A few years back, I wrote a post on this site about bad experiences I had on Something Awful back when I was active on the site, mostly concerning ableism. I also shared this on other places, and people were generally supportive, but some of them defended SA.
"It's a lot better nowadays!" People told me. "C-SPAM is good!" They said.
It is not.
While searching C-SPAM for keywords that interest me (something I still occasionally do even though I almost never use the site anymore), I discovered that one of them dug up my post FOUR YEARS LATER in one of their megathreads for the others to attack. I told them I wrote it because as far as I'm concerned, if they made fun of me for it, that only further justified my decision to soft-quit the site.
And boy did they give justification to spare. It turns out they really like using the r-slur. They use it repeatedly. Including site staff. If you think this is a bad thing, they will accuse you of "using [ableism] as a cudgel." One of the site staff scraped my Hexbear post history so that he could (non-ableistly!) make fun of my emotional dysregulation issues.
They show just how in touch they are with the left by saying things like "god im so glad everyone realized this type of person wasnt helpful to marginalized people or the left and are slowly being sidelined" when every org I've ever worked with has had a zero-tolerance policy for the r-slur, and my comrades in my current org have been nothing but sympathetic when I told them about my struggles as an autistic person.
Hours after I'd gone to bed, one of them actually Googled my username and found my account on an image board and accused me of using the site for fetish material (even though I have only ever interacted SFW images on that site, but you know, they already decided I was guilty.)
Bonus: They also think Hexbear is a bad forum because we tell people not to valorize a guy who rails against DEI and worships Elon Musk.
Never been more glad I've left that forum. It's toxic and abusive in a way I've rarely seen anyplace achieve, and looking at it from the outside, I'm astonished I ever put up with it.
I can't convince you that its normal or something. But I feel like most people on sites like that who aren't full on
probably aren't there to sexualize the show. There's probably a surprising amount of attention to some nsfw art of adult characters that would get made, because I wouldn't be surprised if emotional connection from watching it as a kid themselves/other psychological shit would lead to a lot of people liking that stuff that otherwise wouldn't. But that's different from sexualizing the show as a whole (in the brains of most people, it would be too weird for me IMO). For the same reason that people can have fantasies over an actor in a tv show without feeling weird about watching it with their family, I guess (again I can't relate but I assume people do this).
Also it's just... that's not how that works. Yeah there's going to be creepers who are doing shit like this for creeper reasons. But that isn't directly correlated with pedophilia in the same way that being like, a "loli" creep is. Most non-pedo people (minus those who are extremely concerned about morality, which is understandable) don't think about it that hard and are probably thinking something along the lines of "hehe horny brain go brrr" and think the big tiddy anthro pony or however they tend to draw it is hot. I agree it's unusual for someone to sexualize a character in a kid's show, but if they're going out of their way to sexualize a specifically adult character it kind of nullifies that weirdness a bit. Because if they're a libertarian type than why would they limit themselves to adults? This conversation alone is proof that doing it just for clout reasons would be hilariously ineffective. More likely than not they just aren't attracted to kids because they aren't pedos. Its like how someone with like a, diaper kink, isn't remotely automatically a pedo, but I could see a pedo pretending to have a diaper kink as a cover.
Idk just please don't assume the worst of autistic queer marginalized people who are being harassed. I understand wanting to get to the bottom of things like this but I guarantee there's nothing more to it. Especially because members of communities being forced to be on the same sites as people who want nsfw stuff is not an unheard of phenomenon, especially with how many horrible people with way too much money and ego love to invade spaces like that.