My stance on the whole hysteria that seems to have taken over my TL is that you can draw NSFW content of characters played by minors as long as it's not a realistic render of the *actor in question* (the more cartoonish / stylized / anime the art, the better).

(Hello, decades of porn of the HARRY POTTER CHARACTERS, without anyone other than conservative fundie Christians shitting themselves over it, until now).

I genuinely don't see the point of this level of hysteria over... what, three accounts?

Mass-block them, report them and be done with it. When this thing first exploded, before I looked into it, I thought there was a horde of users slobbering over the IT actors, judging by how people were screaming all over my TL.

And it's three accounts, Jesus Christ. They could've been knocked offline with a small, *focused* reporting campaign and that would've actually been useful, instead of this incoherent screaming.

Also, there's something remarkably disingenuous about presenting the situation-

-as "people who talk about 'live-action shotas' vs everyone else".

When it's more like "three creepy-ass motherfuckers who talk about 'live-action shotas' vs a group of pro-shippers knee-jerking all over the place vs others who don't understand how we're getting from-

-the *very* reasonable "don't sexualize the real underage actors who play these characters" to "you must never draw NSFW of these fictional characters even when they're not at all the likeness of who plays them."

Again, decades of Harry Potter porn?

I'll be honest, I'm disappointed, but not surprised. I've said before that emotion-based knee-jerking (the very same that dominates fanpol spaces) isn't something that pro-ship spaces are spared from and we've got very clear evidence here and now.

"Telling someone to stop sexualizing X underage actor isn't fanpol behavior."

Very true. It isn't.

But telling someone they can't draw smut of an underage live-action character even when not modeled on the underage actor's realistic appearance, *is* fanpol-typical behavior.

(Once again, the Internet is filled with visual smut / porn of the Harry Potter cast and I genuinely don't remember, in the 20+ years I've been part of online HP fandom, anyone suggesting someone was purposefully sexualizing the actors, unless they went hyper-realistic).

In the last half-hour, I've had *four* separate people admit to me in private that they agree with this whole thread and want to retweet it... but are afraid to do so. They're afraid of harassment.

Afraid of harassment from the fucking *pro-ship community.*

Doesn't it strike you as the height of hypocrisy that we're tripping all over ourselves to write "support/ex/ant/s Think about what it means when you can't speak freely in your community, for fear of harassment" and yet here we fucking are, with people afraid to retweet a thread.

And it's not even an unreasonable thread. All I want is for people to keep being able to enjoy shit like their visual HP smut, as they've always been able to, without bad-faith actors accusing them of "sexualizing Tom Felton & Daniel Radcliffe, who were Minors when they filmed!"

I've been informed of at least one person so far that pointed out some of the actions taken against the three accounts mentioned above crossed the line into outright harassment, in the style of fanpol. When this person pointed this out, they were harassed *off Twitter.*

Again, harassed off Twitter by *pro-shippers.*

Another pro-ship friend outright told me that they don't want to correct any of the purposeful distortions floating about, because they'd be accused of "supporting" those three accounts.

Tell me this isn't fanpol-typical shit.

I'm genuinely asking myself if I want to continue having anything to do with a community where a significant number of members have proven that they will 100% act the same as fanpol (knee-jerk and harass, purposefully simplify the situation to "creepers vs everyone else" etc).

The hilarious thing is that I don't even have a 'horse' in this race. I'm not really into live-actions canons, much less those with underage casts, the only significant one is HP and that one is old enough that it's not really a target for this thing.

All I want is for people to not be UNJUSTLY accused of heinous shit like sexualizing real underage people. All I want is for the pro-ship community to be *true* to its ideals, instead of defaulting to fanpol-like behavior the second it hits an *uncomfortable and nuanced topic.*