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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Hm. I don't have time to touch on the deeper matters tonight -- and there's a lot to be explored in "sex makes everyone see like an artist does"! -- but the example of Zootopia porn is kinda interesting. There's definitely a lot of stuff in that genre that's either only 'fulfilling' in the sense of needing to wash your hands afterwards, or somewhere between junk food or lead paint chips, but there's also stories and artwork that are decently emotionally impactful, either to strong ends (eg RobCiveCat's work) or at least traumatic ones (eg Amadose's Cucking Comic).

I don't want to overstate that. The_Weaver's Pack Street series is a great example of Zootopia work, if not specifically Hopps-focused, and one that players heavily on tension (if more in the social or hubris senses than conventional horror), but is less masterpiece and more 'pretty decent fable under the porn'. For non-Zootopia works, Meesh's Little Buddy, Rund and McKinley's Associated Student Bodies, and a lot of Kyell Gold's work is porn, sometimes even to its detriment (ie a college gym shower scene that's just gratuitous), but also was helpful for a lot of people trying to get a grasp on their own interests and how they wanted to relate to others. I think I've mentioned tatsuchan18's S4S here before, but I still think it's one of the better illustrations of what certain types of submission are about, wedged into a bunch of incredibly unrealistic full-time-slave fantasy.

It's not some uranium-level enrichment, but neither is it just holes-and-poles. Won’t be something that's going to be impactful and resonant for everyone, but having the filters baked in on that isn't exactly a bad thing: contrast Catcher In The Rye for a mainstream and mostly-school-appropriate work that falters because it isn't 'for' most of its typical audience.

((M/m or f/f incest remains with some level of taboo, if you want to near-completely remove genetic health concerns, even in the furry fandom... though there's also a lot of people still focusing on it prominently. Not my kink, but no few of them are writers or artists I otherwise like. Which at first sounds like it would not be denying the 'fails to enrich culture' bit, but I'm... not sure that's true, even there, at least universally: ItTastesLikeGreen's non-incest works are unusually people-focused in a way that makes me expect at least some of his incest ones are, too.))

There's a tension where, sure, human-lead artwork can have these deeper themes and meanings, but MLgen does not. That's... mostly true, at least for now; there's only a tiny handful of AI-assisted works with prolonged content and context, rather than just pinup, and much of that content is added by humans in post. It can, contra greyenlightenment, exist for shock value as much or more than gratification, sometimes relatively subtle and non-pornographic shock value, or to communicate other messages, but a lot of it's just pinup level. I'm not sure that reflects an innate incapability, though, so much as limitations of the tools and most people just not wanting to say that much that deep.

There's the escape clause where at least some prurient content is detracting from human culture, and that's probably true under most definitions of the common good -- I don't trust most arguments about fantasy kink tricking or forcing people into real-world bad action, but there's at least some media both pornographic and otherwise that's simply filled with "hey kids try this at home"-level bad advice, and some ugly even more complicated cases. But in turn that's true about wide swathes of content, to such an extent that it provides little meaningful guidance. It's not like the contentless wolfman pinups are less related to some attempts are more engaging adult works than the contentless still lifes are from engaging conventional paintings.