I’m not trying to attack you, but do you know that proshipper means someone who supports and romanticizes pedophilia, incest, and abuse? Your reblog on that post seems to read that you think antis just hate on people for having ships they don’t like. But it’s completely different than that. Just looking on the proshipper side of Tumblr and the internet and you can see people happily shipping children and adults and making nsfw content of such things.
i appreciate that you're not being outright hostile, but i have to say, that on its own put you above basically every anti i've interacted with.
i understand where antis are coming from, i really do. there are a lot of things on the internet that make me deeply uncomfortable, including the minor/adult ships that you mention. i don't want to anything to do with those kinds of ships and i would be happiest if i never saw them again. which is why i'm proship.
nine times out of ten, if i see that kind of ship brought up on my dash, it's because i was following an anti without realizing it, and they brought it up unprompted and untagged, to talk about how bad it is that they exist. they are the ones putting that kind of content in front of my face and making it harder to avoid.
the thing about people who ship those ships is that they're generally very aware that not everyone wants to see that kind of content, and so they tag it. they make sideblogs to talk about it. they don't go out of their way to shove it in people's faces. that means i, and everyone else who doesn't like it, can avoid it.
what antis want is for it to not exist at all. they want the tags to be purged and blocked, and for anyone who uses those tags to have their accounts deleted. and sure, that might get rid of some of it, but do you know what would happen to the rest? it would stop being tagged. people who don't want to see it wouldn't have the tools to avoid it. this isn't just a hypothetical, that's what's happened any time a fan space has tried to do that.
that's not even getting into the rabbit hole of what should be banned and what shouldn't. obviously any content that depicts real children or real life abuse shouldn't exist and shouldn't be allowed to be posted, but basically any platform that people use already enforces those policies, and there's not much of a slippery slope to go down there. if it involves real living breathing people being abused, it's bad. end of discussion.
but the same can't be said for fiction. ask ten antis for a specific list of all the content that should be banned, and you'll get ten different answers. what about kink? what about roleplay? what about horror and murder and anything that involves fictional characters being graphically tortured? what about people using art to process terrible things that have happened to them? what about art that uses dark themes as a horror element? if you just want to ban anything questionable to anyone, that's the line of thinking that gets any mention of lgbt existence banned. and again, this isn't just a hypothetical, this has happened before, and that's generally where it leads.
i know, from personal experience, that antis do, in fact, send harassment to people just for shipping things they don't like. i've gotten accused of absolutely vile shit for shipping two fictional characters who were both consenting adults. i've seen ship wars turn into moral battlegrounds, over ships that an average person wouldn't bat an eye at.
the thing about "romanticization" is a whole other can of worms. the anti logic goes like this: if someone sees something (even if it's very obviously fictional) in a positive light enough times, they will start thinking it's okay in real life, and go on to hurt real people. the problem with that is that it's just. blatantly untrue.
if it were true every horror movie fan would be a serial killer, every person that studies dark media would be an unhinged psychopath, and everyone who is into ddlg would be a pedophile. but they're not. they just aren't. people have directed movies just as fucked up as the darkest shit on ao3, and are still capable of being normal human beings who know right from wrong in real life.
even if someone is that impressionable, scrubbing away the existence of every piece of questionable content isn't going to solve their problem, because they're still going to be vulnerable to con men, scams, and cultists. the only thing that would actually materially help someone like that is developing their own morals and critical thinking.
children are also more impressionable, and there's a lot of content that's not suitable for them, but that doesn't mean that content shouldn't exist. it just means that they should stick to spaces designed for them (which most social media sites, tumblr included, are not) or, if they're old enough to be responsible for their experience online, they, or a trusted adult in their lives, should block and filter out things that they aren't comfortable with.
which is what everyone on the internet should be doing. it's what i do, and it's made the internet a much more pleasant place to be. and it's why i sometimes worry for antis mental health, especially teenagers, because they're being told it's right and moral to seek out content that makes them uncomfortable and to engage with the people making it. and that's just. really bad. it's not good for the creators that they're harassing obviously, but it's also really bad for them! it's not healthy to seek out things that make you feel bad, and it's a terrible internet safety lesson to teach minors that it's okay for them to seek out and engage with people making adult content.
individual harassment and crusading is never going to succeed at removing dark content from the internet. it just isn't. at best you might get a small percentage of people who create that content to stop sharing it, at worst you're just going to make people stop tagging it, and either way, you're exposing yourself to things that make you feel bad, when you don't have to.
if you want to materially change the type of content you see, you can. the block button is your friend, use it liberally. same with content filtering and tag blocking.
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(DCXDP) The obligations of a rogue versus those of a parent (Pt. 5)
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Tw: torture scene (GiW agent receiving), general angst, canon-typical violence (DC), nobody is having a good time
Will be crossposted to AO3 eventually
(Masterlist/subscription post)
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It was pretty easy for Danny to forget that Dr. Crane was a rogue at times.
Most of the time he wasn’t comically evil, like what he’d expect of a Gotham rogue. He was helping Danny, even if only because he didn’t want to be taken in by the GiW as well. He was even downright nice most of the time, or at least neutral.
Sure, he had a strange obsession with fear and psychology, but that wasn’t really out of the ordinary for Danny. It didn’t feel like living with a rogue, just like…staying with a distant relative, or something.
He seemed like just an ordinary person.
Today, though, Danny was brought back to reality.
The GiW agent they’d tracked down together writhed on the ground, screaming in pain and terror. Scarecrow was sat a few feet away, setting up a syringe of the antidote he’d made.
After a few more moments, he injected the man with the antidote, watching him like a hawk the entire time.
Suddenly, the man surged forward, lunging at Scarecrow with a feral scream.
Unluckily for him, though, he was still weak from the fear toxin in his system, and from the beatings he’d received prior. Scarecrow easily wrestled him to the ground, settling himself on the broad part of the agent’s back with a vice grip on one of his arms.
“Let’s try again,” he said sharply, all of the warmth Danny had grown used to gone from his voice. “Where is the GiW base of operations?”
The agent took several shuddering breaths before spitting at Scarecrow, defiance and hatred written all over his face.
For just a moment, the room was utterly silent.
“Fine, have it your way.”
Scarecrow began to twist the man’s arm further. It wasn’t long before the agent began to squirm, then writhe, beneath him. Danny’s stomach churned.
“You know,” Scarecrow began, almost conversationally, “there are plenty of jobs that one can get without the use of their legs, especially with the level of education you have. Anything that doesn’t involve hard labor, really.”
The man’s face was beginning to turn red in his struggle not to scream. He took in gasping breaths, the way that his mouth moved almost reminding Danny of a goldfish.
(He felt awful for the comparison, but it was true.)
“However,” Scarecrow continued, “I find you’d be rather hard-pressed to find a job without the use of your arms. Especially in a place like Gotham, where you can always be replaced by someone eager to do your job for even less money. Of course, you could most likely coast off of savings and severance pay for a while, but…”
He leaned closer to the man’s head, his voice lowering.
“Would you be able to live like that? To live with yourself, if you no longer have a purpose?”
He allowed the agent a few seconds of rest before increasing the pressure on his arm. The agent gasped, letting out a strangled hiss. His arm bones were making fascinating noises in response to the strain. Danny felt sick.
“You seem like a rather driven young man. I’m sure your family would hate to see you unmotivated, directionless. Would they resent you, do you think?”
“Fuck you, you—”
The man was cut off by his own scream as Scarecrow finally allowed his arm to break, audibly splintering into thousands of useless shards of bone.
He had the exact pressure memorized. Clearly, he had done this before.
This was wrong. This was wrong.
Shouldn’t Danny step in, do something?
“That won’t heal cleanly. Even with the best medical care in the world, you’ll end up with permanent damage.”
The man below him wheezed and sobbed, choking on air as Scarecrow let go of his arm carelessly, letting it flop back onto the ground.
“Just the sort of thing something like you deserves,” Scarecrow hissed, his voice cold.
“You tortured a child, and you enjoyed it. You laughed with your friends about it. In your notes, one of your friends complained about the screaming,” Scarecrow brought his leg around, grinding his boot into the man’s broken arm. He howled in agony, writhing uncontrollably.
“Was it inconvenient to him, do you think? Too loud? If you were joking about it, clearly you thought so, too. I could fix that as well.”
He drew out another needle, this one once again filled with fear toxin.
“Scarecrow, wait,” Danny choked out.
Scarecrow turned to look at him.
Even his posture was different than usual. He looked… stiff, more like an animal than a man. When he tilted his head at Danny in a silent question, it looked like something in his neck had snapped, his head lolling to the side.
Danny wondered if he was consciously moving like that, or if it was habit at this point.
“You—we don’t have to do this. We can get information some other way, right? You don’t have to…”
Danny looked down at the GiW agent below Scarecrow. He didn’t even have it in him to glare up at Danny like he had before. Instead he laid limply on the ground, tremors rolling through his body uncontrollably.
“We’ve exhausted every other option and you know it,” Scarecrow said, his voice low, “this is the only way we can move forward.”
“Still, I—I don’t,” Danny swallowed, his throat tight, “this isn’t—this isn’t right. Isn’t there some other way to do this? Like—a truth serum, or something?”
“Truth serums are notoriously unreliable. They’re almost as bad as lie detectors. We’re much more likely to get a reliable result from this.”
Danny just stared at the GiW agent and his splintered, ruined arm. He began to weakly wriggle in Scarecrow’s grasp, which was graciously ignored.
He vaguely remembered himself doing the same thing when he was on the operating table; even if he knew there was no chance of escape, he still thrashed and screamed, desperate to get away. The jagged I-shaped incision on his torso felt uncomfortably warm.
What was there left to say?
“The Bat does the same thing at times, you know,” Scarecrow said, “him and the rest of his brood. By using my toxin, I’m actually lessening the amount of permanent damage that I’m doing. Physically.”
“Still, that doesn’t make it right,” Danny said desperately. “Even if—even if everyone in the world did this, it wouldn’t make it right.”
Scarecrow hummed.
They were both silent for a moment.
His next words were gentle, absurdly so when compared to the scene in front of him.
“I would love an alternative. But…”
He shrugged, hand coming to rest on the break in the GiW agent’s arm. Even without applying any pressure, the man stopped squirming immediately.
“There aren’t any other options,” Danny repeated, his voice flat and his body numb.
“Yes,” Scarecrow said. “I’m sorry.”
There was a pause. No one moved a muscle. Eventually Scarecrow spoke again, his voice strangely empty.
“You can stand outside and keep watch, if you’d like. At such a short distance their radars won’t pick us up.”
Danny said nothing, leaving the room silently.
He sat outside for quite a while.
He was grateful that Scarecrow had, with his help, dragged the agent to one of his previous hideouts. It was soundproofed, after all.
He was glad that he didn’t have to hear the rest of what Scarecrow did to the man.
After what felt like an eternity, Dr. Crane left the building, joining him outside. He guided Danny back to his beat up old truck and they drove home in silence.
“Did you at least…do you know where they are, now?” Danny asked as they entered the apartment, his voice small.
“They didn’t share the details of all of their locations with any one person. I know where one of their locations are, but not their main base of operations.”
Danny felt disgusted. With himself, with Dr. Crane, with the GiW.
He was disgusted by the agent, too. Did he just hate the restless dead so much that he would prefer to be tortured than to give them the upper hand? Did he really think he was in the right?
Was there a chance that he was?
Danny felt very, very small, and very stupid. Stupid and weak and cowardly.
“Danny,” Dr. Crane spoke, his voice soft.
“I’m truly sorry that this is happening to you. I really, truly wish that you didn’t have to endure my company. I…”
He fell quiet. Danny wondered if he was just saying this to pacify him, or if he truly meant it. He wondered if it really mattered in the end.
After a few moments of silence, Dr. Crane sighed, looking truly pained.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
Danny was quiet.
“I’m going to bed early,” he finally said, turning away and leaving without a second glance.
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