NSFW Fanfiction
(A slight trigger warning that I will be showing tags of NSFW fanfictions that are very descriptive and may be uncomfortable to some. If that bothers you please do not read on)
Fanfiction has been around for many years, starting in the 19th century with Dracula, continuing into Star Trek and exploding on the the web with many different fandoms. Fans create their own characters (Y/N inserts stand for Your Name) into a canon world of their choosing. While many kinds of fanfiction are just personalized storylines to live in the worlds they want to participate in, I wanted to talk about the more NSFW side of fanfiction and what the consequences could possibly be. On sites like Wattpad and Ao3 (Archive of Our Own) are the main sites for these more NSFW fanfictions, and are tagged as 18+ or as the specific sexual content of the fanfiction. I am relatively new to fanfiction, my first interaction coming from curiosity from a TikTok recommendation. Which TikTok is a huge platform in which users can share their NSFW recommendations and the algorithm will target the correct fandom that is tagged in the hashtags. These fanfictions are usually marked “Minors DNI” (Do Not Interact) which is a precaution I hardly see working, but necessary nonetheless.
The fanfiction sites I mentioned have a small screen that makes the reader confirm their age to proceed, again a very feeble protection.
I’m interested in how these fanfics came about, with censorship in the 2000’s, Tumblr users created the terms “lemon” and “lime” to replace the words porn and erotica, so these fics have been around and popular at least since then. As I ventured further into this category I found something rather interesting as a medium for fanfiction, audio fanfictions. Creators like King Akira and Yagami Yato (I will expand on her in a moment) on Youtube record their voice acting of characters in fanfiction scenarios. Some are very SFW, encouraging the listener to do well in school or being supportive in a hard time. Others, that you can pay for on their Patreon, are very NSFW. This new medium for fanfiction has only come about recently with YouTube but is just as effective. Yagami Yato was just in a bit of a bind as she send out her NSFW audio to a minor who asked for it. Many people think this is a form of abuse as she is exposing a minor to NSFW content, but again the platforms I discussed earlier only have a button to press to proceed. Many people do have a problem with the written and audio sexualization of underage characters, where is the line drawn in fiction? Like many fans I have watched anime since I was a child, and some characters do not age or age as quickly as the people who watch them. Do the NSFW fictions stay away from these characters because they are canonically minors? Even if their show is over 18 years old? If the show itself sexualizes them, does that mean fanfictions cannot? There are many cases where a character looks childish on purpose but are canonically thousands of years old, is that different? It is a debate I have seen frequently in the fanfiction world. I pass that on to you, what do you think?
