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Restarting the don't panic thread after the timestamp glitch (ITT: I panic)
This was the OP of a thread I made in Yack Fest:
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This post was inspired primarily by a hysterical email Ki TA sent me after Fast Eddie called him a pedophile and banned him for saying that Lotte no Omocha! wasn't a pedophilic work. It was also influenced by a mod's (who shall remain anonymous) assumption that, since Lebrel said that shota isn't legally child porn, and that calling it child porn could bring the FBI down on us for "hosting child porn, " she must be a pedophile. In general, it's a consequence of the recent atmosphere of fear.
I know of one pedophile in the history of TV Tropes. That person was banned, and I'm not complaining about that. But when people who aren't [X], for any value of [X], need to fear that they might be accused of being [X] and banned, that creates resentment, and resentment drives people away. This wiki can't function in such a state.
I have no idea whether I'm even allowed to make this thread. If it's locked or purged, I'll shut up. But I do think we could all benefit from a proper discussion. (Although most of this has been going on in Wiki Talk, I made this in Yack Fest because it's less formal and arcane, and I think we need to discuss this informally.)
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KiTA had emailed me a link to a copy of the post that had gotten him banned. In one post in that thread, I included that link. This was what Bobby G said before he locked the thread:
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For Heaven's sake. When Fast Eddie thumps a post, you don't start another thread and repost it there. That will also get you banned.
To everyone who is upset: yes, "paedophile" is a very serious accusation. It is not a term we throw around lightly, and if Eddie has banned somebody for being a paedophile, you can be sure he had a reason for doing so.
I know we aren't popular right now, and I know people are worried. Don't be. We are not initiating a "witch hunt", and if you're not a paedophile, don't act like one and you will be fine.
I believe that once the panel thread is up and running, you will see that they are handling this reasonably and fairly, and that will assuage your concerns. In the meantime, please have some patience.
But I am going to lock this thread, because it is pure scaremongering.
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So yeah, I'm now banned, and I think most posters will have no idea where I went.
Comments
-clicks on Lotte No Omocha link-
lololololololol
But seriously this whole thing is getting kind of silly.
Wow, I only expected the pages to be wiped and locked.
I'm not handling this well. At all. Bobby G is saying that I was banned for "scaremongering," and I have no way of explaining anything. (I did send a PM to one person who asked for context, so I guess that's something . . .)
Writers' Block is by far my favorite writers' forum. If I can't participate in the next writing contest, I am going to start freaking out even more.
Wait, you got banned from TVTropes too? I'm so sorry, I should have warned you that they're not conductive to open discussion over there right now -- and probably won't be for a good while, if ever.
I was banned from TVTropes for suggesting that perhaps the purge wasn't needed, because we can discus tropes and works that are reprehensible and have obscene contents without being reprehensible and obscene ourselves. If that sounds familiar, it should -- Eddie's "Content Policy Change" thread was basically a point by point rebuttal of my position -- which he deleted, renamed all my posts as being from "Troll Poster," then replied trying to make it sound like I was suggesting something completely off the wall. I wasn't, and he knows it -- but I was defending my arguments and well defended arguments that go against ideas for "his" wiki aren't acceptable, apparently.
When I contacted the staff (as I wasn't just banned from the forums, I was banned from everything, including appealing said ban or reading PMs), Eddie said I could come back, but "pedo was out," porn was out because we're not smart enough to talk about it, etc. I said I was fine with that and suggested an alternate solution (the "exh solution", which I'll detail in another post).
I then noticed in the special thread made for appealing mistakenly cut works that a handful of people were appealing Lotte No Omocha, which is a work I rather enjoy, but has a rather outrageous, alienating premise. It's certainly not pornographic, and anyone who has read it knows this -- it's far, far tamer than "My Balls," for example, and definitely shouldn't be lumped in with Kodomo No Jikan.
I posted a request for it to be uncut, with a description of the plot and a quick summary as to why despite the alienating premise ("10 year old succubus needs to form a harem to feed off of for when she hits puberty") it's actually clean -- to wit, the main character is a single father (unheard of in manga) and just refuses to play along with the situation, because his daughter is also 10 years old (and he recognizes the princess needs a parental figure more than she needs a "harem").
But people see "10 year old succubus" and their higher brain functions completely shut off. It's no different than idiots missing the entire point of the "Lolita" novel. "Oh, it's got a Pedophile in it, ban it!" "But he's supposed to be a villain protagonist, the author says we're supposed to hate him and..." "Pedophile, BAN IT!!"
Fast Eddie pulled the exact same stunt -- he deleted my post, renamed it "Troll Poster", banned me again, called me a "Pedo Apologist" in an email and blocked me from the entire site, including appeals, PMs, reading the forums, etc. He didn't do anything similar to the other ~7 or so people requesting the same work be unblocked, but my writing was longer than a few sentences and actually tried to explain why it's a valid work worth tropeing about.
Fortunately this time I saved my post on pastebin so at least I can show people I'm not freaking nuts.
He's really losing it over this whole thing. A year of SomethingAwful trolling him is really taking it's toll on the poor guy.
The "exh" solution:
I mentioned in the previous thread about how a lot of manga sites had to purge themselves back in 2010, just like TVTropes is doing -- although they didn't start banning people left and right over it. It was the same thing that appears to be happening now -- someone was upset about Kodomo No Jikan, suddenly the site's advertisements were getting targeted and the site was being starved of money.
Well, E-h (I won't give out the full name, some of you probably know it) was nailed pretty hard by the ad-trolling, as unlike the other sites, e-h actually hosts pornographic manga. Lots of it. It's basically a gallery based version of "That Imageboard that Shall Not Be Named." Their solution was actually pretty brilliant:
* If you log into e-h, you can access every page on e-h.
* Galleries are tagged via their content.
* A page tagged with unacceptable content (loli, shota, etc) is automatically hidden, and gives an error message when loaded.
* If you are logged into e-h, you can load their sister website, exh. All galleries load just fine on the other site, including those with unacceptable content.
* If you are NOT logged into e-h, the sister website exh displays a picture of a panda and refuses to load.
Now, we could apply this to TVTropes. We already have something similar -- the YMMV system. YMMV tropes are flagged via a tag, and if they appear in a main trope page a banner appears when editing. Those bullet points that include a YMMV trope are automatically colored orange to make them stand out.
So, my proposed solution (which Fast Eddie did not acknowledge when I emailed it to him, hopefully he's at least thinking about it):
* A team of moderators can flag a trope or a work as being "Not Family Friendly." This would cause it to give an error message when attempting to load it on TVTropes.org.
* Trope entries in other pages that mention this work would be automatically hidden on TVTropes.org using CSS. They would appear while editing but a casual glance at the site would not mention them at all.
* A secondary domain name, or subdomain, would have access to the same TVTropes database. However, on this subdomain, all tropes would appear as normal. (Not entirely dissimilar to how Darthwiki looks completely different to TVTropes.)
* This subdomain would have a different theme in order to visually differentiate it from the main TVTropes site.
* To prevent abuse, a special "recent edits" page could filter out all worksafe (so you only see "non family friendly" edits) edits.
It's the best of both worlds. It would take maybe a long weekend to hammer out the entire thing -- you set up 2 CCS files, and set up code that if a "not family friendly" trope is there, the class ID of that bullet point is marked "id=nsfw". Heck, you could probably copy the entire code from the YMMV system with only minimal changes. Bam. Done.
And it wouldn't alienate half the website and generally step on all the toes that this current nervous breakdown is doing.
So, Bobby G says I won't be allowed back unless Fast Eddie himself gives permission, because of "misleading posts" in Absent People. (I asked Juan to say that I'd been banned, and that long story short, it was for trying to argue that ^ shouldn't have been banned.) He also says I couldn't possibly not have known that I wouldn't be banned.
Edit: And with the exception of Tomu, no one seems to even care that I was banned. Even Rottweiler's ban caused more protests than this!
Edit to the edit: If it seems like I'm taking this way too hard, it's because TV Tropes was (and still is) one of my dreams. I've spent years trying to promote unity and harmony amongst its members--I've even converted at least one troll into a valuable poster. I'm having a hard time accepting that I've probably lost that.
Welcome to the blacklist.
You can email the staff via the "contact us" link at the bottom of the pages. Be polite. I would phrase it as you being upset that people are throwing around the word "pedophile" so lightly more than anything else (something that honestly does offend me a bit), but it's ultimately up to you. I hope you succeed. It worked for me, but then he just banned me the second I returned to the forums, so... Keep your head down.
My current plan is to wait ~3-6 months and appeal again then. Maybe he'll have calmed down by then.
I really wish I knew exactly what pushed Fast Eddie's buttons re: me. Not sure if it was my mentioning that someone on the "anti-lolicon" side was openly mocking the entire conversation on the SomethingAwful thread, or if he just didn't appreciate a well written post arguing against his planned "porn purge", or if he just hates anime and manga fans in general.
I get the impression (there was a quote to this effect on the SA thread) that he doesn't really pay attention to the anime and manga side of things on TVTropes, at all. Said quote had him also suggesting that all Anime and Manga fans "accept pedophilia as just a fact of life," which... is certainly an opinion.
Edit: For more fun, if you noticed your thread that got locked in Yack Fest got derailed pretty hardcore on the last few pages? Well, looks like about the time it started getting derailed, the SomethingAwful TVTropes trolling mothership thread noticed and linked to it.
If you think that's a coincidence, you haven't paid attention to how SA works.
Well, the site was originally developed with Western, live-action TV in mind. Then us animu and vidya folks poured in.
I'm going to try to avoid being inflammatory here, as best as I can. I don't frequent this forum often—mostly I'm on TVT itself or debating Flyboy on BtL II—and I like to avoid causing a stir when I do show up.
That said...
I think that you're wrong, Feo. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough that I think that a suspension from the site would be at least somewhat justified. A permanent ban? No. But a suspension? Yes.
Here's my position:
- I really couldn't care less if you bitched at Fast Eddie, but the fashion in which you did so gave me the distinct impression that you have no sense of self-preservation. You are smarter than that. Act it.
- Making a duplicate thread on the matter on Yack Fest was just a bad idea, regardless of whether you were in the right or not. It gives others the impression that you are unable to let things go, and frankly baits the moderators like no-one's business.
- KiTA was unfairly banned, yes, but that does not automatically justify anything that you do in opposition to the ban. It's faulty logic and you should know better than that.
- While I agree that keeping articles on certain repugnant works on the site is not categorically a bad idea, as well as that the purge was ham-fisted and overly broad, you don't seem to be taking into account the fact that these articles could easily be triggering for many people. Indeed, you seem entirely focused upon ethics without thought of the actual implications of what you advocate.
- Speaking of which: Stop assuming that you are on the moral high ground here. It's this attitude that got you banned, not your opinions. No-one likes someone that thinks that they are the arbiter of truth in a situation.
- Of course we're being trolled. Look at how weirdly obsessive some of the site's enemies are. But thinking in the long run, assuming that it doesn't actually "work": Is this a bad thing for the site or a good one? Ask yourself this.
- Let this statement not let you or anyone else assume that I dislike you, Feo. You are a perfectly nice person and, to whit, a pretty decent writer. This does not preclude me from thinking that you are not right here; in fact, it only bolsters my desire to tell you out, because I think that you are better than this.
Yeah. Feo, you really shouldn't have posted that thread. I emailed you cause you made the previous thread on IJBM about the purge and I wasn't sure how long it took for IJBM accounts to be approved, I didn't intend to incite you to riot on my behalf or whatnot. I feel like a complete ass about it. I hope they unblock you soon.
I honestly don't see much of a reason to not remove the Lotte no Omocha! page. Something like say, Fate/Stay Night, has extremely little porn in it that is barely relevant to the story. But Lotte no Omocha! is about something that's killing TvTropes' advertisement access, and there is no real sense of anti-pedophilia in it beyond Naoya saying that its too early for someone like Lotte to be doing such things. And also the OVA showed Naoya at age 12 or something having realdream-sex with an older woman who happens to be a succubus on-screen.
(guys how do I quote again)
That's certainly untrue, people who don't accept such things as just facts of life are considered immature or enemies of the modern world. Saying that it isn't would be kind of like denying the existence of natural disaster.
Though if Fast Eddie himself doesn't believe such a thing is true, I wonder how he would react once he discovers the existence of rape fantasies as commonplace.
Actually no, this has nothing to do with the ads anymore. The "adult" purge is something completely different, it started after the first cleanup / "pedo gush" purge was underway.
We can discuss works and tropes that are perverse in nature without being perverse or obscene. No one's trying to shut Wikipedia down for discussing Lolita or for having a picture that one infamous rock album with the nude preteen on it, for example.
As for the Lotte No Omocha OVA, I haven't watched it but do have it downloaded, I'll fire it up real quick:
Zooming to part 3, the 9 minute long 3rd part about the queen and Naoya meeting up involves... the queen in a bikini, a rather out of nowhere bathing scene (nothing new to bonus OAVs from a blue ray release), about 5 minutes of them talking about the world the manga takes place in and the queen ranting about her life, and... her kissing him in his sleep. It then flashes to them floating nude in a dreamspace with a bit of fanservice of her, some suggestive words about "floating," and... that's it.
Nothing more explicit than her bare bottom is shown -- and I need to repeat that the Anime dialed the fanservice *way* up compared to the manga.
Ironically, this same flashback was shown in the latest 2 manga chapters. The most explicit part are pages 20 and 21, which involve again, them floating naked in a dreamscape, some lense flair to hide her nudity, the two kissing and some suggestive hand poses/dialogue -- same exact setup as the anime, except with no nudity (lens flare) and some added hand poses/dialogue.
Hardly "on screen" sex, although I will admit the whole situation (15 year old girl with a kid) is kinda screwed up -- something that is openly pointed out and lampshaded in the manga and anime when he points out his age vs his daughter's age.
Still, the work simply isn't about that, and taking it out of context is silly. The vast majority of the manga has been either worldbuilding, or the interaction between his daughter and the princess.
I didn't realize the ads didn't have to do with this anymore, sorry.
Anyway, I actually do like Lotte no Omocha (though I could have sworn the manga had more fanservice than the anime) I just don't see why it shouldn't be removed from tvtropes based on the standard Fast Eddie is applying.
Well sure it should be removed based on the standard Fast Eddie is applying in that it does have young characters who are sexualized to some degree. The problem I think is that Fast Eddie's standards are kind of completely ridiculous.
I suppose with that condition -- "based on the standard Fast Eddie is applying" -- you could probably consider it purge worthy. It shouldn't be, since things like "Little Miss Sunshine" or "Blue Lagoon" aren't, but if we're taking that specific condition, I could maybe see it.
But is even debating that worthy of a permanent ban from the entire site, editing and PMs included?
Besides. The standard is crazy. How do I know this?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Main.PeterIsTheWolf
Here's Fast Eddie, the guy currently on a "lets purge anything pornographic" crusade, editing the works page of a pornographic Western furry webcomic about an underage and... lets call him "hilariously overendowed"... werewolf boy and his 12 foot tall underage werewolf girlfriend.
This edit is post-"porn purge," btw.
Now, should they delete the works entry for that comic? No, it's a fine works page, fairly neutral and professional, et cetera, et cetera. Same as a good chunk of the purged pages.
But combine this with the comments about FE not paying attention to the anime and manga tropes, him suggesting that all anime and manga fans "support pedophilia" or whatnot, and the fact that the vast majority of the purged works were anime and manga, well. It reeks of double standards.
Ah yes the anime-hating-and-oblivious nature of Fast Eddie. I know it well. Too well.