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Followup to suspension
2 years ago
So the order of events went something like this:
I got some hate replies to a comment I made on a 7 year old picture Foshu did. A lot of people were angry about a child prey pic. I put in a trouble ticket because the Twitter raid that hit Foshu was instigated by someone with an FA account. Instigating a raid seems like something that should be against the rules. (It's against the rules on 4chan. 4CHAN.)
In the course of this I heard about the new rule put up on January 3rd. "Minors will not be fetishized." This is pretty unclear so I put in a trouble ticket asking for a rules clarification. I was at Further Confusion at the time and going through my whole gallery looking for possible problems on my phone wasn't going to happen.
I previously assumed that as long as a minor wasn't having sex or near sex all was well. I got a previous suspension because the word "young" appeared once in a story which later on had sex. The young character wasn't involved in the sex, by the way. They had been eaten long before that happened.
While I was waiting for a response on the rules clarification I got suspended.
I put in two appeals, not asking for a relief from the suspension but asking for relief from the strike against my account as it was due to a new rule being applied retroactively.
I took a screen shot of my FA front page to get an idea of what was removed. Eventually I got a reply to my second appeal, which said many of the pictures removed were removed in error as there was no sexual content. The ones removed in error were restored, I was told. 13 were still removed due to sexual content and the strike against my account remained for this reason. I was not told which these were despite asking this question.
Yesterday my suspension ran out and I was able to read the reply to my rules clarification trouble ticket. This said in so many words that any vore involving underage characters is now against the rules because vore is a fetish. This of course contradicts the reply I received to an appeal that said many submissions with my sexual content were restored.
They were not restored, by the way. Whole comics have evaporated including The Lost Ball, Sproing!, and even the wholesome Mdogo strip where he eats a kid's dog, apologizes and even gives her a tour of the camp. All the Weird Kid stories, which have no sex of any sort, got the axe. Anything with both an underage character and vore is now verboten according to at least one mod.
I'll put a link to my Eka's account on my front page here. I've been organizing my gallery there to be more like my FA one. Stuff that evaporated here will still be there.
Weirdly, stuff that is fine to post on Deviantart is now against the rules on FA now and DA bans all "adult" art.
(There were a few in my gallery that included sex with minors present if in your infinite meta knowledge you knew the age of the characters. I assumed Merida or whatever her name was in Brave was an adult but apparently the mods knew better. The rule of thumb now is no minors and nothing that can be perceived as a minor.)
The upshot of all this is that the mods on FA are obviously not talking to each other and no overarching rule is in place about this whole troublesome underage vore thing. One mod says it's never allowed and another says it's fine as long as there is no sexual content. And the fact that they haven't restored the ones I was told were A-OK means they can't be trusted to follow their own internal rulings either. Or maybe they are just overworked. The result is the same.
The extremely poor moderation regarding this new rule has caused me to lose all trust in FA. I had a trouble ticket in asking for a rules clarification. I was paying attention and was perfectly ready to remove any problem content once I was told what that was. Instead I got suspended and a strike against my account.
Presumably this happened because of the new Amazon affiliate ads on the site. Tumblr banned all porn a few years back to get those sweet ad dollars and lost 90% of their user base.
At this point I would not put it past FA to ban all smutty feral art, any feral/anthro or feral/human art, or just plain ban all vore. The same crowd on Twitter that attacked Foshu hates these things too and Twitter seems to be giving FA its marching orders now based on the fact that the FA guy who raided Foshu hasn't been punished in any way. They may decide something else is wrongthink and feral and vore are high on their list.
Any one of those restrictions would probably result in more bad faith retroactive strikes against accounts and probably some "We don't think you are a good fit for our community" bans as were handed out to baby fur artists when they got the axe. Strikes never go away on FA, by the way. Once you get those points on your license you are one strike away from a lost license forever.
I love FA but I've been psychologically preparing myself for a ban because the way they behaved this time makes me think they will find excuses to ban more people.
There is a saying in the military "It takes ten attaboys to make up for one ohshit" and this is a pretty big ohshit on FA's part. A lot of trust has been lost. I hope those ad dollars were worth the cost.
I got some hate replies to a comment I made on a 7 year old picture Foshu did. A lot of people were angry about a child prey pic. I put in a trouble ticket because the Twitter raid that hit Foshu was instigated by someone with an FA account. Instigating a raid seems like something that should be against the rules. (It's against the rules on 4chan. 4CHAN.)
In the course of this I heard about the new rule put up on January 3rd. "Minors will not be fetishized." This is pretty unclear so I put in a trouble ticket asking for a rules clarification. I was at Further Confusion at the time and going through my whole gallery looking for possible problems on my phone wasn't going to happen.
I previously assumed that as long as a minor wasn't having sex or near sex all was well. I got a previous suspension because the word "young" appeared once in a story which later on had sex. The young character wasn't involved in the sex, by the way. They had been eaten long before that happened.
While I was waiting for a response on the rules clarification I got suspended.
I put in two appeals, not asking for a relief from the suspension but asking for relief from the strike against my account as it was due to a new rule being applied retroactively.
I took a screen shot of my FA front page to get an idea of what was removed. Eventually I got a reply to my second appeal, which said many of the pictures removed were removed in error as there was no sexual content. The ones removed in error were restored, I was told. 13 were still removed due to sexual content and the strike against my account remained for this reason. I was not told which these were despite asking this question.
Yesterday my suspension ran out and I was able to read the reply to my rules clarification trouble ticket. This said in so many words that any vore involving underage characters is now against the rules because vore is a fetish. This of course contradicts the reply I received to an appeal that said many submissions with my sexual content were restored.
They were not restored, by the way. Whole comics have evaporated including The Lost Ball, Sproing!, and even the wholesome Mdogo strip where he eats a kid's dog, apologizes and even gives her a tour of the camp. All the Weird Kid stories, which have no sex of any sort, got the axe. Anything with both an underage character and vore is now verboten according to at least one mod.
I'll put a link to my Eka's account on my front page here. I've been organizing my gallery there to be more like my FA one. Stuff that evaporated here will still be there.
Weirdly, stuff that is fine to post on Deviantart is now against the rules on FA now and DA bans all "adult" art.
(There were a few in my gallery that included sex with minors present if in your infinite meta knowledge you knew the age of the characters. I assumed Merida or whatever her name was in Brave was an adult but apparently the mods knew better. The rule of thumb now is no minors and nothing that can be perceived as a minor.)
The upshot of all this is that the mods on FA are obviously not talking to each other and no overarching rule is in place about this whole troublesome underage vore thing. One mod says it's never allowed and another says it's fine as long as there is no sexual content. And the fact that they haven't restored the ones I was told were A-OK means they can't be trusted to follow their own internal rulings either. Or maybe they are just overworked. The result is the same.
The extremely poor moderation regarding this new rule has caused me to lose all trust in FA. I had a trouble ticket in asking for a rules clarification. I was paying attention and was perfectly ready to remove any problem content once I was told what that was. Instead I got suspended and a strike against my account.
Presumably this happened because of the new Amazon affiliate ads on the site. Tumblr banned all porn a few years back to get those sweet ad dollars and lost 90% of their user base.
At this point I would not put it past FA to ban all smutty feral art, any feral/anthro or feral/human art, or just plain ban all vore. The same crowd on Twitter that attacked Foshu hates these things too and Twitter seems to be giving FA its marching orders now based on the fact that the FA guy who raided Foshu hasn't been punished in any way. They may decide something else is wrongthink and feral and vore are high on their list.
Any one of those restrictions would probably result in more bad faith retroactive strikes against accounts and probably some "We don't think you are a good fit for our community" bans as were handed out to baby fur artists when they got the axe. Strikes never go away on FA, by the way. Once you get those points on your license you are one strike away from a lost license forever.
I love FA but I've been psychologically preparing myself for a ban because the way they behaved this time makes me think they will find excuses to ban more people.
There is a saying in the military "It takes ten attaboys to make up for one ohshit" and this is a pretty big ohshit on FA's part. A lot of trust has been lost. I hope those ad dollars were worth the cost.
Like you said, whats stopping the mods from banning vore outright?
The fact Dragoneer likes it, he said cheekily.
But yes- I've made the parallels to vore for this for a long, long time now. I don't wanna go out and eat people because I like vore- I have a conscience- and I have tried to make this argument in the broader sense when it comes to people who like minor chars.
It's far since fallen on deaf ears. I don't have as much a horse in the race given I don't actually like the stuff much, but. It's always been disturbing to me the more knee-jerk, self-righteous, and accusatory it seemed to get to someone who dared have a piece with minors.
Meanwhile Brian Griffin is 7 years old- just saying. The ninja turtles are 16- just saying. All kinds of art exists that runs afoul of its minors bar, and they have always been poor to define just what's where.
Hm...I wonder if it would be worth looking into hosting a site for such things...it seems like a mess and I know most companies are worried about "public image" but this seems like something Moonbow would be able to do eventually. in that it is promoting the general concept of ART and community...Can't offer much yet though as we'd need to build a solid foundation first and I have no idea if we would need a sub company or something...Augh it's the whole ROBLOX thing again.
Anyway that seems like a shitty way to handle the situation I'm sorry to hear that they...are less then fair...
The mods worked best when IMVU owned it, but ever since Dragoneer had his "Gotta buy it back for my pride" attack the mod teams gone back to being shit
This is very troubling for me. Understand, I have no content that exists here that flies even into the grey area- but yeah, the mods have no idea what this means, and you're right- Deviantart allows for stuff FA does not now.
That's very disturbing.
A 15 year old is giving someone footrub- that can be a fetish image! Yank it.
A 15 year old boy is dressing like a girl. Rule 63 stuff! Yank it.
See how ridiculous it can get?
(I feel like I gotta clarify though, the tumblr sex purge was because the Apple store threatened to pull the app if they didn't (again, due to kiddy porn drama). it wasn't to do with ads, tumblr ads are a joke and will hopefully stay that way lol)
Every time this kind of rules appears and gets enforced in the most arbitrary way possible, it's some kind of projection. You've probably seen it: the most vocal male feminists of Twitter tended to have an history of sexual harassment or outright rape. I wouldn't put faith in children advocates who go after drawings or stories instead of, you know, doing actual activism against children trafficking.
They keep burning fictional children of ink and paper while the very real cadavers stay hidden behind the smoke screen.
I can't even make a intelligent comment based on how the things in this journal are
And the only thing that has changed between then and now is how accessible the moderators have made themselves.
I'm genuinely starting to suspect they may have gotten rid of the message boards in preparation for these new rules -- that they knew in advance what they planned to do was bullshit so they decided to make it that much harder to call attention to what they had done and have that conversation again.
The other thing that's pretty hard to notice: How much "cub" content DID survive the purge. It's painfully obvious that most, if not all of the reports / suspensions were issued out of spite.
I share your sentiments: F.A. is not to be trusted anymore.
Frankly, I'd be very curious to see what kind of content is on the laptops of the moderators most responsible for issuing all those suspensions. The headline "QAnon arrested for child molestation" is on a permanent loop -- they're so comfortable accusing everyone of being a pedo because that's their idea of "a normal crime".
I wonder if that's also true of people who interpret everything to be pedophilia too...
That's also what makes these social media lynch mobs possible. They never face consequences for their actions, and quite often it's the victim that ends up punished. I hate, hate, HATE to give the wretched hive of scum and villainy 4chan any credit, but they know how to handle these mobs: Zero tolerance. Every participant is instabanned, and they can tell the victim from the instigators. That is the one thing that discourages mobs like this, and it's one that most server admins won't touch - when they aren't joining the mobs themselves.
Then they're all shocked that the person was corrupt, wrong, or both.
If the ban on vore entirely rumors are true, good fucking riddance. I'm not a sheep and I'm smart enough to know that talking to a wall does nothing to benefit me. Why waste my life, $, etc. supporting a toxic community when there's better places for my friends and I.
"But theres pedos on ekas" yeah statistically. Theres pedos everywhere. Yes thats bad too. Im saying some of these mods shouldn't call the kettle black.
And if your first thought upon learning that people on F.A. are knowingly falsely accusing others of committing a crime a normal person cannot even begin to fathom is "I must defend the false witnesses somehow!", you are part of the problem.
also I'm not defending anyone committing raids. (I find it funny that you apparently think leftists don't do that, even though "cancel culture" has been a phrase for a decade now, "struggle session" dates to the '70s, and "dekulakization" is almost a century old at this point. But that's neither here nor there.) I am saying that interpreting Dragoneer changing the rules to remove something he dislikes, and then his mod team fucking up the implementation and/or some trolls doing a little trolling, as a right-wing conspiracy to gas the gays is, well, a laughable conspiracy theory, and I'm laughing at you as I type this (being a right-wing gay myself).
My position is what it's always been: fragment, fracture, separation, schism. (I'm an anarchist for a reason.) If we're stuck under one roof, it's terrible, but no surprise, that an entire fandom can be destroyed by two mods having a bad day or two dozen raiders having a good one. So let's get out of it and make our own damn roofs. (Making that possible is literally my pet project, by the way. Just has a lot of work before it goes gold.)
First you said "oh, dur, you understand the concept, therefore you're just as guilty as the people who do it".
Now you are saying "oh, dur, liberals ask that we please think about what we're saying or doing, therefore they're just as bad as the people who outright ban things".
Or maybe you're trying to say "oh, dur, liberals recommend we scale back on things because they could kill us, therefore they're just as bad as the people who ban things outright because they are offended by them".
I don't need to know which is the case. Nor will I ever know, because you are a clear and obvious pathological liar.
I mentioned the trend of people who falsely accuse others of pedophilia constantly being found guilty of pedophilia, and your first impulse was to take it personally. That is all anyone needs to know about you.
well, as seriously as the situation allows, which isn't much
I think that report raiders being jackasses on the internet, and FurAffinity's mod team being—as they've always been—bad at their jobs, are examples of.... you know, internet jackassery and bureaucratic incompetence respectively, instead of the second coming of Franco or whatever apocalypse-level threat you seem to have turned it into in your head
this makes me a pathological liar who's probably a pedophile
...somehow
we're talking Timothy Dexter levels of logic here
Sorry your shit got zapped, maybe you should move to inkbunny and do whatever you want to do specifically out of spite. :)
If I could draw worth a lick and wasn't entirely dependent on other artists (who may or may not be willing to stand their ground with me) for my gallery's content, there would already be a drawing of kids seated at a table eating a traditional British steamed pudding with the title "Kids Eating Dick".
Also
>I assumed Merida or whatever her name was in Brave was an adult but apparently the mods knew better.
This...is completely stupid. Are the staff here going to research each and every single character in each and every single piece of media to make sure a character is over 18 rather than 17.5? This is an unenforceable rule. While I still disagree with it, I can see them banning characters that clearly look like children, but trying to ban characters based on canon age alone is practically impossible. A 16 year old anime chick doesn't look any different from a 23 year old anime chick.
It feels like some of the staff are moral puritans that hold impossible to follow standards. I've seen it on that hellsite Twitter. They hate lewding any character that is canon underage. They hate lewding characters that are aged up. They hate lewding characters that are "minor coded", whatever the fuck that means.
If FA keeps going down this route they are going to lose a good chunk of it's already smaller userbase.
There are a lot of furries that seem to be drawn up in yet another anti-kink crusade and now the FA moderators have joined the dogpile. Foshu was just one of many that I've seen slandered, smeared, and subject to dogpile attacks over even the most slightly controversial work. It's basically all thoughtcrime, and an excuse to get rid of people the ruling clique see as "undesirable."
A lot of folks are going to be heading for Eka's at this rate.
I wonder if this artist is involved in the shit around here as of late too.
Furries are in the most fragile of glass houses to throw stones on these kinds of issues, and they seem to have forgotten that by insulating themselves in twitter echo chambers.
Trumpeting for dictatorship in the name of freedom. An end to censorship, but remember, wrong-think will be punished harshly. A ballot with only one box to check, a freedom to do what you chose and say what you chose as long as you chose the choice assigned to you.
I wonder if these (most likely religious) crusaders realize that they'll be among the first up against the wall once their collaboration with the overthrow is complete? Promise you the moral guardians consider all furs to be evil degenerates, just as they consider all trans people, all queer (umbrella usage) people, all people who don't conform (so crossdressers/drag, etc) to be equally deserving to be stoned to death?
It's getting harder and harder and harder to give anyone the benefit of the doubt these days, we're so saturated in dogwhistling propaganda and fear mongering hate spewing narratives. Hanlon's Razor has been left on the shelf long ago, it's not a useful tool in a reactionary age seeking to drag us back to the dark ages of inquisitions and witch hunts.
I wonder if I'll be banned? I just have a few commission pieces with my cow, but I'm sure they'll find a reason.
Maybe my thoughts put to text here will be interpreted as a threat, due to dissent, and I'll be banned for hate speech? Or just dissent against the overlords? I'm sure they'll find an excuse, once moral panics graduate to social purges, it tends to be too late to stop it.
"First they came for..."
I'd already learned earlier that the same people will do whatever it takes to destroy something, even if they have absolutely nothing to gain from doing so, just as long as they know someone else wants to preserve it.
What happened here isn't exactly on the same scope as bulldozing national heritage sites or nature reserves to drill for oil that they already know is not there, but I'm sure the thought process behind it has been the same.
I have seen many people name many artists who were affected by this, and not once was it an artist I did not already recognize. They didn't go on a mass reporting spree -- didn't type "cub" or "underage" into the search bar and report every single thing they found. No, they only went after the names they recognized -- only went after the artists with large follower counts -- accounts that the largest groups of people would see the "suspended" notice and demand answers.
If anything, the fact that you and I are dissenting as we are probably means we are less likely to be reported and banned. Dissent is what they want to see.
But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop. It just means I'm shifting my focus. From the trolls and wannabe thought police who did this to the F.A. moderators who have seen this shit attempted a hundred thousand times before and "fell for it again" anyway.
"Get back in the closet or get in the oven."
And not in the fun way. Of course this is only predicated on the fact I can 'pass' as normative... there are many who either can't or won't.
personally I think the solution is separatism, rather than trying to have one monolith that Respects Free Speech As An Ideal™ b/c it turns out the ideal is fuzzy as hell
though I call myself a reactionary so what do I know
Doesn't matter who is, or even if any of them are, they're still going along with it.
I can tell you right now that my reactionary friends and I view the left as the people in power. From my perspective, this appeared to be a leftist, Dragoneer, deciding that on a personal level he doesn't like underage stuff, and then—because he sucks at running a website—botching the new rules implementation, the same way all left-managerial organizations screw over people they don't like. I'm not up in arms about it, because it seems par for the course to me. Is there something I'm missing that doesn't involve sounding like mirror universe InfoWars?
You're right; this absolutely was a raid, given how many people got targeted in the last week. And instigating a raid should absolutely be something that gets the instigators banned...but I've heard no word about that...
I also agree that the new rule was poorly written. A LOT of FA rules are, actually. Especially worse when we consider that FA staff never consider the grandfather clause; "a provision in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations while a new rule will apply to all future cases. Those exempt from the new rule are said to have grandfather rights or acquired rights, or to have been grandfathered in." If something posted USED TO be allowed, and now is NOT, I think it's fair for staff to remove said content...but not at all fair for the poster to be punished for it. Of course, FA staff do exactly this, and have for years.
The simple fact you had left concerned questions, which staff did not respond to, yet they could respond to reports made against you... Absolutely infuriating. You were already doing your due diligence and that was simply ignored.
At least you were told they made a mistake. I've gotten no response about anything that I went through, and they seem to not be apologizing to me.
The vore topic is really pissing me off. A lot of furry interests which can be both SFW and NSFW depending on context are nowadays being labeled as 'always NSFW because it's a fetish' and I just cannot disagree enough. And vore is absolutely the number one thing that people label as 'always porn' nowadays. Meanwhile, I know some asexual people who like stuff like SFW vore and actually feel super-uncomfortable at people labeling their interests as 'porn' when they have NO interest in porn. It's fucking rude and it's imposing upon people, telling them how they like what they like for them.
Thanks for sharing about the conflict between moderator statements too. What a damn mess. I lost all trust in FA 4 years ago, and somehow they dropped the bar even lower for me now.
If this is all because of Amazon ads, I'd find that darkly funny. Amazon itself is a pretty corrupt/immoral company from what I've heard...
I heard about the potential for feral bans. My IDENTITY/sona is a feral dog, so that REALLY feels like an attack on me at that point if it happens. I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that way.
And indeed, FA never forgives any sort of strikes. I've got myself into a bad position for the terrible fault of 'occasionally making a mistake' simply because I've been here since 2006 (same with you, right?). It turns out that it's pretty easy to build up a strike record over the course of 17 years if infractions never-ever fall off of your account...
So how is that Discord that's supposedly designed to replace the forums? I haven't bothered to join that as I hate entering tons of Discord servers. But it sounds like you don't get any traction on there anyways...
Shame that they're just trying to sweep this under the rug. I don't think they truly can though; the damage they did is still visible. For instance, I removed my whole gallery and explained how I did so as I don't feel safe to have any submission up given the arbitrary and unfair way things can just get reported. People are noticing my decision, so. Hopefully people making large changes to their FA accounts (or outright leaving) will garner the traction this issue needs.
1. they discuss hate from twitter all day
2. they talk with each other about how they hate this, how they hate that and even compete between each other whose hate is stronger
3. they don't listen to any arguments, no matter how smart it is, they will always answer with an insult, they will mock you, put dirty labels on you, then ban you. not a single reply explaining why they are right
hatred is a trend now, which is horrifying
people are afraid of what they don't understand, and people hate being afraid
I already kept a recent story restricted to ekas just in case this boulder -that i was unaware of prior to your recent journal- should fall on my head as well.
I hope they get their rule interpretations in order.
I'll never understand the mentality of attacking fantasy representations of things. Even the stuff you'd never want to see happen in reality. That's why it's fantasy. Better done in ink than blood. There are questions and ideas we'll all want to explore without hindrance, if only because something about it amused us... but really, really, what's the point. I assume this'll be the end of anime... don't make your characters too cute or we'll assume you're depicting a child. You got an adult who's a child at heart? Oh no you don't. And like you say, if they start chasing the bestiality angle with ferals. Well... how do we define this? Is it the bestial nature, mindlessness that's the issue, or just the physical body? If you're writing about a shapeshifter, how does that work? But I guess for this mindset, context means nothing...
Is it so wrong to just want to be left alone to my art without worrying this or that will be unacceptable tommorrow, or next week. I'm dragon mad for example. So I guess anything intimate I've ever done has been feral. Are we judging child by age or mental state, do I need to now consider whether my fifty year old dragon is technically a child by dragon standards and hence forbidden from eating anything lest it be considered fetish content? >_< Why...
As of now, I have received zero communication from the mods prior and post suspension, despite my appeal and reminders over email. Other than just copy pasting the ToS to me on my suspension notice, the one thing they had to say about the image is basically that it was 'almost vore'.
Can I use the trouble tickets to have a better chance to get in touch with the mods? Barely any response sounds better than no response at all.
Honestly I wish personal sites would make a comeback, especially for creators with niche stuff that doesn't quite fit anywhere else.
Over the years, there have been times when I got uneasy about the inclusion of child prey in some of your works, I would just freeze mid-reading and go, "Oh, no... Why did *that* have to be in here? It was looking up to be such a great story!". I'd even stopped following you at one point over that, although I still kept checking up on your works every now and then.
*Some* of the arguments used by the people defending Foshu in that huge disgusting dogpile journal I have found to be a little feeble and dishonest, I will admit -- relying on technicalities, framing vore as purely non-sexual, invoking the freedom of speech laws in the vaguest interpretation thereof, etc.
However, with all that in mind, I wanted to state the following:
The instigators of the raid on Foshu had no authority, education or honest benign intent for their actions.
Whatever they thought were doing, it was not harm prevention or community support. And that is beside the fact that *no* raids like that could have a proper justified cause, as you rightly mentioned.
Foshu's interpretation of the nature of the offending picture (that it was an inside joke not meant to be enjoyed as erotica, kinky or otherwise) was perfectly spot-on, as anyone even remotely perceptive and honest would have to agree with it.
Identifying and defining clear instances of involving and implying child characters in erotic and kink-related fiction is impossibly difficult, and coupled with the vague wording of the additions to the ToS, the window for erroneous or malicious misapplication of those rules to destroy reputations, careers and mental health of artists on this site is now wide open.
And lastly, this site, and the furry community that it services, has always been the sanctuary for a wide variety of disadvantaged, excluded and persecuted people, in many cases -- persecuted specifically on the grounds of exhibiting the "wrong" types of sexuality -- and the atmosphere of acceptance and tolerance has always been a cornerstone of this community, and even a well-intended attempt to sanitize the less savory manifestations of that diversity will inevitably grievously injure that atmosphere of trust and security.
Obviously, community self-policing need to be exercised when instances of actual harmful criminal behavior are identified, but outrage mobs trying to equate enjoying pastel-colored softcore Pokemon porn with the worst kind of real life child abuse does nothing but hamper and discredit such community efforts.
* * *
That said, I'm re-watching you as a tiny token of support. Thank you for handling this situation with utmost maturity and composure, and going through the proper channels to protect your creative works!
And I'm bitterly sorry for the despicable response you got from the FA staff despite acting reasonably.
* * *
All that aside, I wanted to thank you for that lengthy phase you've had whereby you'd started drawing and writing a lot about sea lion and leopard seal characters -- I really appreciated seeing those, and I'm sorry for never having expressed my gratitude and admiration!
The thing is we've done away with the church's flawed moral system, but we haven't gotten around to figuring out a decent secular one to replace it.
The women's right to abortion had for so long rested on one singular court case precedent, and everyone was alright with that status, until that crutch was yanked out from under the lives of millions of people.
Same thing for the drug addicts, convicts, sex workers, pornographers: as long as the social issue elicits a general "eww" response from the public, no one but dedicated interest groups examines it, and it's left on the dusty shelf until a big enough pertinent scandal comes along.
What's the society's scientific, ethical and legal stance on involving fictional minors in erotica and kink? -- "Eww!"
What about that scene in Disney's "The Jungle Book" where an adult character hypnotizes, fondles, and intends to eat a boy? As in, eat to death? -- "Oh, that's just good clean entertainment for the whole family."
Sadly, freedom of the press protects this. If they want to do this then they will. Freedom from harassment, that's the gray area that they will get into trouble for. The: "they probably won't sue you but will freak you out by threatening so you stop anyways" type of tactics that karens and kevins do that actually screws with people.
Ironically I recently scrapped my old metaverse for my writing before hearing about this and am rewriting all of it from 0. So, I don't really have much to lose now because all the stuff before the start of this month this year is archived/scraped.
I don't want and need any content with underage chars... that is a given.
And I have NO idea what exactly happend nor did I read every single word of the journal.
Also some people do not choose their words or actions wisely online. Not saying names here.
But I want to say something, and I will always stick with this opinion;
A fetish is only a fetish to someone who has that fetish.
IF you draw a picture of for example just a foot you don't have to flag it as adult artwork just because it is someones fetish.
IF you draw nothing NSFW, it is not NSFW. And eating something is NOT NSFW and never been, only in the minds of someone who has it as a fetish.
And if you feel uneasy just because someone might feel it is sexual content than this is not your fault.
Still... underage chars don't need to appear in any vore content. Out of ethical reasons and because it is someones fetish and can indeed rub people the wrong way.
What I discussed was technical reasoning.
I created vore levels in LittleBigPlanet 2, and got bit critique for pushing a fetishe on a mainly underage community of the game.
But I stuck with it and said I did not put any adult content in it. It was just a plattformer where you need to escape out of some maze like structure.
(Vore is something happening in cartoons every single day on TV, and it is not marked as adult eighter.)
And what happened? I was featured with that level in a community highlights post, and in a DLC the game makers itself made a simlar vore level.
So much for that.
Suspending you for it was over the top though.
And I bet they did not remove that flag of your acc that you been banned already and the next time you'll get a longer ban for something else vague like this.
It been like this on twitter, and sadly with the size of FA ever growing I don't see it different here, unless for example Dragoneer themselfs takes a look at it and decides.
And as a well known name like yours it might be easier to reach out than some other people who are going to be banned for things like years ago when it was allowed or what ever.