Not sure if this is an okay place to say this, but holy shit, I just realized that the whole “Throwing around heavy terms like ‘Pedophile’ to describe ship art of things you personally don’t like,” has absolutely numbed me to any online accusations that could actually be TRUE. Like. I saw a post that goes “I am calling out blah blah for being a pedophile,” and to my horror, I immediately sighed and went “Which ship and fandom is it NOW,” before catching myself and realizing wtf I was DOING.
People– the people who are doing this unwittingly, rather than those doing it on purpose– need to realize that this is what normalization ACTUALLY is.
By throwing around accusations constantly, they are numbing people and training them to expect a certain outcome.
Normalization is about actions in the real world that affect other people, not about tropes in fiction that everyone know are stories.
this is specifically called Alarm Fatigue, by the way!
you know how when your antivirus keeps going off on some harmless programs because there’s japanese text in the files, and you KNOW it’s no big deal, and it keeps going off so eventually you start to just assume that the alarm is about those harmless programs and you stop taking it seriously, and stop watching for when it ISN’T a harmless program?
it’s the same thing here. Alarm Fatigue happens when an alarm which should normally be a cause for concern has been turned into a pointless annoyance over something that isn’t actually a problem, so you start missing the actual problems because you can’t go through a panic every single time it goes off. and the only real solution is to change the alarm to one that’s not so sensitive that it’s going off over nothing.
for the record, this is why i stick to more specific claims. “x sent creepy roleplay dms to a minor” or “y sent ‘kill yourself’ messages to someone” is more clear and immediately concerning than “x is a pedo” or “y harasses people”. and it’s also much, MUCH harder for specific accusations to get eaten up by bad actors, although not impossible(as we’ve seen with how people have fucked over the words Gaslight and Grooming).
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