the message in the bottle is the booze

Sometimes I am just baffled by Tumbr discourse. There are legitimately people arguing that it's pedophilia to write porn about characters that have been aged up:

Cept they’re still a child. You’ve just imagined what they’d be like older so it ain’t technically illegal. Let me ask, why age up a child to get off to em if you don’t want to fuck the child? Wouldn’t it make more sense if that wasn’t the case to just do that shit with an adult character? But no, for SOME ODD REASON you take a child and imagine them as older. Really makes me think.

But like ... if you are imagining them as older ... that is the opposite pedophilia ... oof ... my head hurts.

I honestly believe that most of them are just looking to be angry and righteous about something.

And like, people respond and point out various reasons someone might do this, but I always get stuck on a particular question: Why are they assuming the author wants to fuck the characters anyway? It's such an incredibly simplistic way of seeing things. It really makes me wonder how they relate to media.

Hell, I'll use the series my icon is from as an example. The main characters are in middle school when the series starts. Friendship is a major theme and the characters form deep friendships with each other. Does this mean that Naoko Takeuchi, who was in her twenties, must have had a desire to form deep friendships with middle school girls?

Of course not, because it doesn't work that way. And it doesn't work that way when you add in sex, either.

I mean, yes, sometimes people do write erotica about characters because they think they're hot, but it's still stupid to say that they would be attracted to the character in real life. You can be attracted to the themes a character embodies, their design - all sorts of things. You don't have to be attracted to every single trait they possess.

(And in some cases that would be impossible; age in particular is often contradictory, since characters often have stated ages that don't mesh well with their activities or their looks. So are you attracted to the number or to the adult actor who's playing them?)

It's just fundamentalist thinking, to see things in such a direct, and literal way - and refuse to see them in any other way.

I can rant all day about how Tumblr ruined fandom, but right now I'm annoyed at a specific thing:

People misusing tags to get attention for their stupid, uninteresting blogs.

I'm talking about when someone posts a vague "AU idea" or "imagine" that doesn't have anything to do with a particular fandom, and they tag it with every popular fandom and pairing they can think of to get the most views. For some tags I'm monitoring, there is more of this bullshit than actual relevant content.

And people like and reblog, validating the behavior. Meanwhile I'm sitting on my hands even though I just want to reply, "STOP DOING THIS, UGH YOU ARE THE WORST."

Tumblr incentivizes this bullshit because blogging on Tumblr, unless you already have a social circle, is like posting into a black hole. You have to catch the attention of people through tagging in order to build followers. And the social currency is likes and reblogs, not discussions. So you can understand why people do it.

This is one of the ways I think that the LJ model is much better. Sure, I don't have many active followers, and it's a lot slower than it was back in the glory days, but there are some people who will read this. Someone might even comment, and it will be a name I recognize, rather than an anonymous person who just like my post because it had a certain keyword in it. I don't need to collect huge numbers of notes in order to feel like I'm connecting with people.