I try to stay away from a lot of fandom discourse, but since I’ve been seeing this on my dash again and in tags, I feel the need to make a statement on this, particularly for any young fans who follow me that might get drawn into this mindset.
Stay away from purity culture. Warn your friends away from it too, if you see them starting to fall for it. It’s very easy to get drawn into it
Almost always, it starts with one of three roots, pedophilia, incest and/or abuse. Usually it’s pedophilia. Funnily enough, that’s also what congress usually uses to try to justify passing bills that undermine online privacy & security. Because it’s an easy, extreme target, and when people attempt to argue against it, it’s nice and easy to say “Oh so you like pedophilia” rather then actually engaging with their argument.
The logic goes like this, although there’s many forms of it.
- “Pedophilia is bad.” -> Obviously, you agree with this. You’re a reasonable person, and the idea that anyone would do something like that to a child is horrible. This is a normal human reaction.
- “Because pedophilia is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.” -> Here you might hesitate, but it adds up, doesn’t it? The thought of pedophilia in any context probably gives you a bad feeling, that makes you inclined to go along with this logic.
- “Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia is also bad.” -> Maybe you pause here, or maybe you don’t. But still, it adds up, it’s a very easy flow. After all, we’ve decided that that is Bad, so why would anyone Good want to create something like that?
- “Since people who create content with a fictional exploration of pedophilia are just as bad as people who engage in pedophilia in real life, it’s okay to harm them.” -> Here’s where you might pause again. The argument might not win you over entirely, you might not be willing to do harm yourself, but you may be a lot more willing to turn a blind eye to harm being done to someone. Or to consider it ‘justified’.
- The pattern now repeats for anything else that’s considered “morally impure”, and “pedophilia” is expanded and expanded, often to ridiculous points, such as merely shipping two underage characters. “Abuse” becomes any ship that the person pushing doesn’t like, for any reason. And so on and so forth.
This is the foundation of “anti” culture, and it’s important to be aware of it so you can catch this false equivocation. Fictional explorations of something, are not the same as the thing itself. Fictional explorations are fiction. The characters are not real people. There is no actual harm being done. Equating fake harm and real harm is a dangerous, slippery slope, which leads us to fundamentally flawed ideas of moral purity. It’s a form of controlling people & making them feel guilty for their very thoughts, rather than holding people accountable for their actions.
A very handy trick for when you encounter this sort of argument, is to replace whatever the selected purity term is with murder. After all, we can all agree that murder is bad, but at the same time, we understand that a murder in a book =/= a murder in real life.
Let’s see that argument again, shall we?
- “Murder is bad”
- “Because murder is bad, all fictional explorations of it must be equally bad.”
- “Anyone who creates content with a fictional exploration of murder is also bad.”
- “Since people who create fictional explorations of murder are just as bad as the people who commit murder in real life, it’s okay to harm them.”
Hopefully, it’s now easy to see why the above argument is fundamentally flawed.
Keep your eye out for purity culture in your fandom spaces, and when you see it, refuse to engage with it. Warn your friends if you see them falling into the same traps, although try to be kind about it; this is a very easy thought pattern to fall into. I don’t recommend trying to argue/debate anti’s. The attention only feeds them. Block them instead. Don’t let people control or shame you for what you create or consume, and don’t control or shame others for what they create or consume.
Also, as a note, let me be clear about something. If you are uncomfortable with any of the above discussed things, or anything in general in fiction (ie, underage ships, murder, incest, abuse, penguins, needles, etc), that’s perfectly fine (it’s also called a squick, for those that haven’t heard that term before). Absolutely control your fandom experience by blocking people, filtering tags, unfollowing, etc. However, just because you are uncomfortable with something, does not give you the right to control other people. Other people have no right to control what content you create or consume, and you have no right to do that to them either.
Okay?
Putting these here, cause Instagram scary
I'm hyperfixating on marble hornets the youtube series sm rn it's actually horrendous-
you have a whole family on stage to sing about the importance of family, to the whole of europe, and the act before you….sang about being possessed by the ghost of edgar allan poe. eurovision simply cannot be bested
eurovision is like when the answer to "gay or european" is "yes"
I love how all of them carry a completely different tone than the others
FUCK EM UP YOUR GRACE
Pop off, my liege
my favorite thing about this post is all the people who chose to use the default icon defending themselves in the notes like no stop it just put a picture up
Loving this energy
*wipes tear* they learn tumblr culture so fast . . . the spite . . . the malicious compliance of it all . . . I'm so proud
i love when random tumblr users find my blog and go through it liking and reblogging everything in a frenzy, it feels like i’ve been cultivating a nice backyard with a lovely birdbath and feeder and i’ve glanced out the window to see a bird going absolutely wild with it
I love getting a hundred notes from one person, like, hello friend thank you for appreciating my collection, enjoy your stay
✨USEFUL ART RESOURCES✨
I've been sharing some stuff I use on tt and ig so here's a compilation of it for y'all too
all except for two of these are totally free btw
happy arting 🤙🤙
all except for two
of these are totally free
btw
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Sound on for morning purrs and cuddles
trust me, when you see a dove couple doing this for half an hour without ever getting bored of each other, something in you changes fundamentally
this post has been getting notes again, so let me tell you this: whenever someone tells you something cynical and pessimistic about love, that it doesn't exist and it doesn't mean anything etc. remember that there is a mourning dove couple somewhere in the world, kissing, cuddling and raising their baby together with so much love and tenderness, and it is all a part of nature. it is all a part of our beings.
Is it just me or are the new tumblr users convinced there's a penalty of some kind for using this site like it's meant to be used?
reblogs have always been in short supply for artists, sadly, but it's hitting the shitposts and even the cat pictures lately. Gotta keep getting the word out that reblogs are good and keep people posting new material that will be passed around for the next 12 years
They’re used to other social media sites, where the only equivalent of reblogging is straight-up content theft; so the idea that you can put someone else’s stuff on your page and have it not be a bad thing is a strange experience for them.
They’re likely also used to an algorithm recommending content based on what they hit “like” on, so they probably think that that’s how this works, too.
reblog to kill god faster
kill it, kil it whith fiar
an important addition
creacher
Important if your in an abusive situation you can turn off this alarm
Please reblog to spread awareness
This is money cat. He only appears every 1,383,986,917,198,001 posts. If you repost this in 30 seconds he will bring u good wealth and fortune.
how are we falling for this anyway reblog
I mean it’s a cat
Wors case scenario: cat
[image: a dark gray cat loafing with a US twenty-dollar bill on his head and another couple hundred dollars spread in front of him.]
Funny to me to think about the whole "oh you say you don't like <insert website> but you'll gladly reblog content FROM <insert website>" as like... trade exports between nations that all a little bit don't like each other.
"Come try these grapes. They're from Tiktok." "OH Tiktok? Wonderful. They grow the best grapes. We just don't have the right terrain for them here." "I agree. Lovely grapes. Wretched country though, I'd never live there." "Oh me neither. They cancel their peasants in the town square. Speaking of, have you seen the new textiles boypussydilf is selling in the town square? Imported from Instagram!" "Oh amazing textiles, Instagram has. Wretched country though." "Absolutely wretched."




















