cashew | Really tired of young fans (Reply)

Was I this obnoxious when I was younger?

Recently I've been seeing some more kerfluffle about how "think of the children! one eleven!" regarding appropriate/inappropriate content in fan spaces and, well...

Firstly, never really understood American's obsession with "don't use swear words around children", because...gasp, it turns out, swearing doesn't make you a worse person. I mean, educated or not, people are gonna swear, you might as well walk your kids through the do's & don't's of swearing so they swear in a socially appropriate way.

Secondly, if reading fiction can so easily shape how we behave and think, writers would have way, way more influence. Also, there wouldn't be so many different interpretations of stories. We mostly bring our own biases and baggage into whatever we read and the writer has very little control over it. If someone takes offense at what's being written, that says more about the reader than it does about the writer.

Finally, the children should probably be supervised and studying instead of participating in fan spaces online. If someone is under 13-years-old, they really shouldn't be having unsupervised internet browsing time. Also, they should be spending most of their free time studying, learning a hobby, or reading professionally written books instead of wasting time online reading crappy fanfic. Sorry, if you're not paying attention to the way your kids are spending their time online, it's not the rest of the world's job to babysit them for you.

So, yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that I find "think of the children" argument to be pretty lacking in terms of arguing why we should warn for something.

Anyway, back to racking up words for NaNo. (I've broken 40k! Yay!)