Thread by @spumdonor

OH, SO NOW "THE JOHN K RESPECTER" IS GONNA LECTURE US ABOUT SEXUAL DEVIANCY IN CARTOON FANDOM

(thread)

the online "Animation Community" (insofar as it even is a "community") & the Toon Biz proper both have a problem w/ sexual deviancy. if you don't think they do, skip this thread, I'm not going to try convincing you. and I don't have any SOLUTIONS, just some rambling observations

to begin with, cartoons are POWERFUL because they have the ability to EXAGGERATE & IDEALIZE our world, to bend its rules, into something resembling a schizophrenic alternate reality. Live action filmmaking has this ability too, of course, but in cartoons / animation it was innate

It's because cartoons (at their best) have this attitude of malleability to distort & reshape representational reality that average people are attracted to them EVEN when the shows go out of their way to make animation as visually BLAND as possible. THAT'S how entrancing they are

Here now I'm going to bring up the Autism spectrum, not to attack ppl on it (I have autie friends on Twitter & irl) but to connect to larger patterns when it comes to the perception of cartoons as an auxiliary reality- or a substitute for it - & how this relates to sexual desires

Cartoon exaggeration creates CLARITY of communication (whether in Comics or Animation) so many Autists & Aspies, who have a harder time interpreting the subtleties of REAL human communication, love them. even BAD CARTOONS become easier to "read" & connect with than reality

(oh and ofc the giant eyes of most anime characters have always held a big attraction for autists, in case you never pieced that one together)

autists & aspies make up a sizable portion of the "toon porn" scene just as they represent a lot of fetishist interests: their ability to focus like a laser on specific (& impossible) things. w/ toon porn, their interest is not in cartoon PARODY but forms of at-will transhumanism

Cartoon porn has a natural draw for sexual paraphiliacs because of cartoons' ability to reshape representational reality at will. in the venn diagram between autists & the immature-adult-fan-of-kids-cartoons (we'll get to them next) u have a perfect storm for fetishist obsessions

the Coomer Epidemic is closely linked to immature adult fandom of kids cartoons: against the backdrop of proliferated porn & breakdown of healthy family formation encouraged btwn men & women (for a variety of reasons) Toon Coomin' is a mental purgatory btwn. childhood & adulthood

To mold one’s sexuality with cartoons leads one to define it through cartoons (speaking broadly, even 3D poser art that depicts physically impossible, autistic fetishes are still "cartoons")- seeking out cartoon sexuality is the road to polymorphous perversity of ur sexual psyche

Animation has intensified attraction 2 socially aliened ppl (on the spectrum or not) in the modern post-digital world, when childhoods spent increasingly in front of screens & not around other ppl have manifested more symptoms of social (& thus sexual) stiltedness even in normies

(God help all these young kids growing up around everyone wearing facemasks, by the way, further stunting their brains' abilities to recognize emotional cues from facial expressions & communicate with their fellow human beings - on top of digital video screens being ubiquitous)

I've made fun of Animaniacs as the "theater kid" cartoon because traditionally, school drama clubs were where socially awkward kids gained a context to be extroverted - but their annoying ideas of charisma & comedy were so obviously learned from imitating the media they consoomed

There's nothing wrong w/ that per se, but it's worth noting whether they're "theater kids" or not, that personality type seems to learn a lot of communication "skills" from CARTOONS - back in my day (the 90s-2000s) I could always tell who was learning behavior from anime, too

Incidentally, have y'all ever seen this clip of candid 7/11 video from 1987? look how ANIMATED normies used to be, before the digital panopticon surrounded us. hell, even before Cable TV & video games had everyone in front of screens 100x more than before

the flipside of Cartooning's focus on clearly telegraphed cues of emotional communication - and their place in socially awkward and/or autistic ppl's social development - is the ambivalence of modern cartoons when it comes to what is "age-appropriate." yep, it's pedo-talk time

To state some very obvious facts: cartoon characters rarely age. This creates a kind of emotional anchor that ppl who have problems w/ maturing into adulthood (basically everyone now) will cling to, among other retained kid interests- a lifelong identification w/ child characters

I've said b4 that if you're still watching kids' cartoons after 12, you're emotionally stunted. Does immature cartoon fandom turn u into a pedo? if media hyperreality manifests autistic symptoms in ppl who aren't on the spectrum, could pedo symptoms also be manifested over time?

Consider how sexualization of teens & adolescents by adults is something clearly increased over the decades when it comes to live-action Hollywood product - even if u don't think it's EXPLOITATIVE, u have to admit it's more LIBERAL. Have CARTOONS been exempt from this influence?

oh hey here's some unrelated pics of Dan Schneider & his children's programming that millions of kids grew up on btw

a big factor in this problem is Western Animation has almost no true "Adult Animation," just a hard line btwn idiotic Beanmouth kiddie fare & Cartoon Shitcoms / puerile Stoner Cartoons. Hence the rise of what I call "YA Cartoons," which I tried to define:

https://twitter.com/spumdonor/status/1349961932212641793

In my thread decrying "YA cartoons" I described the pattern of teens & adults forming parasocial relationships w/ adolescent characters, including interest in their romantic lives. This isn't necessarily pedophilic, but at the very least it's a weird state of arrested development

Many teen & adult fans of adolescent cartoon characters were probably close to the characters' ages when they first became fans. But many are not & simply refused to stop watching kids' cartoons. YA cartoons give them the excuse of having "omg MATURE THEMES" (that made them cry)

I don't think these YA cartoon fans even notice they're "sexualizing minors" when they gush on social media about a 12-14 year old cartoon girl's first gay kiss at junior prom or w/e, just b4 decrying anime fans as "pedos" over Uzaki-Chan without any sense of cognitive dissonance

you might be asking, "JKR, do you REALLY think ALL these post-adolescent YA cartoon fans have problematic attractions to the characters??" well, why don't u try Google Image Searching any of these shows a bit & see how easy it is to find porn? who-all's looking at all this stuff?

@tacticalfiend puts it more pithily than I could, here. Loli respecters don't consider themselves pedos PER SE (& we'll get to them) but this is almost analogous to YA fans not having any self-awareness about developing crushes on minors, as adults

https://twitter.com/tacticalfiend/status/1295421774306385922

a mutual has DM'd me in the course of this thread about The Loud House being an "outlier since the premise is inherently incest bait." Look - why are ANY kids' cartoons being perceived as "incest bait" to begin with? I'm trying to describe the conditions we're currently living in

I'm old enough to tell you that cartoon porn has been on the internet since the very beginning, but I don't think a lot of you realize that it was originally a very fringe thing, confined mostly to anime / hentai. Normies consume Rule 34, now

https://twitter.com/gravenebula/status/1356338279445114883

so, my personal theory about what goes wrong in someone's brain when pedo impulses cause fixation on pre-sexually mature children - or even when an adult has regressed pedophilic attraction towards sexually mature adolescents- this is a crossing of wires between "CUTE" and "SEXY"

God (or gnon if you prefer) programmed us to respond to the cuteness of children in a positive way. I think pedos have an imbalance (or whatever) which mistranslates this as sexual attraction - what's this got to do with cartoons? well, many cartoons are drawn CUTE, aren't they?

in the documentary "Crumb" (1994) Rob admits having what he describes as a strong sexual attraction to Bugs Bunny as a child - look, Crumb's not exactly a sexually normal guy, but what he's describing speaks to the magical power of Appeal in Cartoons & the intensity of BIG EYES

This is why normies will say "anime is for pedos," lolis or otherwise - and I'm going to defend the normies a lil' here because to be fair, BIG EYES are natures' way of signaling cuteness & innocent infancy, like babies - when adult characters have big eyes too, it crosses wires

Golden Age cartoons were "for the whole family," meaning an alchemy of violent slapstick + cuteness for the moms & kiddies + a little sex appeal for the dads. Now we have idiotic kid fare, puerile "Adult Cartoon Sitcoms" & YA in the middle. so where does that leave Sex Appeal?

There’s no real sex appeal in Adult Cartoon Shitcoms, so just as YA cartoons indulge their idea of "mature" themes, they also - oh so delicately - try to indulge their ideas about romance & "love." But the makers of these shows are just as immature as the adults in their fandoms

Rebecca Sugar's EE&E yaoi. Steven Uni "fusing" w/ adults. "12 Forever" creator scoping 14 y/o's. Alex Hirsch's teen pussy hunt. adult Owl House fans cheering a 14 y/o girl's bisexuality. "Star Vs" fans' own speculation. "Jared Shapiro." Loud House incest fans. Horny Ducktales guy

I think all the aforementioned ppl had their wires crossed at some point because the lack of clear delineation between childhood & adult life in modern society does manifest pedo symptoms in ppl's brains - & all Cartoonists are already a bit crazy from how they transmute reality

There's a quote I can't remember the source of, about how Hollywood doesn't make ppl evil, but it does attract evil ppl - the same could be said of the modern Toon Biz, which doesn't make Cartoonists into emotionally stunted perverts, but it does attract & even encourage them

pedo-symptomatic YA cartoon creators sexualize young teen & adolescent characters, emotionally immature adult fandoms of these shows consume porn of these shows on the internet - or at least sexualize them - & they never even think they're being pedophilic - "they're cartoons"

so yes, lolicons, my own Tangled-swords-to-neck-meme opinion is that if you don't think loli & shota porn are rewiring your pliable brain over time - just like all sustained consumption of porn affects your psychology - you're kidding yourselves. ALL porn induces sexual autism

the JP side of this is too much to get into on top of everything, but re: its consumption in the West? It seems the rationale of loli / shota / yaoi / etc Coomers is that it's not pedophilic bec. cartoons are an abstraction - I UNDERSTAND this argument, I just don't agree with it

the mental math of one who 1) jacks to lolis but 2) "would NEVER look at real cp & hates real life pedos" is someone who is roleplaying the psychology of pedos for a thrill- conflating "cuteness" w/ provocative "sexiness" and then trying that gaze out on "safe" targets (cartoons)

additionally many loli fans practice a kind of idol worship where they obsess over & collect art of these cartoon idealizations of adolescent (or younger) girls, in a kind of sentimental ritual- meditating on graven images of childhood is not necessarily sexual, but still stunted

(of course when they do want openly sexualize them & not even bother arguing that representational art doesn't relate back to the real world in any way, they'll go to more elaborate lengths which is where the hilarious "she's actually a 10,000 year old vampire" meme comes from)

loli respecters are quick to point out that Japan has lower per-capita rates of child sex abuse cases than America. I'm not arguing that this material encourages ppl to ACT on such fantasies - merely that any fantasy affects one's perception of reality. how could it be otherwise?

I meant to include Sailor Moon & her daughter earlier, as examples of ambiguity in kid characters having eyes as big as adult characters - the daughter's head shape / facial features aren't much different either, creating the child-like impression for so many adult characters

I once joked that if loli fans didn't want ppl 2 think they were pedos they should note that "loli" is short 4 "lolita" - I think desexualized appreciation for "cute lolis" is actually a dissociated instinct to express parental love for one's own children

https://twitter.com/monstermandude/status/1356377080733323264

anyways, when you talk about lolicon stuff, it's hard to do a 1:1 comparison with the perversion coming out of the modern West so I think I've said my piece about Japan, here- at least their perverted stuff is more explicitly out in the open & not so insidiously packaged for kids

Cartoons aren't REAL, but they represent reality & their mental magic relates back to the world of the flesh- even when conjuring the unreal, our brains conceptualize them into the real, just as disbelief is suspended when watching movies- no fantasy exists independent of reality

concerned-parents groups over the years who decried violent video games (they don't exist anymore, we're all screen-addicts) - they went wrong in trying to claim there was direct CAUSAL relation. if they'd said, "this stuff DESENSITIZES you" - that might've forced ppl to reflect

a healthy culture would have adult sexuality in cartoons MADE FOR ADULTS, but, more importantly - our culture should have a true sense of ADULTHOOD. they say American culture "worships youth" but really, we hate AGING. this is why the whole conceit of "YA" for anything is poison

btw, I opened this thread with a famous Tijuana Bible cover - many of those were ugly & crude, but some were actually cute & had heart - am I crazy for thinking that modern adults might enjoy seeing little sex-comedy animated cartoon vignettes like these? or hell, just do Jucika

in closing: contemporary cultural conditions of media hyperreality, the death of adulthood, & the very nature of Cartooning all contributed to the high degree of sexual deviancy in Cartoon fandom - but tbf, the arts are always susceptible to perverts w/ a shaky grip on reality...

Sci-Fi fandom in particular has a long sordid history of perversion - it's a private joke among feds that collectors of CP all tend to be Trekkies - novelists like Heinlein had a lot of weird sex stuff in their books - and then there was "The Last Closet"

amazon.com/Last-Closet-Da…

I think this is because writers (real ones, not Cartoon Writers lol) like cartoonists, create entire worlds from scratch & with this Godlike power comes the temptation to experiment, if only in thought, with breaking taboos - an addictive habit even when confined to imagination

sorry if I've offended any of my autistic or pervert mutuals today. love you guys uWu

(/thread)

PS. some of my mutuals are informing me that the Harley Quinn cartoon with the Vore joke is TV-MA like yeah lol I'm sure there aren't any children watching the Batman cartoons intended FOR ADULTS ONLY!!!!!

PPS. this always comes up when ppl argue about "sexualized women in video games" or comic books- the idea you can't have Sex Appeal in entertainment w/out it automatically being pornographic - the proliferation of porn into the mainstream is what did this

https://twitter.com/raptdonaught/status/1356304242135474176

PPPS. how did I forget to include this infamous Miyazaki quote about sentimental attachments to adolescent cartoon girls? ehh, draw your own conclusions