marshemillow:

I sincerely doubt it, but I understand the worry.

Here’s the thing; Old conservative Jack Thompson types are so much more influential than these internet harpies. They’ve been campaigning to make violent video games and other fictional content illegal for a long time, from the Satanic panic of the 80s, to concern about kids playing Mortal Combat and being scarred for life, to modern day conversations about shows like Euphoria, a live action show that sexualizes its characters who are supposed to be underage but are played by adult actors, and the ways in which those might be normalizing seeing real minors as sexual objects (which I won’t comment on here, but it is an interesting conversation).

But, despite how old this conversation is, metal bands, Euphoria, and violent video games are all still protected under freedom of expression under the law. At least in the US. I suppose I can’t comment on how other countries have it, but my impression is that most developed nations have at least basic freedom to fiction.

Even under apocalyptic circumstances, the realistic worst-case scenario does not lead to one where antis win. If not even the most influential Catholic boot-licking bible-thumpers can stop GTA from flying off shelves, then some snot-nosed little brats that have nothing better to do than send death threats to people with hobbies anonymously on the internet certainly can’t do anything about freedom of expression. By the time they’re even old enough to campaign for making things like lolisho illegal, they’ll have likely grown out of this pointless game and have moved on to living their own lives with their own real-world concerns.

And for the people who are already old enough to do that and are still antis…well, I hope we’ve already established that they’re the ones who are already secretly breaking the law behind closed doors (harassment is illegal after all, but that hasn’t stopped them). Most of them have no interest in actually making a difference, they just want a steady influx of victims, which they already have under the current state of the antishipping movement.

Now, the law is not perfect, and we still have a long way to go in removing the damage done to art and communities from the Hayes Code and general evangelical censorship. That’s why shows like Steven Universe can be cut short for being “too gay for kids”, but that’s a slightly different conversation.

So if you’re actually afraid of fiction becoming illegal under the law, then I’ll be the first to tell you that that is highly unlikely. Not completely impossible, but certainly not anything worth worrying about. That’s why I advocate for proship ideals on tumblr and not like, in the senate. I just want to stop seeing people get harassed in my favorite hobby. They’re personal reasons, you know?

In terms of the real law, we have much bigger things to worry about.