everyone is always up in arms about the morality/immorality/virtuousness/wickedness of reading/writing about certain subjects but for some reason there’s never any attention paid to the morality/immorality/virtuousness/wickedness of being responsible for your own behavior and owning your own emotions. i’m really sick of the culture on here that acts like it’s some heinous crime to expect adults capable of searching out hobbyist fictional material on the internet to also be capable of monitoring their own consumption of said material and their own internet use. you used to have to wade through endless LJ/AFF.net/fandom-specific-archive/personal-geocities-page fic descriptions on the off chance of finding that rare fic you actually wanted to read. and yeah, a lot of it was disturbing, even triggering (AFF.net was a cesspool of untagged scat, rape, abuse, necro, etc), and not written well, and in poor taste. so you didn’t read it, and if you read some of it by accident you closed the tab and went outside, because you understood that by entering your birthdate at the welcome screen you were acknowledging that you were an adult who was capable of managing their own internet activity.
now a great deal of the material global fandom has produced over the last 10 years is in ONE place, with a standardized, readable format and an extensive tagging system that is wrangled/curated by fellow fan volunteers. it’s a god damn wonderland, and if you occasionally stumble upon something that wasn’t warned ‘correctly’ (because who gets to define what is sufficient or correct? who gets to decide?), and makes you feel sick, and you suffer legitimate distress from that, maybe you should reconsider whether reading hobbyist fictional material on the internet is a good choice for you.
when did it become cool to be so helpless and victimized by the mere existence of another person’s words, which are available to you at your leisure, which have nothing to do with you? whose author does not even know you exist? it indicates a serious lack of emotional resilience and boundaries, and to take your own shit out on authors is not cool, it’s not going to help you, and all it shows is that you cannot control your own behavior enough to close your browser when you know you need to. and if you cant do that, you have a problem, and should take a break from the internet.
fanfiction is free, it takes work to make, and we publish it as a favor, because we want to share it with other interested parties. the amount of entitlement and childishness around this is really stunning, and it’s not doing anyone any favors, especially people who are using social justice language to get out of working on their own emotional issues.