Whenever I see an anti make the typical comment of how “pedophilic” certain content is or that this content (like lolicon is “CP” when really these people are watering down what “CP” actually is) the best way to argue against it is, “you can walk into a Barnes and Noble or go on their website easily and purchase books like Lolita.”
if pro-censorship fans were in the habit of going into bookstores or libraries, or hell–the amazon kindle marketplace– and looking at the content that’s available there, they would perhaps for a moment at least give pause to wonder if they were the ones in the wrong.
The type of content available in fanfiction, whether violent in nature, sexual in nature, etc, is not wildly different than what’s been written about in other formats a million times before by a million authors in history.
Heaven forfend if they ever stumble across Bear, or an Anne Rice novel.
But if you try to point that out they’ll start moving the goalposts about how those books don’t “romantize” or “glorify” or “normalize” the problematic themes contained in them.
Of course they’ve never read either the fics they’re complaining about(just saw the tags and made assumptions) or the books with the same type of content. So they can’t explain the actual difference between the horrible fanfics which should be(but aren’t) illegal, and these apparently okay to exist books.
Really it’s just a matter of antis being conservative bullies and cowards. So they target people they think will be weak targets to bully and establish control over. Fanfic writers are appealing targets because they’re more accessible than most book authors, and the perception of fanfic writers being younger and more vulnerable to criticism.
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