I thought I'd share with you a moment from my life that was really eye-opening, something that can better help my audience understand me.
I already told you the story about my experiences with Sankaku Channel and DeviantArt, but those experiences led to some interesting things in my development. Like I was saying before, I found myself in a position where art that fascinated me was being restricted, and it could only be found in terrible places. For the longest time, I had naturally assumed I was worried about being a pedophile, someone attracted sexually to children.
But then I went to that secret society and started commissioning art. No longer did I have to wait for material I wanted to appear; I just had to buy it and someone would do the job. That gave me a sense of power I never thought I'd have, since I was in full control over what I received. And well, let's just say the stuff Xierra does for me is quite different from her usual stuff!
A while back, I discovered a discussion on my homebase about the nature of loli art, and whether liking it for the kids was bad. The discussion got into a bit of "well, you might not act on racism, but it's still a thoughtcrime" (which isn't a bad POV), but the thing I learned about this discussion was the idea of what the art I commissioned and saved represented.
I saved situations from movies and TV, but not true pornography. I saved embarrassing moments and cartoons. I commissioned characters I thought were cute based on episodes I really enjoyed. And there's also the sociology angle, where the pics match up with a pic from an existing episode, especially later on with Krizeii's recreations.
I came to the conclusion of one thing: The fact that it was about kids was never due to attraction to them. It was about appreciation for things that fascinated me, of cute characters, pleasing forms, and fun scenarios.
It's that kind of thing that helped me work out a lot of my issues, and I'm glad to have made that discovery. It fills me with a sense of confidence and makes me feel at peace. I'm not a monster, far from it. I'm a fan, and this is how I express my fandom.
Now if only there were an easier way to explain all that...