Frequently Asked Questions

Or, rather, frequently sent asks. But it does get tiresome having to repeat myself

• “It’s just a fictional pairing. Shippers know how to distinguish between fiction and reality and if they don’t they shouldn’t be on the internet. It doesn’t have an affect on real pedophilia/abuse.”

First off it’s pretty gross to think only those who are “mentally healthy enough” are allowed to use the internet. Also you might want to check out this post, all of the links in this post, this post, or even just scroll through this blog filled with personal stories from csa survivors about how these kinds of ships impact them negatively and have even caused their trauma.

Ironically this statement in itself is an effect that these ships have on people. It’s been so normalized on the internet that it loses its shock value. If you were to ask, say, anyone in your life who doesn’t hang around fandom areas of the internet, what their opinion on this is, what would it be? If you told them there are subcultures on the internet who love children’s shows but write about scenarios where kids have sex with their relatives, what would their reaction be? I’ve had to explain these things to both my psychologist and psychiatrist so I know exactly what it is and it’s disgust!

• “What if [underage character] is aged up?”

That is a really bad thing to do if you’re going to put them in sexual situations, pedophilic relationships, or otherwise inappropriate scenarios. Think of it like waiting for a child/teenager to become legal so that you can have sex with them without getting in trouble. Gross, right?

Bottom line is, if someone has aged up a character for these reasons, at some point even if for a split second, they looked at the underage character and thought, “I want to see them in a sexual situation but I know that’s wrong so I’ll make them older so no one can hold it against me.”

• “I’m a CSA/abuse survivor and I use this ship to cope.”

Unfortunately if you post/reblog things about the ship(s) on a public blog you’re doing just as much damage as nonsurvivors who ship it. Abusers don’t care if you have a little warning on your page asking not to spread your cope ship works. Kids who stumble upon it will still be affected. Coping is important but so is protecting other people. Please keep this in mind. Plus, retraumatization is not a healthy coping habit so for your own health it’s best you work on gravitating away from it anyway.

• “People will always ship what they want. You can’t stop them and there’s no point in hating it.”

I know it’s always going to exist. As nice as it would be, I know we won’t be able to stop everyone. But it’s a problem these ships always get so popular in fandoms. I want to spread the information I needed when I was younger, and the validation that kids the same age as these fictional characters have every right to be uncomfortable with and avoid people who drool over their age group.

Real People Shipping

• “What’s wrong with shipping real people?”

It’s dehumanizing, invasive, and sexual harassment.

• “How is it dehumanizing?”

Real people are not the equivalent of fictional characters. They are regular human beings, like you and me, with thoughts, emotions, opinions, relationships, talents, and struggles. They deserve the same respect you’d give your friend or a stranger. Unlike fictional characters, real people can see all of your content. They aren’t lines in a book or on a screen that you can make headcanons for and push relationships onto, they exist in our world with us and have their own identities you can’t project onto.

• “What if they’ve said they’re okay with it?”

Honestly a lot of public figures who say this only do it because they’re pressured from their fans and don’t want to disappoint anyone. Even if they’ve said they’re okay with it, play it safe and respect them as people. Don’t treat them like dolls.

• “What about shipping real people who are actually in a relationship?”

The pressure of fans doing this will strain the relationship and the possibility of disappointing shippers might make the participants stay in an unhappy relationship longer than they’d like to (this happens a lot in youtube communities). I know you think you’re being supportive but just, please don’t ship real people. It’s never okay.

Bottom line is don’t be weird.

Other

• [Question about age gap relationships in teenage years]

Something an alarming number of people deny is that age gaps between teenagers can be predatory. My stance on it: any age gap bigger than one year apart is pushing it. Two years difference max. If they’re even younger, like in the preteen years, no gaps at all is best. My two year rule doesn’t apply if the older person is 18 and dating a 16 year old unless they’re both still in high school (otherwise the 18 year old would be…an actual adult). The “this 18 year old is a pedophile for dating a 17 year old” straw man usually happens when teens date within the same grade and one has a birthday before the other so there’s nothing wrong with that. Even if there’s only a year’s difference between a middle school student and a high school student, I don’t trust it. There’s an even bigger maturity jump between middle and high school students even if you can’t recognize it at the time. I feel like this sentiment gets misunderstood a lot to mean older teens usually look down on younger teens for being younger so if one actually interacts with a younger teen respectfully that must mean it’s predatory. Absolutely not. I myself am friends with a variety of people my age and younger, even going as young as the 12 year old I babysit. It’s unbelievably easy to talk to someone as an equal and joke around and have fun no matter their age without pursuing a romantic relationship. Just like with any other relationship you have, like towards teachers or grandparents, you judge what is appropriate for those conversations and adjust accordingly. That’s all. As a side note, I generally do not trust adults that are super attached to kids ships. I think it’s creepy that adults are so invested in the love lives of children but as long as they aren’t sexualizing them I prefer to just steer clear from them.

• “Why do you hate vegans?”

Short answer: they’re annoying. Long answer: I don’t actually hate vegans unless they give me a reason to but I do stay cautious around them until I know they’re safe. There’s a lot of classism, ableism, and racism in vegan communities and since the more annoying ones have started calling people “carnists” and generally have a pretentious air around them, accusing everyone else of hating animals, saying things like we’re “putting baby corpses in [our] mouths,” and even though usually they preach about understanding people with eating disorders, they attack everyone without bias until they’re told this person has a health issue and even then don’t consider that other eating issues exist besides anorexia and bulimia so their resources for going vegan despite those are useless. They also just generally ignore mentally ill people with sensory issues who have complicated relationships with food and are too picky to limit their diet more. I’ve seen the classism and ableism addressed a lot but this post also addresses the racism.

I have no problem with posts that outline how being vegan can be beneficial to both you and the world around you but the thing about those posts is they usually have some sort of message like, “don’t knock it ‘til you try it! Everyone should go vegan, save the earth!” And oftentimes it ends up sounding like people who are unable to go vegan are burdens on our society so everyone else needs to do their part to fix the damage they do. I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve seen about how great our planet would be if everyone went vegan and basically wishing everyone else didn’t exist anymore.

• “Can I complain about something/ask you for advice/vent to you?”

I used to say yes, absolutely, I’d try my best to help you feel better. Unfortunately though I’m going to have to stop doing this. It put a great amount of stress on me to try to respond in the best way possible, put the responsibility of dozens of people’s mental well-being on my shoulders, and put me in a loop where every few weeks everything would just get to be too much and I’d have a breakdown. I’m finally starting to focus on my own mental health and recovery, which is…pretty big actually because I used to disregard my own thoughts and numb my own emotions for the sake of not inconveniencing others, believing I don’t matter. There are plenty of other blogs like mine and general venting blogs that will listen and try to help, I’m just not one of them, sorry.

• “Mind if I talk/ask you something about [not social justice related thing]?”

To be honest I’m usually only interested in talking about my hyperfixations. You might be able to notice what they are because I tend to talk about them a lot. Gravity Falls, Pokemon, Mob Psycho 100, Kekkai Sensen, and Danny Phantom are always favorites of mine.

• [Something about racial issues]

I’d prefer not to say much on this topic myself honestly, even if I do reblog a lot of posts I agree with. I’m not white but I’m white passing so my experience with racism has been minimal and I don’t want to pretend I’m some sort of expert. My family assimilated and I’m trying my best to learn what I never got the chance to growing up regarding my culture. I can only talk about things in relation to my own experiences. If you want to talk about mixed race stuff, sure thing (specifically I am of Mexican descent). But if you have a question regarding antiblack racism, I really shouldn’t be the first person you go to.

• [Something about Steven Universe/Hamilton/Hetalia/Homestuck/etc], “What’s wrong with ____?”

If you send me something like this it will just be ignored. I’ve answered this dozens of times, I have a decent tagging system so you can look into it yourself assuming you’re not sealioning, and I’m definitely not the only person who has ever critiqued these medias. If you personal message me about it, don’t expect my patience, I hate getting those messages anyway but giving people the benefit of the doubt I’ll usually just throw out a sentence or two. In other words you won’t get very far so don’t bother me.

• [Something about drama with a certain youtuber from summer 2016]

This drama is over. Don’t bring it up. If you’re wondering, here’s my final post about it, including apology. I don’t even remember what started the drama tbh. I think I made a snappy comment on a hypocritical post of hers that crossed my dash.

And you know what? Even though I do regret that, I don’t trust anyone who still supports her. Even if you were aware she drew teenagers sexually as a younger adult and never removed these drawings, I might have just side eyed you because it was years ago but if you still support/reblog her now knowing that at 27 years old she spent two days on twitter screencapping our blog, vagueing us, and retweeting mocking tweets from her group of 20 something year old friends of whatever a 13 year old, 15 year old, and 17 year old said, you need to check your morals. The icing on the cake? The only adult on the blog at the time, Kara, was 19 and open about being a csa/rape survivor who was preyed upon by a much older man, even putting it in his mod bio and talking about it occasionally. Someone made a post saying that since Kara was the only adult on the blog, that made him a pedophile and after going through the notes on the post I saw that she liked it. Kara was willing to try to discuss the issue with her as adults until he saw that.

In short: fuck Kylee Henke and every single person who supports her. I’m not perfect and I messed up but that’s what teenagers do, she was more than a decade older than most of us and publicly mocked us with the unrelenting support of her thousands of fans. Our blog went from about 200 daily visits to 5,000 and we got hundreds of graphic rape/death threats.

• “What’s your stance on the ace discourse?”

Don’t ask me about ace discourse. I’ll put my thoughts here because if I answer any asks about it it will start something. I used to say it was okay to IM me asking for clarification on anything here, but that just ended up starting ace discourse again so any messages about this will be ignored and blocked. If you sent an anon this means you’d be IP blocked so if you wanted to interact in the future you wouldn’t be able to.

I think both sides do horrible things so no matter what side you’re on you need to continually check your behavior.

pro ace in lgbt spaces: This side is extremely homophobic and ableist. Stop using “allo.” Replacing this with another word that means the same thing isn’t the solution either, it’s still sexualizing people who don’t want it. Stop demonizing people for their sexual wants/needs. Stop saying that if someone breaks up with someone who is asexual it’s abusive. Some people have incompatible needs. It happens in relationships and it’s healthy to end it if someone’s needs aren’t being met and the relationship is miserable. Stop gloating about how you won’t get any sexually transmitted diseases. Not only is this the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen but you’re also talking about 1. aces who were raped and 2. aces who still engage in sexual activities, so you’re not even talking about aces at this point, just people who don’t wish to have sex and are lucky enough to not have experienced that forced upon them. Stop saying things that suggest you’re more intelligent or focused or whatever for not thinking about or wanting sex. Stop saying cishet people can opt out of being cishet if they don’t choose to identify that way. If someone is cis and only attracted to the opposite binary gender, no matter in whatever way, they’re cishet.

“H*mo” is a slur so stop using it to describe sexual or romantic attraction. Just use gay. If you’re cis and het (regardless if you’re ace or aro) or just cis aroace stop using the q slur. It isn’t for you. “The [q slur] community” isn’t a thing and a lot of lgbt people have expressed discomfort with this because despite what you might think, that word has always been and is still a slur. Yes, even trans people (like myself). Saying q***r is a slur is not terf rhetoric or only something truscum/transmeds do. Your insistence on using this slur as an umbrella term for our community in the aim of making sure transmisogynists know trans people are included only alienates ALL lgbt people who haven’t reclaimed it, which means you’re inadvertently excluding trans people. By definition the word means weird. They refer to us as “the q***rs” BECAUSE being lgbt meant you were a freak. That is why SOME people have decided to reclaim it (“yeah we’re freaks, so what?”). YOU can use this word for yourself, take away the power it has on you, but you can’t force that on anyone else. Our community being “the q***rs” has a violent, bloody history and it’s not progressive to try to rebrand that sentiment today.

Stop hijacking posts. Shaming gay people for their attraction is homophobic. Diverting a post that was originally about sex (usually educational, sometimes just jokes and #relatable things) and turning it into a discussion on asexuality or a game of “you won’t have to worry about this if you’re ace,” is wrong. That’s basically just celibacy, which you all insist isn’t the same thing, and is something most schools teach during sex ed courses instead of actual knowledge they need because simply telling people not to have sex won’t stop them, it’ll just send them off to do it improperly and hurt themselves/their partner(s). It helps no one, let them talk about and educate others on sex.

The ableist part I mentioned earlier you might not get so let me introduce something called hypersexuality. It’s not an orientation, it’s a mental illness and it can be a result of sexual trauma. People with this disorder think about and crave sex constantly for various reasons, including as a means to self harm, so every time you make a post about how silly it is to always think about sex, you are harming these people. You are shaming mentally ill people, mostly survivors of sexual abuse. A lot of them already think they are worth nothing more than a sex toy to be used by others and you’re adding to that.

Another thing is aplatonic or any other -platonic “orientations.” Aplatonic is not yours. It was coined by a mentally ill person to describe how trauma has affected their ability to form friendships. It has nothing to do with quasiplatonic relationships. The person who made it up isn’t even aro, they were simply inspired by the terms in the community. It isn’t an orientation.

Alright, I’m going to have to explain this really carefully.

I am in love with my best friend, a story you’ve heard if you’ve seen any of my posts. I’ve come to realize that this is not the first time. However, I have also been really evaluating my other friendships lately. If you saw my post in the Tea and Sympathy on not loving my friends, good, but in short I’ve come to understand that most people in my life could be considered an acquantance at best. Now, I have a few friends who are nice, but I don’t feel a psrticular bond with them. If the aromantics are to be believed, platonic love is a type of /love/, and a love that is not to be under-estimated. It runs deeps and means a lot.

I have never had that.

Sure, the people I’ve ‘friended’ are nice, and I’d want nothing but for them to be happy, but I don’t really have a bond with them. The only people in my life that I’ve bonded with are those I feel romantic attraction to.

So, don’t get me wrong, I have friends and care about them; but love is a powerful word, and one I cannot apply to them.

I’ve theorized its because my parents were abusive, so I never learned how to love those I don’t feel romantically for; bur how would one even change that? I’m an adult now, and I don’t know if I can learn to have feeöings for friends.

That’s where the title comes in.

Aplatonic.

I was just wondering if anyone has shared my experience? Do you think aplatonic can exist? Its not that I don’t want to bond, but I just feel so indifferent. I’m not neccesarily looking for a label, but I’m more looking for others who share this experience. I feel empty to feel as I do.

Thoughts? Opinions? Cake?

I have a tag for bad posts and behaviors that come from this side to use as examples

anti ace in lgbt spaces: You need to stop shaming survivors as well. Just like “inclusionists” shame hypersexual people, you shame repulsed people. You make valid points about how harmful it is to complain about pda and I’m behind you 100%. Gay love is shamed enough by society as it is. I’m repulsed, I’m uncomfortable with pda but small, common gestures you usually see in public like kisses and hand holding are okay, making out or anything further makes me panic. That’s where I come from on the pda debate, things that happen in public casually on a daily basis shouldn’t be censored. However, repulsion is different for everyone as it can also develop from trauma so please keep this in mind. Something as small as holding hands could actually make someone panic so you shouldn’t belittle that either. It can even change on a day-to-day basis, some days you’re fine with anything and everything, you might even be hypersexual, on bad days even thinking about these things will cause you great discomfort. Don’t think this is me saying there’s nothing wrong with this. I, and everyone else who struggles with this, should be able to admit to themselves that this isn’t healthy and needs to be worked on. But that’s something you do at your own pace. I agree that labeling holding hands as pda is wrong, so maybe instead of mocking people who need that tagged (or outright refusing to tag as some people I follow do) you could change the notion behind it and tag for “romance” instead? Gay love is a statement, one that shouldn’t be censored, but romance is more inclusive and doesn’t carry the connotations that public displays of affection = bad.

I really wish people from this side would stop assuming everyone they’re arguing with is a cishet aro/ace or cis aroace. You invalidate people and honestly this side of all people should be aware that plenty of people struggle with internalized bigotry. Marginalized groups can say bigoted things about groups they belong to, it’s not uncommon, it’s the society we live in.

Stop making fun of harmless aroace headcanons. Of course headcanoning gay and bi characters aro/ace is homophobic, and it’s frustrating that fandoms always by large headcanon the awkward/nerdy characters aro/ace but call that out for what it is - homophobia and ableism. That meme that’s been rising lately like “___ is always talking about ___ and never sex, dare I say…asexual?” It originates from a Garfield post where another meme, “he’s so brave and so fucking orange,” is from too. It was made for no other purpose than to make fun of people who want to see themselves in characters. I’ve even seen some people say asexuality isn’t real, it’s either internalized homophobia, trauma, or mental illness and for this reason they are entirely against the concept of asexuality as an orientation, or lack thereof (and for this reason see no issues with saying they wish all aces would die). All of those things could be true, I’ve seen plenty of people who identified as ace because they were struggling with these things and have had to work through it to shed the ace label. Ace tumblr is awful but there’s a point where you stop calling out their bigotry and start harming survivors (and neurodivergent people who may be aroace because of their mental illnesses but are comfortable with it) who just want to think the characters they relate to the most are like them.

As for aplatonic, I understand why this gets mocked so much. The ace community stole a term from neurodivergent people (see above in the pro-ace bit) and stripped it of its meaning. Admittedly it was a questionable term to begin with, but I still don’t think it’s right to mock. The -aesthetic -sensual orientation nonsense you can go wild with but I’d leave aplatonic alone. Not only because of its origins but because there’s just something about laughing at people for not being able to make friends/not having friends that seems cruel. If people are claiming it’s an orientation shut them down, but don’t forget about ableism in your fight against homophobia and transphobia.

In general this side has turned very mean spirited. Most of the content has turned completely away from educating people and calling out bigots, and is mainly just laughing at a cringey group of people for trying to find self confidence and love for an aspect of their identity they’ve been struggling with. Avoiding the main discussion here, regardless if it’s systemic oppression or not it’s a fact aces still face social backlash for perceived deficiencies. They aren’t inherently a privileged group and don’t deserve the same treatment as straight, cis, or even sapiosexual jokes. You hijack every positive post or headcanon even for characters it wouldn’t be a problem for, and even for characters the source material itself hints to being aroace. Or, taking it a step further, if a character has been undeniably confirmed, stated word for word in the source material they are aroace, a lot of people from this side go, “nah don’t like that” and make a bunch of content undermining that. You’ve crossed the line from laughing at cishet weirdos to just being cruel a long time ago.

I have a tag for bad posts and behaviors that come from this side to use as examples

Personal thoughts: I don’t like the split attraction model or idea of a spectrum because if I say I’m asexual I don’t want people to wonder if I’m still interested in dating or if there’s a possibility I’ll experience sexual attraction. I want to be able to say I’m asexual and have it be assumed that I’m completely devoid of attraction, no implication that I’m talking about sex at all. It’s an invasive concept for an identity that should be general, like gay, bi, lesbian; they’re shortened from the original words of -sexual suffix and don’t immediately link attraction with sex. I think it’s frustrating feeling left out in spaces with people who are supposedly like me because they use the aroace label then gush about their crushes because, turns out, most of them are grey or demi. What’s the point of having aro/ace spaces if people talk about crushes and stuff? It’s confusing having all these super specific orientations that are supposedly asexual/aromantic but also describe situations in which said person experiences attraction. It’s an oxymoron, an asexual that experiences sexual attraction. However, despite my personal feelings I don’t think they should be mocked because terms like these could help survivors understand and describe the way their trauma has affected them in this area. Yes, there’s no “normal” amount of attraction a person feels, but anti-ace-in-lgbt people at the very least you should consider this possibility, as many followers of my own have told me they find comfort in labels like these due to traumatic experiences.