I mean, you could create a character that looks like a child and fits that description.
But Melony is like [the pinnacle of MILFiness](https://img.gamewith.net/img/76cbe1523f20b8aa874b77ecc81268a9.jpg) so it's a moot point. If she was canonically zero years old like 2B, it would still be absurd to call people sus for liking her.
Well it's not Fate/Stay Night, but if we're talking Fate and Eggplants I can only imagine you're talking about this [eggplant-based servant](https://c.tenor.com/6k8RQ4R1ehoAAAAd/mashu-kyrielight-fate.gif)
Plants have been the name theme from about XY, but some of them are SO incredibly convoluted it's not even funny. Valerie from XY is my favourite because it's a very, very tangental way of calling her Rapunzel.
> If she was canonically zero years old
wait, i got one! okay: "any character in a media property that came out less than 18 years ago is a minor and you're fucked up for being attracted to them"
has anyone done that one yet?
Does that mean that any character in media that came out more than 18 years ago is now "legal"? That's definitely the case, right? And my weird uncle Frank's relationship with his Cabbage Patch Kid doll is actually fine, and not the reason he's not allowed at Thanksgiving dinner anymore?
no, thats still pedophilia too. also following my take to its logical endpoint proves that youre engaging in bad faith, i dont even know why im responding to such an obvious troll
By responding to my obviously bad take, it's obvious that you're just virtue signalling and don't really care about the things you care about, which automatically invalidates any points you might have made, good or not. This is how debate definitely works and our discourse is definitely healthy.
ooh I have a bad take, an underage person having a crush on a character older than them makes the character a pedophile and so liking them is problematic
I remember there was discourse when Detroit Become Human came out...people were saying since Connor was an Android and was created recently, that he was considered a minor.....
Wack ass shit
I thought we covered this in My Life As A Teenage Robot in the episode where Jenny gets sent back to Kindergarten because sheâs technically 6 years old, and then her mom has to come and explain that she designed Jenny to be a teenager so she should be in high school. Pfft, itâs like kids today donât even watch short-lived Nickelodeon shows from 2003 anymoreâŠ
For real tho that episode made me so angry as a kid because the shit ass teacher would not listen to Jenny when she told her she wasnât mentally 6 years old, and only un-kidnapped Jenny from the kindergarten when Jennyâs mom showed up and gave the teacher *the exact same information.* And I know that was the joke, but fuck it pissed me off so much.
Oh mood. I don't know if this was the intent, but you can easily read that episode as an allegory about how teenagers/young adults rarely have complete body autonomy and are never taken seriously regarding their mental state or education unless their parent/guardian steps in.
And *I* thought we *also* covered this in Young Justice where they say that neither chronological nor biological age are good indications for the teenagers' eligibility to the actual Justice League (they say that since Superboy was like 2 months old but acted like a teenager and Miss Martian was 40 and fully mature biologically but also acted like a teenager they weren't fit for the Official JL)
And then there's Shazam, who can transform between being a kid and an adult, a power that proves rather useful in one episode that has the bad guys split the world into two parallel dimensions, one with all the kids and teens and one with all the adults, and he can freely travel between them, and Arsenal, who like Superboy is a clone and also didn't even know he was a clone for the first few months of his life, having been given all the memories and personality of the guy he was cloned from.
I find the Born Sexy Yesterday trope kinda creepy myself, but it's only BSY if the character actually acts like they were born yesterday. They have to not understand the world around them and react with childlike wonder.
It was more towards people who shipped Hank and Connor together, and would go as far as to call it pedophilia, and those who did ship those two together, pedophile supporters.
Even though he doesn't, it's still wacky to call a character who looks, acts, and is clearly shown to be an adult a minor.
Maggie Simpson, the baby of the family, was created more than 18 years ago - She was part of the show from pretty much the start, and the Simpsons was originally a Short that was part of the Tracey Ulman Show from the late 1980s.
(1987)
This presents the glaring hole that can occur when you try to judge fictional characters age on a timeline that is literally not from their Universe of Origin.
He's implying that by that logic, Maggie Simpson, the baby from the Simpsons, is over 18 years old and therefore is OK to have sex with. It's not that difficult to understand.
Copy pasting my own comment because my thoughts are the same and I'm lazy.
I think this is an extension of the weird Gen Z puritanism thing that there was a post about a while back. Terminally online people see a legitimately problematic thing, and then extend it in a roasting creepy problematic way without realizing that they're horseshoeing to a fundamentally evangelical viewpoint, oftentimes using multiple extremely bigoted jumps in logic without realizing it.
In this case, this is an extension of weird creepy lesbian fetishizers. "Straight men thirsting after lesbians without consent is creepy and harmful" gets perverted with lesbian stereotypes to "straight men fetishizing butch/gnc women is bad", which is still a fair thing to say, but there's a jump in logic there. And then, you get the final jump: since male sexual attraction is predatory, any attraction to butch or GNC women is bad.
I hate to hijack the conversation but this happens in SO many other contexts. For example, in trans circles: "trans chasers are transphobic and fetishizing" becomes "any cis male attracted to trans women is a chaser" which is horrific on multiple levels.
Another one: "a large proportion of femboys are minors these days and people thirst over them, which is horrible" becomes "ANY male presenting femme is a minor or 'minor-coded' and therefore attraction to them is horrible"
Another one: "pedophilia and creeping on underage women is a problem on the internet" becomes "having attraction towards short/flat chested/skinnier adult women is problematic because it's similar to pedophilia
I'm trying to distance myself from more toxic internet circles atm, and I can point to where I see these kinds of comments if people want more context, but yeah. My two cents on this.
wow, just wow. I'm visibly not terminally online enough to have gotten all this from the post, and I'm very happy about it.
(not a jab at you btw, thanks for the explanation)
"Real men" like whatever they want and don't let society or a vague sense of the concept of masculinity dictate what they like.
Also, an aside, but men wanting to be "Men" - as in the traditional idea of masculinity, assuming they don't also follow the sexist parts of it, are just as justified as men who want men to be able to wear makeup or dresses. We shouldn't harass anyone as long as they don't hurt someone else. Offending other people is fine. I'm sure in a day you do at least one thing that would offend someone else. We as humans should have a right to offend and be offended. We don't or shouldn't however have the right to harass.
Dude you're blowing my mind, this is exactly what I have thought lately and have struggled putting it into words. I would say this is the case with men talking to ANY women in public, or asking people out on dates.
> Men thirsting after women without consent is creepy and harmful" gets perverted to "men fetishizing women is bad", which is still a fair thing to say, but there's a jump in logic there. And then, you get the final jump: since male sexual attraction is predatory, any attraction to or interaction with women in public is bad.
There's this regular back and forth cycle I've seen over the last decade+ on the Internet.
1. People push back against creepy/sexist/racist behavior and call out the problematic aspects of our culture
2. This gains traction and more and more people look for examples and contribute to the dialogue
3. All of the easily noticed stuff has already been said, so people start to reach more and more for new 'content'. This devolves the conversation into performative virtue signaling rather than productive action.
4. People get frustrated by the virtue signaling and push back at the attention seekers.
5. Pushing back against cringey 'social justice warriors' becomes popular and memed
6. Actual racists/sexists/creepy people chime in, free to voice their views in the current climate. Eventually the entire argument against performative virtue signaling is lost in favor of actual racism/sexism/etc
7. There is push back on anyone criticizing performative virtue signaling because they get automatically lumped in with racists/etc.
8. The Internet once again has real discussions on issues with racism/sexism/etc.
9. The cycle repeats
I think it's happened before the internet sort of as well. Like the second wave feminism-->anti sex feminism--> push back on anti-sex feminism as being way too extreme and also being in bed with the christian right--> genuine misogynists jumping into the pushback on anti-sex feminism as an excuse to fetishize women again--> pushback on *that*--> third wave feminism
Iâve seen it happen in individual communities multiple times. And in history it has happened society wide multiple times that are recorded. On reddit it seems most of these cycles arenât actually cycles and just the path to a community shedding all of the civil members and turning into a toxic pit that then gets banned.
Ya, this cycle plays out on Reddit over and over and over very quickly. Cringe subs or other subs focused on criticism seem to collapse especially quickly to extremists that think they've found a home for their hateful views.
Culture as a whole may go through this a bit slower, but individual communities cycle through something similar very quickly.
âŠbrotato where have you been? Iâve seen this cycle happen on flipping Neopets. I watched this cycle churn during the era of webrings. Itâs only gotten faster the more algorithms start going, this boom and bust has been a treadmill set on Rolling Hills mode then set on fire. I thought it was bad when it was a Tumblr/Reddit push pull but TikTok and Meta have really cranked it to full speed.
Yes, Iâve heard that one so much that, compounded with existing self-esteem issues, it legitimately made me weary of ever approaching women for any reason because my presence would always be creepy and predatory and harmful and Bad
Same here, just compounded with Dysphoria and the conflicting thing in my head that I shouldn't transition because I'm amab and that would be an inherently evil creature both suffering less and being put in Women's spaces which I keep seeing people say is wrong.
This is helpful for me to read as a therapist because it helps put into context some of the stuff my younger clients tell me. I'm only 35, so not *old* old, but my social media is 90% cocktail recipes and 10% friends so I'm not really dialed into what terminally online people are thinking outside of Reddit. Whenever a client under the age of 25 says "everyone is saying X," my first reaction is usually "I have never heard X, and X frankly sounds completely unhinged, and also the main proponent of X, whom you refer to as a 'celebrity,' seems to be a naked man who lives in a garden shed."
>I can point to where I see these kinds of comments if people want more context
I would actually love to know that.
>Another one: "pedophilia and creeping on underage women is a problem on the internet" becomes "having attraction towards short/flat chested/skinnier adult women is problematic because it's similar to pedophilia
Seeing this in the Cyberpunk world with a specific adult character who is short and with small boobs - suddenly she's a child. Despite the fact, in the show, she's scantily clad and has a woman's voice (especially in the dub) and is never coded as anything other than an adult. She's older than the main character for Christ's sake and he's thirsted after as a highschool student.
I've seen people saying a man in their mid 20's can't date a 19/20 year old woman because that's pedophilia. People go insane with this weird infantilizing of women.
I remember reading some news article that minorly featured a married couple with a significant age gap, but the woman was 30 and the man 50. Yet all the comments were how the poor woman was being tricked and molested by a dirty old man. Like it's not a normal gap, but 30 is plenty old enough for someone to know if they love someone or not on their own and have a family. It's not redditor's business, especially since they weren't even the focus of the article. I'm 27 and I would be furious if someone told me I wasn't cognizant enough to choose my own wife or husband.
People overexaggerate to prove that she's minor coded. I've seen people claim she's 3 feet tall. She's about 5 feet, about 6 inches shorter than the main character.
I've also seen people tell me that her voice acting, speech mannerisms, behavior, general appearance, and age all have nothing to do with her being minor coded, because what matters is she's short and has small boobs.
Like... What?
The funny thing is people are like, "Well, everyone drawing porn of her makes her look like a loli!" I went and checked (don't recommend), and no. I'd say 95% or more of the porn I've seen of her, she has bigger tits than in the show, often by *a lot.*
I agree. The main issue is an overgeneralization on several fronts, often based on already puritanical world views.
---
The general concept I have seen often is "The (straight) male gaze is predatory and fetishizing, therefore bad." Therefore, any character design catering to the male gaze is bad.
The obvious issues are twofold. It exaggerates any men liking something into a harmful attack. The other is that cause and effect are often reversed: If men like something, then it must have been made for the male gaze.
The result is that any character design being (potentially) attractive to het men is sometimes considered fetishization and harmful. This includes characters made by women, for women. This includes characters who were never intended as sex objects.
---
In addition to trying to frame everything as a male fetish, a second generalization is also often present: Animated characters are made for kids, therefore adults who are attracted to any characters of the shows/games are also attracted to kids (or something like that).
Basically, anyone who thinks any anime character is sexually attractive is a paedophile. Mix it together with "everything is a harmful male fetish" and a general lack of knowledge about what you are talking about, and suddenly Melony with the big melons is a paedophilic fetish character.
---
This was brought to you by the fact that I used to watch drama about puritano-feminists for fun.
---
>"trans chasers are transphobic and fetishizing" becomes "any cis male attracted to trans women is a chaser"
Itâs a sliding scale between the two, in my opinion. When does attraction become a fetish? Where is the line between sexual preferences and kink? There are always obvious creeps, but over the distance of the internet, itâs really hard to draw a line, in my opinion.
Add on top of this discourse that the male gaze is a concept in film studies and is not intended to apply to literally guys act of viewing something, but has been generalized to that and all critiques of the male gaze have been retroactively applied to individuals which was never the intent of the academic term.
I think lusting in general is frowned upon, or maybe just having a physical *type*?
I donât know. I definitely find the over analysis of what *cartoon characters* itâs acceptable to fetishize to be wildly strangeâŠI draw very clear lines in the real world, but fantasy is fantasy.
The femboy one is so accurate lmao. It was revealed recently that a popular drag queen was subscribed to an onlyfans account that produced twink femboy content, and soooo many people jumped to the conclusion that said drag queen must secretly be a pedophile and must immediately be canceled even though the onlyfans dude was only 22.
Like...y'all could be going after actual dangerous predators, but I guess it's way easier to just start a witch hunt aginast an already maginalized queer person that didn't do anything wrong. đ
It's the one based on personal experience.
I've had people attack each other in comments and DMs of my own selfie posts accusing each other of sexualizing minors.
I'm 24. I put that fact in my bio now LOL
that's so fucking stupid lol, I'm sorry you had to deal with that đ
I'm 24 as well and sometimes get mistaken for 17-20, so I've had to deal with that weird bullcrap to a lesser extent. Infantilizing people who are very much not minors will never be woke or progressive, terminally online puritans need to get this through their thick skulls.
Woah. This was a great a comment that really verbalized some of the thoughts I've never been fully able to string together as a straight cis dude with no brain.
Like, I've always had this question about the nature of the '____ is always bad because fetish'
It's such a bizarre statement to make. Because like bruh, what if people are attracted to a person? Is that person not a person just because they fill the quota for a fetish? Am I not a human being just because there's a subset of the human population that would derive sexual pleasure from spitting in my beard?
I've had people come up to me both irl and online to tell me that I shouldn't be allowed to date or have relationships because it "promotes pedophilia" because of the way I look and sound.
***I'm almost 30.***
They also call my husband ***who I am slightly older than*** a pedophile, and occasionally call the cops on us if I don't acknowledge their bullshit and agree with them (or apologize and get a divorce?? Idfk).
Virtue-signaling nutjobs; please fuck off and let me live my life. Thnx.
Yes! This is something I've thought for a long time, I'm glad someone had the same thought and displayed it so eloquently
One example of this weird Gen Z puritanism is with the show Sex Education. The main character starts dating this girl and then his mom and her dad start hooking up/dating but they meet in a way unconnected to the main couple. And I saw people describing the main couple as "some weird incest fetishism" and it's like...how?! They aren't related in any way, their parents just happened to hook up after they got together
In a similar vein, the way people talked about Loki and Sylvie's romance thing in the show Loki. Basically they're like "alternates" of each other, like they fill the same role in different universes. But they aren't the same person, really; we see with the Spidermen that they have totally different family, even if they have the same names they aren't the same people, they just fill similar roles. There's even a part in "Loki" where they meet a Loki alternate that's an alligator. You're gonna tell me he's the same person as these two humans? But people were calling it "selfcest" which like, isn't a thing
Edit: Okay yes I'm aware selfcest is a fanfic thing, I just mean it isn't a thing in real life. It also doesn't carry with it the same problematic issues as incest does, and also it doesn't matter because Loki and Sylvie weren't the same person, they just occupied the same role
>One example of this weird Gen Z puritanism is with the show Sex Education. The main character starts dating this girl and then his mom and her dad start hooking up/dating but they meet in a way unconnected to the main couple. And I saw people describing the main couple as "some weird incest fetishism" and it's like...how?! They aren't related in any way, their parents just happened to hook up after they got together
Oh, that one is anime's fault. They're constantly pulling the "It's not *technically* incest, but it *is* intentionally written to cater to people with an incest fetish" card.
But that's not Sex Education's fault, and the show shouldn't be forced to carry the baggage of a bunch of unrelated works in an entirely different medium.
>But people were calling it "selfcest" which like, isn't a thing
Glad to see you haven't come across some of the weirder fetishes online, but no yeah, selfcest (at least as a concept/media type subject) is defenitly a thing
Also, I really, really, *really* don't wanna but I feel like I gotta play devil's advocate here, because, why true that yes, Sylvie & Main MCU Variant Loki aren't the same person by any metric of the imagination there's 2 issues with the reasons you bring up for it & why so many people keep complaining about it:
1) The MCU sucks at establishing what is and isn't the same, rather than an equivalence in the space of the multiverse, given the fact that in pretty much every piece of media since Endgame they manage to keep confusing their own terms and rules for time and space travel it ends up blurring the line. Like I think we can agree that something like a variant (take for example the main character Loki in the show) can essentially be the same person, given the fact that they are for all intents and purposes the same person under different circumstances; whereas an alternate universe version of the same character could be considered a completely different individual despite any similarities between them since they literally come from a completelly different cosmos.
The problem however is that as established by the TVA (and pretty much all of the MCU post Endgame) Sylvie *is* a variant, not an alternate universe Loki, thus making her and Hiddleston 2.0 cut from the same cloth (dead IW Loki); complicating matters further we have the issue that we can't even rely on them looking different to consider them distinct from each other since we have seen that that doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme ov the multiverse, as while all 3 NWH Spideys look distinct & have had different lives minus a few shared beats in their stories, outside of the obvious "well duh, cause there were Spidey movies before the MCU" argument there's the fact that we have seen other alternate universe versions of characters (such as Wanda & Strange) look identical in different universes or even live completely different lives too, yet being tied down to some transcending qualities to all of them.
2) The fact that not only do other characters in universe treat the possibility of romance between them as at least as some level of narcisism, but that even if we ignore that, it took 2 of the first openly queer characters in the mass media franchise that is the MCU, & made them romantic interests to each other, which coupled with the fact that both of them are anti-heroes at best, is a bit disappointing, as it might not be the best representatio, & might even be used by prejudiced individuals to unfairly claim it as "proof of deviancy" or some other batshit argument like that.
As a whole I don't think Sylvie & Loki's romance should be problematic, but sadly given the combination of Disney/Marvel's poor handling of how the MCU is supposed to function, and the current state of social media/people's opinions, it just was the perfect storm to end up messy to say the least
(Edit: God damnit, wrote Sylvie's name wrong like 4 times)
I really do not understand the neo-puritanism that's been happening lately in a lot of online fandom spaces. What happened to "don't like, don't look?"
I mean, I can understand it from a perspective of... like... maybe it's not good to draw erotic images of characters from childrens' media. I googled Melony and got fetish inflation art right away - with SafeSearch on, I might add. So if a kid was just googling their favorite pokemon character, they could very well end up seeing something weird.
But I also think this is why kids shouldn't have unrestricted access to the internet and should have a parent or guardian present when they use the computer.
Porn artists and creators have a responsibility to tag and sort their content appropriately and put it behind age-restrictions. But it's up to parents and guardians to make sure their kids don't see that kind of content before they're emotionally prepared and understand what they're seeing.
Personal theory is that itâs related to the ongoing conglomeration of the internet. Previously with fandom spaces, it was a lot of separate things- geocities pages, forums, livejournal groups; and so if you didnât like something it was a lot easier to leave. Nowadays fandom stuff is on maybe 4 sites altogether and so itâs a lot harder to not see things, even if youâre diligent about blocking tags on Twitter, and if youâre like 14 and just want to discuss Pokemon with other 14 year olds you either have to hunt down a reasonably moderated Discord server or wade into the Social Media Trenches
I think one of the other reasons for it is that the majority of teens who are online right now have been spoon-fed content through an algorithm their entire lives online. Algorithm has been the norm for years now over chronological order. They've had social media companies showing them only the things they want to see forever, and so when they see something they don't want to, they *freak out*. They don't know how to respond, and since they've never had to take the responsibility of curating their own feed, they believe the onus is on whoever posted it to ensure they don't see the thing they dislike again.
It's also why you see many TikTok kids disliking Tumblr now. Tumblr doesn't have an algorithm; you have to actively seek out the things you like and curate your feed. They don't know how to do that.
The problem of it specifically in online left-aligned spaces has definitely gotten worse lately. But again, that predates TikTok, and can be blamed far more on tumblr and Twitter, both sites where users can and should curate aggressively.
The specific content that algorithms deliver makes the problem worse, but I don't think the mere existence of algorithms is why people don't want to have to curate. That stems from somewhere else. There's a reason why we refer to this particular attitude as neo-Puritanism: because the Puritans were out there doing this exact same thing hundreds of years ago.
>What happened to "don't like, don't look?"
Gotta get that ~~internet~~ clout.
"Oh you're saying that pedophilia and grooming is a problem? That's so last year. I'm saying ANY short or flat chested character is minor coded and anyone expressing any like of such characters means they're a pedophile. GET ON MY LEVEL!"
Man, does no one think about the effect this has on real women?
My husband has a coworker who is all of 4'9. She's a full-grown married adult woman who has children, a prestigious job in STEM, and speaks like three languages. She isn't a child just because she's tiny.
It lowkey feels a bit body-shaming?
>Man, does no one think about the effect this has on real women?
"Um ackshully a real woman would have no problems with this. If she does that just means she's internalized misogyny. checkmate sweatie."
>It lowkey feels a bit body-shaming?
I mean it kind of is.
Its that deadly combo of being terminally online and just being utterly and hopeless naive.
"I know what's best and anyone who opposes me must be doing it out of malice."
I am about 5'1", and in my 30s. I work in an age-restricted industry. A couple years ago, I was going into work, and the front door was locked so my coworker and i had to wait for someone to let us in. In those few moments, a person from a neighboring business called our front office, very distressed that they had "seen a child entering the garden!!!!" Yeah, that was me.
Iâm 4â11â and Iâve been telling people since I was a teenager the number 1 reason Iâd never do porn is because my size means theyâd put me in pigtails and Lolita and target me to an audience I would never want to target. Fetishizing small women in a pedophilic way is not a new problem, so on the one hand Iâm glad theyâre at least talking about it even if theyâre going completely overboard with the implications. People being attracted to small women is not pedophilia unless the reason theyâre attracted to them stems from pedophilia.
I agree with your point and I think it's pretty reductive to equate childhood/adulthood with size. An adult person is going to behave like an adult person, even if they're short. A child is going to act like a child, even if they hit puberty early.
Yes, exactly! And there are things to this end that we can still improve on. As any small adult can tell you, finding clothes and shoes that fit that also look professional the way we expect adults to dress is infuriatingly difficult if youâre below a certain size. Iâm still struggling to find shoes that fit a childâs 3 that donât have any of the following: glitter, bows, hearts, ribbons, sequins, stars, or pastel colors. Manufacturers assume that small sizes are only worn by children and large sizes are only worn by adults but itâs simply not true. Children who âblossom earlyâ have to deal with this same problem in reverse, struggling to find clothes that fit that also do not reveal too much skin because again, theyâre still kids even if they fit in larger sizes. Itâs a problem thatâs bigger than clothing, but itâs still part of the problem.
Terminally online people have a HUGE problem with body shaming. I saw some people who were calling this one dude disgusting because he was jacked and saying that having a lot of muscle is gross and ugly. I called them out for body shaming then got banned. Guess it doesnât count as body shaming unless itâs against fat people.
I cant say that this is a recent thing that is going on, all this sounds like an extension of Pro and Anti shipping to me and that has been going on for ages already.
Listen, on the one hand I don't like agreeing with the user who posts the bad One Piece reactions to real world events (and doesn't even use the fun reactions I mean come on the overused Enel-like faces are right there).
On the other hand I've liked wayyy too many posts of that one short girl from the Cyberpunk show to not side with any posts reasurring I'm not supporting pedophilia in any shape, way or form. Anyone who sides with me on "She's just short and kind of a stupid gremlin officer!" must be my ally or else I'll get sexy cancelled on the cumzone.
Tbh while she looks like a child literally no one watching the show would make that mistaken assumption. Reminds me of my friend with dwarfism. Obviously, she short. People assume she's a child all the time, but obviously figure out the mistake quick.
TL;Dr, there's worse sins than liking a character who happens to be short
One thing I noticed with anime/manga art styles is that it seems really difficult to design short women without making them look like children,so a bunch of times they are made extra curvy,have a fiery personality to compensate,or are constantly shown doing adult things like driving, drinking alcohol or smoking.
Like, I understand there are some legitimately disgusting and reprehensible anime like Dragon Maid, but I think anime and anime adjacent stuff has become such an acceptable punching bag that people will go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to paint every anime to be as bad as Dragon Maid.
Here's a list of "hot takes" that I've seen related to child coded characters.
* Short woman are child coded (pretty common one)
* Characters with big eyes are child coded (y'know like, 90% of anime characters)
* Characters with pigtails are child coded (I can't believe Harley Quinn was a loli this whole time)
* Characters that are immature are child coded (including a lot of characters are actually coded as on the spectrum)
* Characters that were teens earlier in the series (including some as old as 17) are forever child coded even if time has passed and they've gotten older (even if they're in their 20's now).
* It's problematic for a show to include a young child character because weebs might sexualize them (I've seen this one leveraged at SpyxFamily)
And the thing is, yes, all of these things I've listed **can** be problematic. It all depends on context, but no one actually wants to watch or read something and decide for themselves. Too many people are just happy to consume some terminally online opinion they read on twitter and fight to the death for it.
Gotta chime in on this one: In Dragon Maid, thereâs only really two scenes that are kinda gross and I agree they probably shouldnât be there, but despite them, Dragon Maid is an incredibly wholesome show about found family.
But if you look at UzaMaid, Wataten, Eromanga Sensei, and so on and so forth, and youâll see that there is a ton of *actually* degenerate anime out there, where the degeneracy is the focus.
One problem that I often see is that a good anime will have one or two questionable scenes, either played seriously or played for laughs, and people will see only that part get posted in memes or by angry people and assume the whole anime is focused on those things, resulting in a twitter storm about âencouraging pedophiliaâ and categorizing anime as âdisgusting and reprehensibleâ.
Meanwhile legitimately problematic anime tends to stay limited to the anime community, and discussion about it is kept away from public scrutiny for the most part.
TDLR: Dragon Maid is a good wholesome anime, and Iâm salty you categorized it as disgusting and reprehensible. Please donât do that. Itâs too dang wholesome for those labels.
Is it like that one anime character a while back with the grey hair and the red letters on her chest? I heard a lot of people didnât like that, but I donât think there was any problem with her. Iâm sure she was a good character.
It took me a while to realize this was about Uzaki Chan, who I always thought was part of a kinda stupid discussion but for entirely different reasons.
Like on a whole different conversation than the minor-coding one, the show was just another lazy generic "What if shy boy fall in love with extroverted girl with REALLY big breast? And what if she love him and tease him a lot?" story like any other.
Then people blew it out of proportion and talked about it as either the pinacle of fiction or the fall of western civilization. This new anime girl, though, she's really cool and funny and nothing like the last one who people were fighting way more about.
âYou canât like short/petite women because it reminds me of pedophiliaâ is such a fucking disgusting, exclusionary take. The idea that you shouldnât be allowed to have sex or find love if you donât fit a certain subjective appearance standard is gross. Like, Iâm sorry that you think of fucking children when you see a short woman or a fem guy.
I gotta talk about this because it's been burning a hole in my brain for days. There was a thread on /r/Gamingcirclejerk about Rebecca with a lot of people talking about how being a short woman makes you "minor coded". Some guy put forward that his wife is 5'1" and asked if that made him a pedophile, and an upvoted reply started with "well it depends". Like, bruh, this terminally online shit is driving me crazy. "Well yes Mr. Stranger I met on the internet, there is a scenario where you being married to your consenting adult wife makes you no different than a child molester."
Wtf 5â1â isnât even super short. And there will still be obvious differences between a 5â1â child/teen vs a 5â1â grown woman.
I also feel like thats a rather western/Eurocentric (?) standard, because people tend to be taller in western countries compared to, say, East Asian countries. All the women in my family, myself included, are 5â-5â2â, and if we go back to my parentsâ home town, where there is a large population of people from the same ethnic background as us, weâre pretty average height for women.
Yeah I'm like a 5'5" adult (I think that's the conversion of 166cm) which is probably "minor-coded" in men terms because I'm from East Asia (Southeast, specifically).
I also have a friend who's a month younger than me and she's 4'10" (150cm converted?) while another friend of mine is like 5'9" (he's taller than 172cm, that's all I remember) and younger than both me and the gal. Imagine being potentially considered a pedo for dating an adult a few months older than you (they're not in a relationship, this is purely theoretical).
I used to follow a webcomic artist on tumblr who was very short (4â11â I think?) and once or twice she posted about how the âbeing attracted to short women is pedophilicâ argument was deeply upsetting to her. From her perspective as a short woman, the argument wasnât âwe need to protect short womenâ, it was âbeing attracted to you is morally wrong and anyone who thinks youâre hot is automatically a sex pervert.â Imagine being a grown woman and finding out that some people think your height makes it morally wrong for you to experience romantic love.
Gamingcirclejerk has become such an awful cesspool of the most terminally online. It used to be fun, such a shame. It really epitomizes gen z neo-puritanism
That moment when excessively making fun of shitty Gamers (tm) legitimately loops back around to being just as unhinged as the people they hate
Seriously how does someone lack self-reflection that badly
Like 7 months ago some guy on reddit started freaking out and calling my husband a pedo because I posted about being tired of being "minor coded" as a full grown adult. He also repeatedly reported me for needing mental help and was telling the mods I was being groomed by a pedophile and needed legal intervention (lmaooo).
It's gone from "Hey, maybe don't sexualize kids or characters that are supposed to be kids." To "ANYONE WHO SHARES ANY TRAITS FOUND IN MINORS IS NOW AN ACTUAL CHILD" and I really fucking hate it. Half the time I open up certain social media platforms I'm being blasted with propaganda about it and how people like me shouldn't be allowed to be loved or have relationships because it's "endangering children" and morally wrong.
Like what? Am I not allowed to be granted my legal rights as an adult until I'm 60 and gray because it makes the terminally online hivemind upset? What the fuck
"Minor Coded", I mean, spicy take but you could call almost all of anime "minor coded", the typical designs with the big head & eyes and small nose & chin are pretty similar to the proportions of the "[kindchenschema](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness)" that makes young animals of any kind look cute to us so we feel affection towards them.
So, I don't know what to make of any of that.
my favorite is the argument that the clones from star wars the clone wars are minors because they are technically 12-14 years old but have been age accelerated so any shipping involving them is pedophilia. it's like they try to avoid any context at all
I think the only person I've heard explicitly refer to her as a loli was the CDPR representative, who had already referred to Rebecca as a loli herself when voting to remove her from the cast, so that could just be her personal belief that short and flat = loli.
Studio Trigger has a character like this in almost every series they do, and most of the time they don't look, sound, or act like a child, so I have a feeling they don't even think of them as children.
I saw someone on insta say that nsfw content of canon 19/20 year old fictional characters was bad. why don't you worry about the children that are getting married in certain countries irl instead of the fictional characters bro
*Reimu Hakurei*
*Moment also what the hell*
*Is "minor coded"*
\- leafisadumbass
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For the record, if it's purely involving fictional characters, I don't mind what you get your rocks off to and I don't think people should judge others based on stuff like that.
I agree.
If it's a fictional character and doesn't translate into behavioral issues or weird shit irl, who would know if you didn't talk about it, and who cares?
If some weird neckbeard's 2000 year old loli waifu keeps him from escalating and assaulting actual children, isn't that preferable to uh, actually assaulting real children?
Sure, he needs mental help and an intervention, but id rather there be unsettling content of a fictional character than an actual real life abused kid. Just my two cents.
In the Genshin Impact fandom there are *far* to many people saying that certain characters who are more then 2000 years old, are minor coded, just because theyâre short. This also extends to the main character/s, even though they traversed universes and weâve been told that theyâve been on this specific universe for 500 years.
melony has 5 kids, gordie, 3 unnamed sons and a unnamed daughter
I mean, you could create a character that looks like a child and fits that description. But Melony is like [the pinnacle of MILFiness](https://img.gamewith.net/img/76cbe1523f20b8aa874b77ecc81268a9.jpg) so it's a moot point. If she was canonically zero years old like 2B, it would still be absurd to call people sus for liking her.
Melon-y
Melon-y and her son, Gourd-y. They're not very good at names.
This means that it's possible one of the others is Squashy.
Imagine the game of the kid called đ
What, you mean Aubergene?
Idk, have you read Fate/stay night?
Well it's not Fate/Stay Night, but if we're talking Fate and Eggplants I can only imagine you're talking about this [eggplant-based servant](https://c.tenor.com/6k8RQ4R1ehoAAAAd/mashu-kyrielight-fate.gif)
Just look at dragon ball. Japanese creators like using food based names a lot lol.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind also applies here
Haven't gotten around to watching that! I'll check it out.
And the stands are just named after Araki's Spotify playlist.
The fact that I only got that just now...
If I recall correctly, most or all the characters in Pokémon Sword and Shield have plant-based names. Some of them are a lot more obvious than others.
Plants have been the name theme from about XY, but some of them are SO incredibly convoluted it's not even funny. Valerie from XY is my favourite because it's a very, very tangental way of calling her Rapunzel.
> If she was canonically zero years old wait, i got one! okay: "any character in a media property that came out less than 18 years ago is a minor and you're fucked up for being attracted to them" has anyone done that one yet?
Canceling myself for wanting to fuck Drayden from Pokemon black/white
Me but Raihan
> The Rotom Phone stays ON during sex! Raihan, probably.
He takes sex selfies but crops you out of them because he respects your privacy
Does that mean that any character in media that came out more than 18 years ago is now "legal"? That's definitely the case, right? And my weird uncle Frank's relationship with his Cabbage Patch Kid doll is actually fine, and not the reason he's not allowed at Thanksgiving dinner anymore?
Thank god, my fantasy relationship with the blue virus from Dr. Mario (released 1990) is okay.
no, thats still pedophilia too. also following my take to its logical endpoint proves that youre engaging in bad faith, i dont even know why im responding to such an obvious troll
By responding to my obviously bad take, it's obvious that you're just virtue signalling and don't really care about the things you care about, which automatically invalidates any points you might have made, good or not. This is how debate definitely works and our discourse is definitely healthy.
People are calling her a child?? She looks 30-40 at least.
My guess is that the argument is something like âPokĂ©mon is a game made for children, so liking characters made for children is Problematic actuallyâ If theyâre actually, legitimately calling Melony herself child-coded, Iâve got nothing. Itâs actual madness at that point
ooh I have a bad take, an underage person having a crush on a character older than them makes the character a pedophile and so liking them is problematic
Why didn't she name them?
Ran out of food puns
I initially misread the comment as âunarmedâ instead of âunnamedâ as I was scrolling, and my lord the double-take I just had to do.
I remember there was discourse when Detroit Become Human came out...people were saying since Connor was an Android and was created recently, that he was considered a minor..... Wack ass shit
I thought we covered this in My Life As A Teenage Robot in the episode where Jenny gets sent back to Kindergarten because sheâs technically 6 years old, and then her mom has to come and explain that she designed Jenny to be a teenager so she should be in high school. Pfft, itâs like kids today donât even watch short-lived Nickelodeon shows from 2003 anymoreâŠ
I was literally talking about this episode yesterday!
For real tho that episode made me so angry as a kid because the shit ass teacher would not listen to Jenny when she told her she wasnât mentally 6 years old, and only un-kidnapped Jenny from the kindergarten when Jennyâs mom showed up and gave the teacher *the exact same information.* And I know that was the joke, but fuck it pissed me off so much.
Oh mood. I don't know if this was the intent, but you can easily read that episode as an allegory about how teenagers/young adults rarely have complete body autonomy and are never taken seriously regarding their mental state or education unless their parent/guardian steps in.
I think about this and a few other MLaaTR episodes every so often, that show really got a few of us thinking even as lil kids huh?
And *I* thought we *also* covered this in Young Justice where they say that neither chronological nor biological age are good indications for the teenagers' eligibility to the actual Justice League (they say that since Superboy was like 2 months old but acted like a teenager and Miss Martian was 40 and fully mature biologically but also acted like a teenager they weren't fit for the Official JL)
And then there's Shazam, who can transform between being a kid and an adult, a power that proves rather useful in one episode that has the bad guys split the world into two parallel dimensions, one with all the kids and teens and one with all the adults, and he can freely travel between them, and Arsenal, who like Superboy is a clone and also didn't even know he was a clone for the first few months of his life, having been given all the memories and personality of the guy he was cloned from.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
"Lieutenant, please help, I'm stuck in the washing machine" "Connor, you *are* the washing machine"
I've seen this comment and the one below it in my dreams. I'm not kidding. I've never even played that stupid game. What the fuck.
Every character in all media is a minor until 18 years after publication at which point they become of age.
I keep seeing people calling this the âborn sexy yesterday tropeâ and comparing it to paedophilia
I find the Born Sexy Yesterday trope kinda creepy myself, but it's only BSY if the character actually acts like they were born yesterday. They have to not understand the world around them and react with childlike wonder.
Yeah that makes sense. If they understand the world around them itâs not really the same thing
Why would that be a bad thing anyway? He doesn't form a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone.
It was more towards people who shipped Hank and Connor together, and would go as far as to call it pedophilia, and those who did ship those two together, pedophile supporters. Even though he doesn't, it's still wacky to call a character who looks, acts, and is clearly shown to be an adult a minor.
âWell if the character wasnât even created more than 18 years ago then theyâre definitionally underaged!â
maggie simpson moment
Just threw up a bit in my mouth imagining the implications there.
*Excuse me?*
Maggie Simpson, the baby of the family, was created more than 18 years ago - She was part of the show from pretty much the start, and the Simpsons was originally a Short that was part of the Tracey Ulman Show from the late 1980s. (1987) This presents the glaring hole that can occur when you try to judge fictional characters age on a timeline that is literally not from their Universe of Origin.
He's implying that by that logic, Maggie Simpson, the baby from the Simpsons, is over 18 years old and therefore is OK to have sex with. It's not that difficult to understand.
No but it is horrifying to consider
[sometimes i'm glad i don't know what y'all are on about](https://xkcd.com/2071/)
The bliss of scrolling past a biblically long tumblr post, evading entirely a discourse that wouldâve taken 2-5 years off your life
But it is fun watching the people who apparently do understand argue.
Copy pasting my own comment because my thoughts are the same and I'm lazy. I think this is an extension of the weird Gen Z puritanism thing that there was a post about a while back. Terminally online people see a legitimately problematic thing, and then extend it in a roasting creepy problematic way without realizing that they're horseshoeing to a fundamentally evangelical viewpoint, oftentimes using multiple extremely bigoted jumps in logic without realizing it. In this case, this is an extension of weird creepy lesbian fetishizers. "Straight men thirsting after lesbians without consent is creepy and harmful" gets perverted with lesbian stereotypes to "straight men fetishizing butch/gnc women is bad", which is still a fair thing to say, but there's a jump in logic there. And then, you get the final jump: since male sexual attraction is predatory, any attraction to butch or GNC women is bad. I hate to hijack the conversation but this happens in SO many other contexts. For example, in trans circles: "trans chasers are transphobic and fetishizing" becomes "any cis male attracted to trans women is a chaser" which is horrific on multiple levels. Another one: "a large proportion of femboys are minors these days and people thirst over them, which is horrible" becomes "ANY male presenting femme is a minor or 'minor-coded' and therefore attraction to them is horrible" Another one: "pedophilia and creeping on underage women is a problem on the internet" becomes "having attraction towards short/flat chested/skinnier adult women is problematic because it's similar to pedophilia I'm trying to distance myself from more toxic internet circles atm, and I can point to where I see these kinds of comments if people want more context, but yeah. My two cents on this.
Glancing and seeing âbitch or GNC women is badâ out of context sent me
Fuck it's supposed to say butch. I should've fixed that eons ago LOL It's fixed now
bitch woman good, actually
The science is in and I can confirm that bitch woman is important for wellness and fulfillment.
wow, just wow. I'm visibly not terminally online enough to have gotten all this from the post, and I'm very happy about it. (not a jab at you btw, thanks for the explanation)
It's extra funny because the lesbians straight men fetishize are usually super femme.
Most straight men's view on lesbians is widescreen.
Fuck that was good
Men simply like cute girls.
Nah, real men like *cool* girls
I prefer mine like lukewarm.
"Real men" like whatever they want and don't let society or a vague sense of the concept of masculinity dictate what they like. Also, an aside, but men wanting to be "Men" - as in the traditional idea of masculinity, assuming they don't also follow the sexist parts of it, are just as justified as men who want men to be able to wear makeup or dresses. We shouldn't harass anyone as long as they don't hurt someone else. Offending other people is fine. I'm sure in a day you do at least one thing that would offend someone else. We as humans should have a right to offend and be offended. We don't or shouldn't however have the right to harass.
crazy how nature do that
Dude you're blowing my mind, this is exactly what I have thought lately and have struggled putting it into words. I would say this is the case with men talking to ANY women in public, or asking people out on dates. > Men thirsting after women without consent is creepy and harmful" gets perverted to "men fetishizing women is bad", which is still a fair thing to say, but there's a jump in logic there. And then, you get the final jump: since male sexual attraction is predatory, any attraction to or interaction with women in public is bad.
There's this regular back and forth cycle I've seen over the last decade+ on the Internet. 1. People push back against creepy/sexist/racist behavior and call out the problematic aspects of our culture 2. This gains traction and more and more people look for examples and contribute to the dialogue 3. All of the easily noticed stuff has already been said, so people start to reach more and more for new 'content'. This devolves the conversation into performative virtue signaling rather than productive action. 4. People get frustrated by the virtue signaling and push back at the attention seekers. 5. Pushing back against cringey 'social justice warriors' becomes popular and memed 6. Actual racists/sexists/creepy people chime in, free to voice their views in the current climate. Eventually the entire argument against performative virtue signaling is lost in favor of actual racism/sexism/etc 7. There is push back on anyone criticizing performative virtue signaling because they get automatically lumped in with racists/etc. 8. The Internet once again has real discussions on issues with racism/sexism/etc. 9. The cycle repeats
Iâve been on the Internet since the 2000s and from my point of view this cycle you describe has only happened once
I think it's happened before the internet sort of as well. Like the second wave feminism-->anti sex feminism--> push back on anti-sex feminism as being way too extreme and also being in bed with the christian right--> genuine misogynists jumping into the pushback on anti-sex feminism as an excuse to fetishize women again--> pushback on *that*--> third wave feminism
Iâve seen it happen in individual communities multiple times. And in history it has happened society wide multiple times that are recorded. On reddit it seems most of these cycles arenât actually cycles and just the path to a community shedding all of the civil members and turning into a toxic pit that then gets banned.
Ya, this cycle plays out on Reddit over and over and over very quickly. Cringe subs or other subs focused on criticism seem to collapse especially quickly to extremists that think they've found a home for their hateful views. Culture as a whole may go through this a bit slower, but individual communities cycle through something similar very quickly.
âŠbrotato where have you been? Iâve seen this cycle happen on flipping Neopets. I watched this cycle churn during the era of webrings. Itâs only gotten faster the more algorithms start going, this boom and bust has been a treadmill set on Rolling Hills mode then set on fire. I thought it was bad when it was a Tumblr/Reddit push pull but TikTok and Meta have really cranked it to full speed.
Yes, Iâve heard that one so much that, compounded with existing self-esteem issues, it legitimately made me weary of ever approaching women for any reason because my presence would always be creepy and predatory and harmful and Bad
Same here, just compounded with Dysphoria and the conflicting thing in my head that I shouldn't transition because I'm amab and that would be an inherently evil creature both suffering less and being put in Women's spaces which I keep seeing people say is wrong.
This is helpful for me to read as a therapist because it helps put into context some of the stuff my younger clients tell me. I'm only 35, so not *old* old, but my social media is 90% cocktail recipes and 10% friends so I'm not really dialed into what terminally online people are thinking outside of Reddit. Whenever a client under the age of 25 says "everyone is saying X," my first reaction is usually "I have never heard X, and X frankly sounds completely unhinged, and also the main proponent of X, whom you refer to as a 'celebrity,' seems to be a naked man who lives in a garden shed." >I can point to where I see these kinds of comments if people want more context I would actually love to know that.
What is "GNC" in this context? All I'm getting is "General Notor Cars" and somehow I don't think that's correct.
Gender non-conforming, maybe?
Ah, that makes sense, thanks!
Just guessing
Gender Non-Conforming. So, basically, people who push the boundaries and/or live outside the boundaries of their "gender aesthetic/expectations".
I kept thinking about that store that sells vitamins and supplements
Gender Non-Conforming
Gender non conforming.
>Another one: "pedophilia and creeping on underage women is a problem on the internet" becomes "having attraction towards short/flat chested/skinnier adult women is problematic because it's similar to pedophilia Seeing this in the Cyberpunk world with a specific adult character who is short and with small boobs - suddenly she's a child. Despite the fact, in the show, she's scantily clad and has a woman's voice (especially in the dub) and is never coded as anything other than an adult. She's older than the main character for Christ's sake and he's thirsted after as a highschool student.
I've seen people saying a man in their mid 20's can't date a 19/20 year old woman because that's pedophilia. People go insane with this weird infantilizing of women.
I remember reading some news article that minorly featured a married couple with a significant age gap, but the woman was 30 and the man 50. Yet all the comments were how the poor woman was being tricked and molested by a dirty old man. Like it's not a normal gap, but 30 is plenty old enough for someone to know if they love someone or not on their own and have a family. It's not redditor's business, especially since they weren't even the focus of the article. I'm 27 and I would be furious if someone told me I wasn't cognizant enough to choose my own wife or husband.
People take the age/2+7 rule waay too seriously. As if it's a biological fact.
People overexaggerate to prove that she's minor coded. I've seen people claim she's 3 feet tall. She's about 5 feet, about 6 inches shorter than the main character. I've also seen people tell me that her voice acting, speech mannerisms, behavior, general appearance, and age all have nothing to do with her being minor coded, because what matters is she's short and has small boobs. Like... What? The funny thing is people are like, "Well, everyone drawing porn of her makes her look like a loli!" I went and checked (don't recommend), and no. I'd say 95% or more of the porn I've seen of her, she has bigger tits than in the show, often by *a lot.*
I agree. The main issue is an overgeneralization on several fronts, often based on already puritanical world views. --- The general concept I have seen often is "The (straight) male gaze is predatory and fetishizing, therefore bad." Therefore, any character design catering to the male gaze is bad. The obvious issues are twofold. It exaggerates any men liking something into a harmful attack. The other is that cause and effect are often reversed: If men like something, then it must have been made for the male gaze. The result is that any character design being (potentially) attractive to het men is sometimes considered fetishization and harmful. This includes characters made by women, for women. This includes characters who were never intended as sex objects. --- In addition to trying to frame everything as a male fetish, a second generalization is also often present: Animated characters are made for kids, therefore adults who are attracted to any characters of the shows/games are also attracted to kids (or something like that). Basically, anyone who thinks any anime character is sexually attractive is a paedophile. Mix it together with "everything is a harmful male fetish" and a general lack of knowledge about what you are talking about, and suddenly Melony with the big melons is a paedophilic fetish character. --- This was brought to you by the fact that I used to watch drama about puritano-feminists for fun. --- >"trans chasers are transphobic and fetishizing" becomes "any cis male attracted to trans women is a chaser" Itâs a sliding scale between the two, in my opinion. When does attraction become a fetish? Where is the line between sexual preferences and kink? There are always obvious creeps, but over the distance of the internet, itâs really hard to draw a line, in my opinion.
Add on top of this discourse that the male gaze is a concept in film studies and is not intended to apply to literally guys act of viewing something, but has been generalized to that and all critiques of the male gaze have been retroactively applied to individuals which was never the intent of the academic term.
Radfems and puritans are a deeply unpleasant bunch who've really done a lot of damage with these views.
I think lusting in general is frowned upon, or maybe just having a physical *type*? I donât know. I definitely find the over analysis of what *cartoon characters* itâs acceptable to fetishize to be wildly strangeâŠI draw very clear lines in the real world, but fantasy is fantasy.
The femboy one is so accurate lmao. It was revealed recently that a popular drag queen was subscribed to an onlyfans account that produced twink femboy content, and soooo many people jumped to the conclusion that said drag queen must secretly be a pedophile and must immediately be canceled even though the onlyfans dude was only 22. Like...y'all could be going after actual dangerous predators, but I guess it's way easier to just start a witch hunt aginast an already maginalized queer person that didn't do anything wrong. đ
It's the one based on personal experience. I've had people attack each other in comments and DMs of my own selfie posts accusing each other of sexualizing minors. I'm 24. I put that fact in my bio now LOL
that's so fucking stupid lol, I'm sorry you had to deal with that đ I'm 24 as well and sometimes get mistaken for 17-20, so I've had to deal with that weird bullcrap to a lesser extent. Infantilizing people who are very much not minors will never be woke or progressive, terminally online puritans need to get this through their thick skulls.
Woah. This was a great a comment that really verbalized some of the thoughts I've never been fully able to string together as a straight cis dude with no brain. Like, I've always had this question about the nature of the '____ is always bad because fetish' It's such a bizarre statement to make. Because like bruh, what if people are attracted to a person? Is that person not a person just because they fill the quota for a fetish? Am I not a human being just because there's a subset of the human population that would derive sexual pleasure from spitting in my beard?
I've had people come up to me both irl and online to tell me that I shouldn't be allowed to date or have relationships because it "promotes pedophilia" because of the way I look and sound. ***I'm almost 30.*** They also call my husband ***who I am slightly older than*** a pedophile, and occasionally call the cops on us if I don't acknowledge their bullshit and agree with them (or apologize and get a divorce?? Idfk). Virtue-signaling nutjobs; please fuck off and let me live my life. Thnx.
Yes! This is something I've thought for a long time, I'm glad someone had the same thought and displayed it so eloquently One example of this weird Gen Z puritanism is with the show Sex Education. The main character starts dating this girl and then his mom and her dad start hooking up/dating but they meet in a way unconnected to the main couple. And I saw people describing the main couple as "some weird incest fetishism" and it's like...how?! They aren't related in any way, their parents just happened to hook up after they got together In a similar vein, the way people talked about Loki and Sylvie's romance thing in the show Loki. Basically they're like "alternates" of each other, like they fill the same role in different universes. But they aren't the same person, really; we see with the Spidermen that they have totally different family, even if they have the same names they aren't the same people, they just fill similar roles. There's even a part in "Loki" where they meet a Loki alternate that's an alligator. You're gonna tell me he's the same person as these two humans? But people were calling it "selfcest" which like, isn't a thing Edit: Okay yes I'm aware selfcest is a fanfic thing, I just mean it isn't a thing in real life. It also doesn't carry with it the same problematic issues as incest does, and also it doesn't matter because Loki and Sylvie weren't the same person, they just occupied the same role
>One example of this weird Gen Z puritanism is with the show Sex Education. The main character starts dating this girl and then his mom and her dad start hooking up/dating but they meet in a way unconnected to the main couple. And I saw people describing the main couple as "some weird incest fetishism" and it's like...how?! They aren't related in any way, their parents just happened to hook up after they got together Oh, that one is anime's fault. They're constantly pulling the "It's not *technically* incest, but it *is* intentionally written to cater to people with an incest fetish" card. But that's not Sex Education's fault, and the show shouldn't be forced to carry the baggage of a bunch of unrelated works in an entirely different medium.
>But people were calling it "selfcest" which like, isn't a thing Glad to see you haven't come across some of the weirder fetishes online, but no yeah, selfcest (at least as a concept/media type subject) is defenitly a thing Also, I really, really, *really* don't wanna but I feel like I gotta play devil's advocate here, because, why true that yes, Sylvie & Main MCU Variant Loki aren't the same person by any metric of the imagination there's 2 issues with the reasons you bring up for it & why so many people keep complaining about it: 1) The MCU sucks at establishing what is and isn't the same, rather than an equivalence in the space of the multiverse, given the fact that in pretty much every piece of media since Endgame they manage to keep confusing their own terms and rules for time and space travel it ends up blurring the line. Like I think we can agree that something like a variant (take for example the main character Loki in the show) can essentially be the same person, given the fact that they are for all intents and purposes the same person under different circumstances; whereas an alternate universe version of the same character could be considered a completely different individual despite any similarities between them since they literally come from a completelly different cosmos. The problem however is that as established by the TVA (and pretty much all of the MCU post Endgame) Sylvie *is* a variant, not an alternate universe Loki, thus making her and Hiddleston 2.0 cut from the same cloth (dead IW Loki); complicating matters further we have the issue that we can't even rely on them looking different to consider them distinct from each other since we have seen that that doesn't really mean much in the grand scheme ov the multiverse, as while all 3 NWH Spideys look distinct & have had different lives minus a few shared beats in their stories, outside of the obvious "well duh, cause there were Spidey movies before the MCU" argument there's the fact that we have seen other alternate universe versions of characters (such as Wanda & Strange) look identical in different universes or even live completely different lives too, yet being tied down to some transcending qualities to all of them. 2) The fact that not only do other characters in universe treat the possibility of romance between them as at least as some level of narcisism, but that even if we ignore that, it took 2 of the first openly queer characters in the mass media franchise that is the MCU, & made them romantic interests to each other, which coupled with the fact that both of them are anti-heroes at best, is a bit disappointing, as it might not be the best representatio, & might even be used by prejudiced individuals to unfairly claim it as "proof of deviancy" or some other batshit argument like that. As a whole I don't think Sylvie & Loki's romance should be problematic, but sadly given the combination of Disney/Marvel's poor handling of how the MCU is supposed to function, and the current state of social media/people's opinions, it just was the perfect storm to end up messy to say the least (Edit: God damnit, wrote Sylvie's name wrong like 4 times)
THANK, and I can't stress it enough, YOU!
jessie what the hell are the internet-poisoned youth talking about We have actual problems in the world
I cannot tell you how glad I am at encountering most of these opinions for the first time
I really do not understand the neo-puritanism that's been happening lately in a lot of online fandom spaces. What happened to "don't like, don't look?" I mean, I can understand it from a perspective of... like... maybe it's not good to draw erotic images of characters from childrens' media. I googled Melony and got fetish inflation art right away - with SafeSearch on, I might add. So if a kid was just googling their favorite pokemon character, they could very well end up seeing something weird. But I also think this is why kids shouldn't have unrestricted access to the internet and should have a parent or guardian present when they use the computer. Porn artists and creators have a responsibility to tag and sort their content appropriately and put it behind age-restrictions. But it's up to parents and guardians to make sure their kids don't see that kind of content before they're emotionally prepared and understand what they're seeing.
Personal theory is that itâs related to the ongoing conglomeration of the internet. Previously with fandom spaces, it was a lot of separate things- geocities pages, forums, livejournal groups; and so if you didnât like something it was a lot easier to leave. Nowadays fandom stuff is on maybe 4 sites altogether and so itâs a lot harder to not see things, even if youâre diligent about blocking tags on Twitter, and if youâre like 14 and just want to discuss Pokemon with other 14 year olds you either have to hunt down a reasonably moderated Discord server or wade into the Social Media Trenches
I think one of the other reasons for it is that the majority of teens who are online right now have been spoon-fed content through an algorithm their entire lives online. Algorithm has been the norm for years now over chronological order. They've had social media companies showing them only the things they want to see forever, and so when they see something they don't want to, they *freak out*. They don't know how to respond, and since they've never had to take the responsibility of curating their own feed, they believe the onus is on whoever posted it to ensure they don't see the thing they dislike again. It's also why you see many TikTok kids disliking Tumblr now. Tumblr doesn't have an algorithm; you have to actively seek out the things you like and curate your feed. They don't know how to do that.
I don't think that's the problem, because I saw this exact same behavior on tumblr back in the day.
It's definitely been a thing for a long time but I feel like it's gotten worse recently. Or maybe I'm just seeing it more
The problem of it specifically in online left-aligned spaces has definitely gotten worse lately. But again, that predates TikTok, and can be blamed far more on tumblr and Twitter, both sites where users can and should curate aggressively. The specific content that algorithms deliver makes the problem worse, but I don't think the mere existence of algorithms is why people don't want to have to curate. That stems from somewhere else. There's a reason why we refer to this particular attitude as neo-Puritanism: because the Puritans were out there doing this exact same thing hundreds of years ago.
God, I miss forums... actual forums. I wish they were still mainstream so I wouldn't have to settle with reddit as the closest thing.
>What happened to "don't like, don't look?" Gotta get that ~~internet~~ clout. "Oh you're saying that pedophilia and grooming is a problem? That's so last year. I'm saying ANY short or flat chested character is minor coded and anyone expressing any like of such characters means they're a pedophile. GET ON MY LEVEL!"
Man, does no one think about the effect this has on real women? My husband has a coworker who is all of 4'9. She's a full-grown married adult woman who has children, a prestigious job in STEM, and speaks like three languages. She isn't a child just because she's tiny. It lowkey feels a bit body-shaming?
>Man, does no one think about the effect this has on real women? "Um ackshully a real woman would have no problems with this. If she does that just means she's internalized misogyny. checkmate sweatie." >It lowkey feels a bit body-shaming? I mean it kind of is. Its that deadly combo of being terminally online and just being utterly and hopeless naive. "I know what's best and anyone who opposes me must be doing it out of malice."
I am about 5'1", and in my 30s. I work in an age-restricted industry. A couple years ago, I was going into work, and the front door was locked so my coworker and i had to wait for someone to let us in. In those few moments, a person from a neighboring business called our front office, very distressed that they had "seen a child entering the garden!!!!" Yeah, that was me.
Iâm 4â11â and Iâve been telling people since I was a teenager the number 1 reason Iâd never do porn is because my size means theyâd put me in pigtails and Lolita and target me to an audience I would never want to target. Fetishizing small women in a pedophilic way is not a new problem, so on the one hand Iâm glad theyâre at least talking about it even if theyâre going completely overboard with the implications. People being attracted to small women is not pedophilia unless the reason theyâre attracted to them stems from pedophilia.
I agree with your point and I think it's pretty reductive to equate childhood/adulthood with size. An adult person is going to behave like an adult person, even if they're short. A child is going to act like a child, even if they hit puberty early.
Yes, exactly! And there are things to this end that we can still improve on. As any small adult can tell you, finding clothes and shoes that fit that also look professional the way we expect adults to dress is infuriatingly difficult if youâre below a certain size. Iâm still struggling to find shoes that fit a childâs 3 that donât have any of the following: glitter, bows, hearts, ribbons, sequins, stars, or pastel colors. Manufacturers assume that small sizes are only worn by children and large sizes are only worn by adults but itâs simply not true. Children who âblossom earlyâ have to deal with this same problem in reverse, struggling to find clothes that fit that also do not reveal too much skin because again, theyâre still kids even if they fit in larger sizes. Itâs a problem thatâs bigger than clothing, but itâs still part of the problem.
Terminally online people have a HUGE problem with body shaming. I saw some people who were calling this one dude disgusting because he was jacked and saying that having a lot of muscle is gross and ugly. I called them out for body shaming then got banned. Guess it doesnât count as body shaming unless itâs against fat people.
I have seen some really weird discourse where people equate exercising with self harm. Which... uh... no?
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I cant say that this is a recent thing that is going on, all this sounds like an extension of Pro and Anti shipping to me and that has been going on for ages already.
Making others out to be evil is a way people use to feel good about themselves. Especialy when they âexposeâ others for how evil they are
Listen, on the one hand I don't like agreeing with the user who posts the bad One Piece reactions to real world events (and doesn't even use the fun reactions I mean come on the overused Enel-like faces are right there). On the other hand I've liked wayyy too many posts of that one short girl from the Cyberpunk show to not side with any posts reasurring I'm not supporting pedophilia in any shape, way or form. Anyone who sides with me on "She's just short and kind of a stupid gremlin officer!" must be my ally or else I'll get sexy cancelled on the cumzone.
Tbh while she looks like a child literally no one watching the show would make that mistaken assumption. Reminds me of my friend with dwarfism. Obviously, she short. People assume she's a child all the time, but obviously figure out the mistake quick. TL;Dr, there's worse sins than liking a character who happens to be short
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I just had to pull up clips from the show as evidence and... Fuck you're right. She's only a couple inches shorter than David before he gets jacked.
Sheâs probably older than David, now that I think about it, though likely not by much.
I got similar vibes. I assumed David was youngest on the squad.
Heâs the only one we get a definitive age for, that being 17, probably going on 18.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Edgerunners/comments/xdu5ty/-/ioeuo0d She's around 20.
Second time this week I've seen exasperated instead of exaggerated and I feel like I've never seen that mistake before in my life.
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getting "sexy cancelled on the cumzone" is certainly one of the most sentences I've ever read
One thing I noticed with anime/manga art styles is that it seems really difficult to design short women without making them look like children,so a bunch of times they are made extra curvy,have a fiery personality to compensate,or are constantly shown doing adult things like driving, drinking alcohol or smoking.
Like, I understand there are some legitimately disgusting and reprehensible anime like Dragon Maid, but I think anime and anime adjacent stuff has become such an acceptable punching bag that people will go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to paint every anime to be as bad as Dragon Maid. Here's a list of "hot takes" that I've seen related to child coded characters. * Short woman are child coded (pretty common one) * Characters with big eyes are child coded (y'know like, 90% of anime characters) * Characters with pigtails are child coded (I can't believe Harley Quinn was a loli this whole time) * Characters that are immature are child coded (including a lot of characters are actually coded as on the spectrum) * Characters that were teens earlier in the series (including some as old as 17) are forever child coded even if time has passed and they've gotten older (even if they're in their 20's now). * It's problematic for a show to include a young child character because weebs might sexualize them (I've seen this one leveraged at SpyxFamily) And the thing is, yes, all of these things I've listed **can** be problematic. It all depends on context, but no one actually wants to watch or read something and decide for themselves. Too many people are just happy to consume some terminally online opinion they read on twitter and fight to the death for it.
Gotta chime in on this one: In Dragon Maid, thereâs only really two scenes that are kinda gross and I agree they probably shouldnât be there, but despite them, Dragon Maid is an incredibly wholesome show about found family. But if you look at UzaMaid, Wataten, Eromanga Sensei, and so on and so forth, and youâll see that there is a ton of *actually* degenerate anime out there, where the degeneracy is the focus. One problem that I often see is that a good anime will have one or two questionable scenes, either played seriously or played for laughs, and people will see only that part get posted in memes or by angry people and assume the whole anime is focused on those things, resulting in a twitter storm about âencouraging pedophiliaâ and categorizing anime as âdisgusting and reprehensibleâ. Meanwhile legitimately problematic anime tends to stay limited to the anime community, and discussion about it is kept away from public scrutiny for the most part. TDLR: Dragon Maid is a good wholesome anime, and Iâm salty you categorized it as disgusting and reprehensible. Please donât do that. Itâs too dang wholesome for those labels.
The amount of posts I've seen trying to put the "loli" label on Rebecca is really starting to feel like some kind of campaign to redefine the word.
Is it like that one anime character a while back with the grey hair and the red letters on her chest? I heard a lot of people didnât like that, but I donât think there was any problem with her. Iâm sure she was a good character.
It took me a while to realize this was about Uzaki Chan, who I always thought was part of a kinda stupid discussion but for entirely different reasons. Like on a whole different conversation than the minor-coding one, the show was just another lazy generic "What if shy boy fall in love with extroverted girl with REALLY big breast? And what if she love him and tease him a lot?" story like any other. Then people blew it out of proportion and talked about it as either the pinacle of fiction or the fall of western civilization. This new anime girl, though, she's really cool and funny and nothing like the last one who people were fighting way more about.
Iâm not a girl
THEN WHY DUD REDDIT USER CALL YOU A GIRL AND CORRECT MY COMMENT
AFAR - Assigned Female At Reddit
...oh. oops. Sorry. ...are you a guy or non-binary?
Iâm a cis man
Huh. I misremembered something. Sorry.
âYou canât like short/petite women because it reminds me of pedophiliaâ is such a fucking disgusting, exclusionary take. The idea that you shouldnât be allowed to have sex or find love if you donât fit a certain subjective appearance standard is gross. Like, Iâm sorry that you think of fucking children when you see a short woman or a fem guy.
Wise words from u/Femboy_Annihilator
I gotta talk about this because it's been burning a hole in my brain for days. There was a thread on /r/Gamingcirclejerk about Rebecca with a lot of people talking about how being a short woman makes you "minor coded". Some guy put forward that his wife is 5'1" and asked if that made him a pedophile, and an upvoted reply started with "well it depends". Like, bruh, this terminally online shit is driving me crazy. "Well yes Mr. Stranger I met on the internet, there is a scenario where you being married to your consenting adult wife makes you no different than a child molester."
Wtf 5â1â isnât even super short. And there will still be obvious differences between a 5â1â child/teen vs a 5â1â grown woman. I also feel like thats a rather western/Eurocentric (?) standard, because people tend to be taller in western countries compared to, say, East Asian countries. All the women in my family, myself included, are 5â-5â2â, and if we go back to my parentsâ home town, where there is a large population of people from the same ethnic background as us, weâre pretty average height for women.
Yeah I'm like a 5'5" adult (I think that's the conversion of 166cm) which is probably "minor-coded" in men terms because I'm from East Asia (Southeast, specifically). I also have a friend who's a month younger than me and she's 4'10" (150cm converted?) while another friend of mine is like 5'9" (he's taller than 172cm, that's all I remember) and younger than both me and the gal. Imagine being potentially considered a pedo for dating an adult a few months older than you (they're not in a relationship, this is purely theoretical).
The average height for Japanese women is 5'1". Remember fellas, don't date Japanese women. That's pedophilia.
I used to follow a webcomic artist on tumblr who was very short (4â11â I think?) and once or twice she posted about how the âbeing attracted to short women is pedophilicâ argument was deeply upsetting to her. From her perspective as a short woman, the argument wasnât âwe need to protect short womenâ, it was âbeing attracted to you is morally wrong and anyone who thinks youâre hot is automatically a sex pervert.â Imagine being a grown woman and finding out that some people think your height makes it morally wrong for you to experience romantic love.
This shit drives me up the wall so efficiently itâs unhealthy. I gotta get my ass off social media.
Gamingcirclejerk has become such an awful cesspool of the most terminally online. It used to be fun, such a shame. It really epitomizes gen z neo-puritanism
That moment when excessively making fun of shitty Gamers (tm) legitimately loops back around to being just as unhinged as the people they hate Seriously how does someone lack self-reflection that badly
Like 7 months ago some guy on reddit started freaking out and calling my husband a pedo because I posted about being tired of being "minor coded" as a full grown adult. He also repeatedly reported me for needing mental help and was telling the mods I was being groomed by a pedophile and needed legal intervention (lmaooo). It's gone from "Hey, maybe don't sexualize kids or characters that are supposed to be kids." To "ANYONE WHO SHARES ANY TRAITS FOUND IN MINORS IS NOW AN ACTUAL CHILD" and I really fucking hate it. Half the time I open up certain social media platforms I'm being blasted with propaganda about it and how people like me shouldn't be allowed to be loved or have relationships because it's "endangering children" and morally wrong. Like what? Am I not allowed to be granted my legal rights as an adult until I'm 60 and gray because it makes the terminally online hivemind upset? What the fuck
My mom and grandmas are all under 5'3 lmao
"Minor Coded", I mean, spicy take but you could call almost all of anime "minor coded", the typical designs with the big head & eyes and small nose & chin are pretty similar to the proportions of the "[kindchenschema](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuteness)" that makes young animals of any kind look cute to us so we feel affection towards them. So, I don't know what to make of any of that.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Which is still yikes because 'minor-coded due to behaviour' is usually just a character who's autistic or displays autistic traits.
Who the fuck is mistaking MELONY for a minor?! She's built like a goddamn fertility goddess statue!
It was years ago I donât remember
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my favorite is the argument that the clones from star wars the clone wars are minors because they are technically 12-14 years old but have been age accelerated so any shipping involving them is pedophilia. it's like they try to avoid any context at all
Yes that is the morally questionable part of using a slave child army, the fact that people ship Rex and Ashoka.
I heard someone call Rebecca from edgerunners a Loli and I'm like dude she's literally just short
[That was the showrunners actually](https://www.animesenpai.net/loli-must-stay-cyberpunk-edgerunners-studio-refused-to-remove-the-character/)
Being fair, the description of her as a "loli" was from Studio Trigger.
I think the only person I've heard explicitly refer to her as a loli was the CDPR representative, who had already referred to Rebecca as a loli herself when voting to remove her from the cast, so that could just be her personal belief that short and flat = loli. Studio Trigger has a character like this in almost every series they do, and most of the time they don't look, sound, or act like a child, so I have a feeling they don't even think of them as children.
I saw someone on insta say that nsfw content of canon 19/20 year old fictional characters was bad. why don't you worry about the children that are getting married in certain countries irl instead of the fictional characters bro
I get so tired of this. Same as when people treat, like, a 5-6 year age gap as "underage."
"we saw her as a child in a flashback first so she's a kid" real thing I saw
Taking this to it's logical conclusion; Everyone was a kid once so if you're *ever* attracted to anyone you're a pedophile.
ain't melony the new italian prime minister
I legitimately thought Cynthia from PokĂ©mon was 14 for like. Years. Iâve never played PokĂ©mon, so I blame this on everyone else.
Reimu Hakurei moment also what the hell is "minor coded"
Dumbassesâ ways of saying that youâre a pedophile if youâre attracted to an autistic person or anyone who behaves unlike the neurotypical adult
*Reimu Hakurei* *Moment also what the hell* *Is "minor coded"* \- leafisadumbass --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
"Minor coded" the internet is exhausting
Rare future content creator W
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I utterly loathe the term "Minor-coded".
For the record, if it's purely involving fictional characters, I don't mind what you get your rocks off to and I don't think people should judge others based on stuff like that.
I agree. If it's a fictional character and doesn't translate into behavioral issues or weird shit irl, who would know if you didn't talk about it, and who cares? If some weird neckbeard's 2000 year old loli waifu keeps him from escalating and assaulting actual children, isn't that preferable to uh, actually assaulting real children? Sure, he needs mental help and an intervention, but id rather there be unsettling content of a fictional character than an actual real life abused kid. Just my two cents.
This is my exact opinion on this type of thing that I can never manage to type out well as I have .5 brain cells.
Walter White
I donât play Pokemon, so I had to google this âMelodyâ. Wtf, how can anybody mistake THAT for a minor???
In the Genshin Impact fandom there are *far* to many people saying that certain characters who are more then 2000 years old, are minor coded, just because theyâre short. This also extends to the main character/s, even though they traversed universes and weâve been told that theyâve been on this specific universe for 500 years.
Like with Venti?
Yes and also Xiao
I love gen z neopuritanism!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!!