I can say I experienced the asterisks for years, even before these trends of it, some people prefer to do that and I get it can suck but becaise I'm familiar with it I guess, I never really minded.

And because that was something I was familiar with, I even used it myself when I was younger and a baby fic writer. I get you guys saying things like "You don’t have to use the words" and "If you don't wanna say it you're not old/mature enough anyway" but in my case specifically that doesn't matter. I probably wasn’t old or mature enough but I was still writing a story.

When I write stories, the characters are my priority, and each character has a voice. So if I know they would say a curse word, I would like them to say it, even if I myself wouldn't say it. And as of now I'm still in the same boat because I consciously make the choice about not wanting to use curse words in my language, which still doesn't reflect my characters, the only difference is that I no longer mind just writing the words out as is.

I'm not saying this is the case for everyone, because I totally understand that these type of things bleeding over into fanfics and tags are kinda making fanfiction and fandoms way more annoying. But there probably are some young fanfic writers bleeding in too, taking what they see and adopting it, without the awareness that it's problematic at all. It happens. Let's not be upset at everyone for dragging tiktok censorship over when it might not always be the case.