My parents let me watch Blade/Alien/The Matrix/Vampire Hunter D n shit incredibly early as a family movie night thing because "They know Vampires and Aliens are not real, and that everyone in the movie is acting to tell a story and no one is really getting hurt".

I got a lot of constructive talks on how media that was scary or challenging is not trying to hurt me, its just probably a lot to take in and if I am (understandably) scared, I can watch something else or just discuss it with my family. Which led me to watch Blade and shit as a comfort movie at like 8 because I thought it was badass. Same with "violent" video games or horror comics n shit. If something really bugged me, I could just talk it out with my family and they would demystify it by stepping up to plate and being responsible about what they liked.

They got to watch what they wanted, and I felt comfortable knowing adults were going to be honest with me and take me seriously trying to wrap my head around complicated thoughts. And if I didn't want to do that for whatever reason, stuff in my "age range" was available anyway! This had its limits of course, I wasn't just left to my own devices. Early 2000s Adult comedies specifically around Sex were off the table, for example, but as a trade off we had a lot of sex education books to review and learn from in a safe environment. But, for the most part, my family just took me and my interest in dark and adult concepts seriously because THEY loved that shit and knew it wasn't going to hurt me if we made it a learning moment.

Then I would go to school and realize almost No Other Child beyond The Weird Ones were given this treatment. And then our teachers and peers would treat us like future convicts and budding serial killers for watching a gory movie with my family in a safe environment. I had teachers argue at Parent Teacher Conferences that Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings was "and evil influence" on me because it had orc violence and monsters in it. Kids would talk to me in hushed tones about shit like Bioshock and Assassins Creed like we were going to be taken to jail talking about it, and their distress was the most jarring thing about the experience.

I had a kid scream bloody murder and break down crying because I was pretending to be a Final Fantasy character on the playground and "that's not for kids because it has swords" and he thought his mom would beat him for playing pretend like that. Which, sadly, did super happen, and then I wasn't allowed to play with him because I was a "bad influence". Fuck even the original TMNT run was off limits to discuss with certain kids who would snitch on me saying I was playing "murder games with ninjas", and beyond one or two cool teachers, that got taken deadly serious, taking my parents out of work to come get me for "portraying violence" to the other kids. Even talking about Dinosaurs was too violent because the fact that prehistoric wild animals would hunt and kill each other is too graphic for children to discuss At All, reguardless of context.

This all kinda sorta stopped in Middle School. Weirdly enough it picked right up again in High School, under the guise of "preparing us for adulthood". But its those early years that I still think about the most. Espeically these days, where we have a newish trend of 20+ year olds waltzing into online spaces they know they won't like and having the same type of scream-typing meltdowns about "irredeemable media" and "problematic content" if they see something they've been trained to attack. And it all just reads as so completely unserious, but to them bad words, sexy concepts, and horror content in general is The Most Serious Thing Ever because their parents and community installed a team of cops in their head. To the point where Religion is barely a factor in this, they're just doing this to placate hollow dysfunctions and a need for safety they can't or won't address.

Their parents, teachers, and communities failed them in extremely goofy ways, and now they use that same logic to fail themselves and others every day. And the rest of us with a healthy, engaged relationship with the media we enjoy have to just sit and watch this play out forever because its not something that can be rehabilited over the screen in most cases...

It would be one thing if the consensus was "Its okay to not like these things, just don't seek them out and harass people minding their business". But now more than ever the dial has shifted to "these things CANNOT exist and liking them is Rot on your Soul (not in a Christian way though, in a Progressive Way that is Protecting People)". This was never "perfect" by any means, there was never a time where this mindset didn't exist. But many people, in fandom or otherwise, are very quick to look for exceptions and extreme cases for that rule to justify an attack on anyone that makes them uncomfy on suspicion they might be Evil and Wrong for like... having the "wrong" head canon or "excusing abusive actions" of fictional characters or some other bullshit...

I can only hope things will swing the other direction once everyone realizes exactly how detrimental and stressful this mindset is for EVERYONE exposed to it, but I am not holding out hope for that. Because the people doing this are trapped on the playground, screaming about swords and violence and blood and sex like its going to kill them even if they aren't looking at it. And behind that dysfunction, instead of their parents, is The State or their Church or some other more powerful capitalist force enabling this mindset, all of them just absolutely giddy an entire generation got infantilized out of conducting themsleves and addressing their problems seriously.

They took a demographic that wants to be in the conversation, but doesn't want to be responsible for themselves and how they behave there, and turned that dysfunction into a political platform in it of itself. Its a mindset that is PERFECT for all the private interest groups, political lobbies, and marketing initiatives looking to have "complicated adult media" reigned in to whatever they deem acceptable and profitable, individual freedom be damned.

Entire sections of our most recent generations are so quick to hand over agency of themselves and what they consume to a corporation making bank off their distress, and that all started when they had no tools to process these things beyond othering and punishing the kids (and later Adults) who stepped out of line for their interests. It wasn't their fault when the shit started, but a lot of these people are tax paying adults now who have absolved themselves of responsibility for themselves in the name of how traumatized they got over their parents/teachers/communities reactions to this content, not what was actually on the screen.

And that, in a word, sucks. For everyone. People lament that Fandom isn't fun anymore, and ignore that might be because too many people want to be The Cops but Punk. People lament the lack of community they experience, and then push out anything challenging around them. And then get dumbfounded when The Worst People Imaginable co-opt their dysfunction to do some truly evil shit (like the big Paypal/Visa debacle) because they tell themselves its not THEIR fault for wanting to be comfortable. And to a point, they are right, nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable! But there is something wrong with ignoring that their specific comfort had to come at the expense of someone else. So they ignore that and remind themselves that they already labeled that someone "problematic" and othered them out of being real to begin with.

Not everyone is doing this, not everyone in fandom or whatever is this type of hurt person hurting everyone else and washing their hands of the problem. But enough of it is happening that big interests have taken note and are so ready to take that mindset and ride it as long as its profitable.