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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Again, mu?

You've talked about several artists by name. I believe zaush(?) was one, but if you really want to make me dig I can find it for you. Just thought you'd be willing to come out and say it because you were so forthright about it before.

For Adam Wan/Zaush specifically, my complaint about his content was that he'd posted stuff on a (few) sites that prohibited that content, while not tagging it with any of the many widely-recognized terms used by people who really strongly objected to seeing that content, denied it was anywhere close while being even less believable than the typical 'she's really a thousand-year-old dragon', and which he mostly got away with because of his social connections and popularity. Which, to be fair, he's since gotten a lot better about, albeit as much because no one was buying it after some tweet oopsies.

I've generally been vague on the specifics for this matter outside of PM because the specifics aren't as interesting as the more general problem of how rules squish, but I do think it a useful case because it's one most people would expect social and legal rules to be much stricter.

I recognize that tagging has some coercive nature to it, but I don't think it's on the same scale as... almost anything else, and it is a pretty important social norm for the fandom. I'll admit I'm tempted to make an unprincipled exception for the specific content for that case because I dislike it to an extent I do few if any other kinks, but it remains useful even for matters like m/m, m/f, f/f or kinks that I do like.

I'm not sure what other artists. The only other person I can remember mentioning in that sorta context is (the author) KyellGold, but then only to contrast with the largely positive coverage that 'mainstream' indie works like Blue Is The Warmest Colour (and it's a far more marginal case than that work). And... uh, I found that offputting enough to skip over Aquifiers, but I've recommended a number of KyellGold's other works.

But I may be forgetting other stuff.

At the broader object level, there probably was (and is) some underlying pressure campaign behind FurAffinity banning the stuff to start with, especially given SoFurry's recorded legal pressures and the Google pressures applied against Gelbooru (and probably e621?), and I've not posted on it where I've done so for AI art restrictions here (albeit for much more than one site) or even smaller examples like the short VioletBlue delisting. Some of the reason's the above unprincipled exception, I'll admit, but some of that's because there was not (to my knowledge) anything as glaring and public as the Eshoo letter, and some's just that FurAffinity in specific made the change predating the Culture War Roundup and either predated or was pretty early in SSC-reddit's life.

I don't think places focused on the stuff (or just widely permissive for it) should be banned, could be banned, or should suffer several coercive or economic pressures; art isn't life. I've openly praised ArchiveOfOurOwn for resisting censorship, for example. And at a pragmatic level, as much as I dislike this class of content, it does seem better that outlets exist and are well-demarcated, both for the trivial benefit of letting people not see it, and for the more serious and important goal of keeping people focused on it in a sphere that can work to protect minors from adults rather than 'protect' people from content (contrast eg Discord, where official bans also unintentionally make it hard to block predators or their potential victims, or... everything going with Twitter's old safety policies).

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