letter writing campaigns and the podcasts. We maintain the fan sites and the fic repositories and the conventions and the rest. Did you think those things just spontaneously evolved? Fuckin’ A we have a place in the culture that we built!

If you’re old enough to be online unsupervised you’re also old enough to police your own fandom experience. Head the tags and warnings, that’s what they are there for.

Also, to be blunt, I am not responsible for anyone’s children. Full stop.

The focus on age in fandom is a new and a little perplexing thing to me. Back in my day it was shoved into the background as much as possible; the young ones like me wanted to pretend we were totally super adult and mature and could handle any discussion (I just wanted to talk to other X-Philes without being instantly recognised as “the kid”), and older fans didn’t want to explain that the reason their kinkfic update was late was that their kid had a stomach ache. Fandom was an escapist space, so real life only entered into the picture once you became actual friends with someone. At that point you might get the “whoa, you’re only 15? But you’ve read my kink fic!” reactions – but these were mostly in private messages and emails. Because fandom as a whole didn’t need to know everyone’s ages. I don’t recall ever once stumbling accidentally on something age-inappropriate in fandom. When I entered a fic archive and read the descriptions for fics, even back in 1998 when “tags” weren’t a thing, I could always tell which ones had mature content. When I read porny or violent fic as a minor, I did so fully aware that I had made that decision myself. It would never have occurred to me to blame the writer – in fact, some of them were probably minors too and pretending themselves. This approach didn’t do me any harm. I daresay it taught me a few things about personal responsibility. In fandom, we were all just fans together; that was what I loved about it.

Now that I am An Old I do like to talk about it and joke about it occasionally, because what, I’m supposed to let all this perspective go to waste? But I still don’t assume I know anyone’s age in fandom. If we know each other in online fandom I’ll treat you with respect and make sure you’ll know what you’ll get if you read my fic. That’s all the “maturity” you’re going to get from me. I’m not the nurturing, parental type in real life and I’m certainly not going to bend myself backwards to be the perfect adult role model and fandom mother to random people I don’t know when I’m here for fun escapist things. If you learn something from me, great! I’d love to learn something from you, too! But I will never accept that as my literal responsibility as an adult in online fandom spaces. Baby-sitters get paid, parents choose to become parents. I’m not here to be either.

I read my first lemon fic at age 12. This was in an archive that was hidden from the rest of the website - no links from the main pages, which were strictly policed on ratings - you had to enter the URL straight into the URL bar to get there. I found it because I was deliberately looking for it. Because I had just hit puberty and wanted to explore the feelings I was experiencing. *I* chose to find these fics and read them. And that’s how it was the entire time I was in fandom as a minor, all six years. Everything was tagged, labeled, disclaimered, and warned within an inch of its life, which I appreciated, because it meant I could find what I wanted when I wanted it. And as an adolescent, what I wanted was porn.

Thing is, I was raised in a conservative Christian household. I know what purity culture looks like, and a huge part of it is controlling the children. Every teen self-help book basically assumed teenagers were helpless lust monsters who had to be protected and sheltered and flagellated with guilt to prevent them from committing sin. Moral panics every other week over what the precious children had been exposed to, while I and the other minors in fandom laughed at the adults for not realizing that their children had already been exposed in years before, and we were fine. The only thing it all taught me was a fuckload of guilt about sex (which I still resent) and also the computer skills to get around every restriction set by the adults, because guess what? Teenagers. Are. People.

70% of the reason why I was in fandom at all was because nobody treated me like a puling infant. Now I’m on the other side, and it’s the same. I follow fandom etiquette on tagging and titling things, and the rest is up to you. I am not your babysitter.

THIS.  Every flavor of this.  It’s baffling to me how the focus on age has come about.  When I was first entering internet fandom, I tried to lie about or completely ignore my age as much as possible.  I wanted to come off as someone far older than I was, someone with experience and knowledge and interesting contributions.  I didn’t want to be defined by ANYTHING but my words and deeds.  The internet felt like this utopian space to me back then, where I could be anyone and anything I wanted.  I was a mind, divorced of physical trappings like age.  I was just me.

It was in that way I found my earliest fandoms.  I joined Yahoo groups and applied for membership on Geocities websites so I could start posting my fic.  I remember digging through the website ‘rings’ back then, which all linked to one another to create a sense of unified fandom back before larger platforms existed.  Not all of them ended up being to my taste, but I got a good sense of where people were at in the fandom and found some great like-minded fellow fans.  I knew nothing about them except that we liked the same thing and had great conversations, and that was how I preferred it.

It was from those sites and that sense of community that modern fandom was built.  The notion that younger fans must be protected or sheltered is frankly impossible and counterproductive.  It speaks of an eschewing of personal responsibility that I dislike.  I am all for tagging appropriately, and being responsive to those who request a specific tag in your material so they can better screen their own experience.  That’s just common courtesy.  But the idea that we must not post materials “because of the children” strikes me the same way all such movements have struck me through the years: simultaneously deeply underestimating the understanding and capability of young people, and seeking to divide fandom at a time when we really don’t need that.  We are all fans.  Older fans have experiences in fandom that can be fantastic, and younger fans have fresh new perspectives.  Fans of all ages create a thriving fandom, and gatekeeping anyone discounts their experiences and perspectives.

Be clear in your tags, and police your own experience.  The greatest thing anyone can do in fandom or elsewhere is to take control of their own life.  Even when you’re a young teen, take as much control as you can.  Establish your own boundaries and your own perspectives, while still remaining flexible.  Respect everyone around you, because they can all add to your experiences.  Seek out what interests you and figure out what you don’t want to see and be certain to block it appropriately.  Tumblr Savior and XKit are both useful.

Basically, the internet is vast and we all have our own lives to live.  You set up your own corner of it, and you tend it yourself.  You choose who you follow and what tags you block.  You live your life, and take control over your own fandom experience.

Ferret shows the owner her babies.

I’m straight up CRYING

The person who commented “sounds like a bunch of kazoos having a panic attack” made me laugh out loud :D

Oh? It’s naptime? Okay.

IMPORTANT

Since you guys like the last manga coloring so much! I made one of Ruggie 🫶

a renaissance lookbook

i feel like we don’t talk about things like this enough

I’m over here like “ooooh!” “Aaaaah” 😂😂😂 everything is so beautiful!!

land of contracts