thelibrarina:
just wait until all the ao3 antis find out about
libraries
I am actually mildly pissed off at our local library right now for reasons that relate to this debate.
So I’ve been taking my daughter out to the libraries to get manga. She’s 12. I do not censor her reading, but she’s uncomfortable when things get explicit and I trust her to know her own limits. She got two volumes of a manga that was purportedly about a retired superheroine who discovers that her daughter has become a superhero with the same hero name she had, so she goes back into the field to protect her daughter. When she told me she wanted to return them, I kept them back because stories starring middle-aged mothers are of great interest to me, for reasons that ought to be obvious.
So I started reading the manga. In retrospect I should have been tipped off by the fact that the villainous organization is called “Blowjob”, but I’m so used to ridiculous mangling and misuse of English by Japanese writers that I ignored it.
Two chapters in, I quit reading. The villainous organization uses tentacle-equipped mecha to molest the heroine, did so the whole time she was a presumably teenage hero, and is still doing it now that she’s back in the game. Her clothes burst off of her when she fights back. A couple of assholes take pictures of her naked with their cell phone. Oh my God do not want. The casual and disgusting rapeyness of this story, the degree to which the audience is obviously supposed to be lecherous dudes who pretend to sympathize with the heroine while watching for the moment when her boobs are exposed… it’s horrible.
And this is not revealed anywhere on the back cover of the book. It’s presented as if this is a perfectly normal manga story about two superheroines, and the only hint as to what it really is, is the risque name for the villain group.
There’s no tags. There’s no warnings. The library had it in the teen section. My twelve year old checked it out of the library and read at least part of it.
And you know what? She’s not scarred for life. She’s probably grossed out – I was grossed out. But she did the mature thing and just said “ok, I want to return these because I really don’t want to read them anymore.” She didn’t cry or throw a fit or demand that I sue the library for letting her innocent 12 year old eyes encounter such filth.
I may, in fact, warn the library, because I don’t believe these are particularly appropriate books for a section where the most likely reader to pick them up will be a teen girl, and I don’t want the library to get sued by some other more hysterical mom. But see, here was an uncured experience in the real world with gross rapey subjects in fiction. This is real life, this is how it works.
Fanfic is tagged. You can choose not to read the subjects that trigger you. That’s not something real life gives you. So antis are going to attack fan writers and artists, who warn you what you’re getting into? Because that’s easier than going after the big corporations that publish rapey fan-service manga and then don’t make it clear on the back cover what the subject actually is?
No, that’s bullshit. Kids who do this shit need to grow the fuck up and take some responsibility. I taught my daughter to monitor her own reading and bug out when there’s something she doesn’t want to see, and not make it anyone else’s responsibility, and I’m kind of sickened at the fact that so many kids on this site have parents who didn’t do that.
Tags are there for you. Use them.
Anxiety-prone-human 