oh my fucking god you people ned help

This obsession with finding some specific number of years that people can have between each other completely misses what predatory age gaps are.

If it's not a case of an adult preying on a child then it's not an issue.

While it's fine to be suspect of an older person dating someone who have *just become an adult*, in general, stop policing relationships between consenting adults in the firs place.

This obsession with micro-managing "acceptable" relationships in both fiction and real life in a way that completely disregards any kind of nuance is so incredibly fucking harmful.

We know what harmful relationships are and how they're formed, we have studies and data on all of that.

Someone drawing a fucking 25 year old dating a 22 year old is doing no harm.

A real 30 year old dating a 27 year old is doing no harm.

There is no nice magical cutoff.

The reason adults preying on minors is harmful in the first place is because minors can't consent and can be manipulated by adults who have more agency and influence than a minor can ever have.

Not because of a magical number.

Also, what constitutes a "harmful" relatinship is rarely something as simple as just some age gap.

You can have two people of the same age and still have a harmful power dynamic.

But nuance doesn't exist in online twitter world. Instead, everyone is either a good hearted pure person who only dates and ships people born within 24 months of each other and the rest are evil pedophiles out to destroy the world.

Man, it sure sucks how decades of detailed studies and data on how harmful relationships form just couldn't reach that simple conclusion that random twitter youths could.

Let's just toss out all the research we have, all the well documented experiences of survivors of harmful relationships, after all.

Fucking anime twitter has apparently solved it all.

Also, this idea that random ass niche fan artists have the influence to cause genuine harm by drawing possibly problematic fan art that most people won't ever see is also just ... not how ANYTHING works.

We know how media reflects reality, niche fan art is not how.

Learn to just block/blacklist and move on with your life.

Seriously.

It's not healthy to turn every single thing into a moral crusade.

There's so much fan art that I find uncomfortable and disgusting. But you don't see me trying to police and call out artists over it.

The few times I've expressed discomfort directly to an artist it has been because I knew them to some extent.

It sucks seeing things you dislike, possibly find morally repugnant, but being online means that you are responsible for your own consumption of onilne content.

Unless someone is forcing you to look at something, it's you who have to take into your own hands to keep things you don't want to see away.

Trying to police these things isn't helping anyone because all you're doing is painting targets on people.

Here's the thing.

The most repulsive offensive outright hyper-ugly problematic thing you can think of is only harmful in the form of online media if it's something being pushed into a mainstream field that in return reflects what is seen as "normal."

You actually wanna call out "harmful media" that "affects reality" like you claim?

Then you have to go for that kind of media, not nobody fan artists with tagged niche stuff.

Thankfully there are people who actually do this.

This is why Netflix' Cuties poster and description went the way it did.

The fact that Netflix got so much shit over it that it was taken down the very same day proves that the average person does not find that shit okay.

If stuff like random ass lolicon artists on pixiv were truly as harmful and influential as people claim, then the Cuties poster would have not made any kind of headlines.

But it did.

Because niche ass anime art isn't reflective of norms.

I've gone a fair bit off from the initial "age gap" thing, but it's all part of the same shit.

People who decide to do a moral crusade against something they could just block out of their spaces and no one would be harmed as a result.

Either the people who do this are terribly misguided and genuinely believe what they say, which worries me, or they know that if they frame things as a moral good vs bad they can lead a big viral online movement against it.

Regardless, it's something that is causing far more harm than the things they claim cause harm does.

People get straight up scared of just displays of sexuality or mentions of things that might have them be put in the "bad person" team.

It's literally the puritan "family values" shit conservatives pushed but in a new scary guise.

Whatever, I'm rambling.

I'm just so tired of this fake ass "moral" nonsense that hasno basis in reality.

Hey, uh, this thread was not me asking to hear about everyone's various relationships.

I'm not sure what gave off that impression.