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December 7th, 2025 - Ratings and Content Warnings

Gonna do more blog posts mostly just talking about random thoughts and such I've had because I want a place to talk and rant about things besides just social media and to organize some of my thoughts. Maybe I should do these monthly? I dunno but yeah these blog posts will be more rambly than cohesive.

Currently I've been thinking about the sanitization of everything and labelling myself as a "filth artist". Recently I uploaded Day 13 of my objectober drawing to sheezy and while I like sheezy and think it's currently the best available art site, my drawing got marked by mod mail with "heavy cartoon gore" and was thus marked as mature. Mature 18+ not suitable for children. Don't get me wrong I tend to mark my stuff as mature all on my own so it's not like I'm making content I want kids to see but it really makes me sit back in my chair and go really? What are we doing here? I've personally always struggled with rating and tagging my work, I'm very desensitized to everything and so I've tended to overcompensate as a result and while I do understand the importance of content warnings and rating systems I can't help but look around, older and seeing the sanitization and censoring of everything and think aren't we all going too far?

When I step back and look at my drawing of my sona eating a brain it's really not any worse than stuff I saw on television as a kid, hell Billy and Mandy had an entire 5 minute song by Aurelio Voltaire about an alien that eats brains, and yes I do have it in my music playlist. I'd say my drawing's no worse than any other depictions of zombies you'd see on a halloween display at the store, the only difference is I added a bit of blood and because of that I do wonder if it would've been marked differently had I excluded the blood. I'm not gonna fight with the moderators on this, it's their website after all, though I think they could stand to clarify the difference between the gore tags and the cartoon gore tags as the way the info is currently worded to me indicated that "cartoon gore" meant like candy gore or aliens with abnormal blood colors like in Homestuck. My friend Rick suggested it'd be better to instead change it to "gore" and "realistic gore" and I agree that that seems like a better way of tagging for an art website though also not perfect, after all when it comes to stylized works where do we draw the line between categories? That's the main issue that comes about with ratings and content warnings and there's a whole long discussion to be had about them that people have been having for as long as rating systems have existed.

An artist I follow online recently talked about a movie he watched called Aragne: Sign of Vermillion. It's an anime horror movie that as far as I can tell was mostly made by one person about spirit bugs so of course I watched it yesterday. I definitely enjoyed watching it though I'll admit I have no idea what was going on near the end but it is certified "the horror movie I have watched with the most explosions in it" and I'm planning to watch the prequel next. What's of note though is the artist I follow said the people they saw talking about the movie described it as shocking and fetishistic like guro and even linked a review that talked about the creator's most recent movie in the same series which I read through. Aragne is a very tame movie that's not to say it doesn't have "upsetting content", there's blood, twisted necks, a bit of body horror, and a girl gets her head cut off and yes there's a scene where the protagonist is naked, in the shower, but it's not very much and depicted in a way that really isn't that graphic. It makes me think of the people who called the first Saw movie a gory torture porn movie when it's not, people who really get your hopes up. Joking aside though I also think of the people who point at media and make videos on youtube like "this [kid's cartoon] was darker than I remember" and so on and how this turning of things into spectacle and sensation is a result of and contributor to the mass sanitization we are seeing.

I once saw a tumblr post state "this era is so conservative and we're not even gonna realize it until 20 or 30 years from now". A discussion I see online often is about kink gear and stuff in public, many queers stating "I don't consent to be a part of your kink." as if that were not the excuse for throwing queers particularly trans people in jail some years ago. How in some places queer people are still marked as mature, how my mother's ex boyfriend argued that I shouldn't be allowed around my younger sisters because of my own queerness, and man can we take just a second to point out how weird it is some people are fine with people wearing collars in public but it's oh so bad and a "sex act" if you attach a leash to it like are you for real? Many people argue it's not the same you see we know the difference between queerness and kink and stuff so that means the system is perfectly fine like do you hear yourselves? I genuinely think there is a huge problem with queers contributing to the conservativeness we are experiencing, hell they may be gay or trans or not cishet in some other way but I feel apprehensive to call the people who act like this queer. I kinda think we need to make queer mean weird again, be fucking weird with me.

I'm not saying show elementary schoolers happy tree friends (though that was the age I was when I sought it out) but when you consider how rating systems exist due to parents, often controlling ones being upset at things their children could access and how the average parent views their children as their property and not as an individual with their own internal world you can't help but wonder what goal are we contributing here when we base our own ratings and content warnings according to these standards. The very standards that have been used to censor queerness. Sure I'm talking essentially about an artist website and an online site is different from going outside where you have no control over everything around you but I have to wonder how useful is it on a 13+ website to mark a cartoon drawing of a zombie eating a brain as 18+? A website in which the ability to tag things as containing blood and gore already exists for people to filter out should they so desire. What is the use of being so strict with moderation? What does this ultimately end up achieving and contributing to? How long are we going to treat children as fragile objects rather than people with their own sensibilities?

It's not even just with stuff that children are able to access, a while ago I found this site called Succubuns, it's some weird adoptable website idk I have a lot of thoughts on adoptables but that's not the point. The thing I want to focus on was a part of their rules, Succubuns is an 18+ website, kink is perfectly allowed but fetish is not. What a crazy thing to state. My friends and I browsed the site to gawk at and someone poitned out "how are they defining the difference between the two" because lord knows the way people differentiate the two is another whole topic. How Succubuns defines fetish is "paraphilias surrounding specific characteristics (fat fetishism, armpit fetishism, racial fetishism, etc.) or fantastical concepts (vore, inflation, "macro/micro", etc.)". Ok first of all why is racial fetishism listed /third/ and put in the same camp as fucking "armpit fetish" if someone has a "race fetish" they're just racist but second of all WHAT? HUH? Sorry the 18+ website doesn't allow something as tame as armpit fetishism? No micro or macro? Are we for real right now? What use is there to censoring an already adult website? Succubuns also does not allow content related to bodily waste. Similarly itch does not allow the sale of fetish involving bodily waste. I can understand the moral outcry about things like rapeplay and such but really? Not even consensual bodily waste? It baffles me.

To go back to art websites one thing I see many do that really makes me think on this topic is how these sites handle nudity to begin with, we live in a misogynistic society that sees breasts as inherently sexual and as such breasts are the most censored thing and often gets works that contain nude breasts marked as mature. A lot of online websites are run by people with an awareness of how gross this is but rather than going the tumblr route of censoring "female presenting nipples" we end up at "all upper nudity is 18+ and must be censored" I think both approaches fucking suck. Some argue that "the websites have to be compliant with the rules and laws of where they are hosted" and I get that but like... really? We're just gonna accept that "it is what it is" and just lie down and play by the rules made against us? Does thinking about this not make you consider what we are all fucking doing? How our ratings and content warning systems are all built around these rules? What are we all fucking doing???

Recently I was reading some interviews with John Waters and some parts of this interview stood out to me:

"We used ‘trash’ or ‘filth,’ which was more punk, to describe our style."

"I look back on my work, and it was almost a political act, a strike against the tyranny of good taste."

"And the people who turned up weren’t part of the counterculture, he says, but those who rebelled against the counterculture’s rules. 'It was angry people who didn’t even fit in their own minority. The first time I went to a gay bar, I thought, ‘I might be queer, but I ain’t this. This is so square.’'".

The world needs more nudity, more blood, more gross art, more ambiguous art, more art that gives queers a "bad name", more ugly art, more trash and filth and punk and spunk. As such I've come to begin calling myself a filth artist, I love the dirty, the grungey, the grimy, I'm a damn vomit fetishist, it's nice to claim oneself filth in an era of sanitzation and conservatism. I think more people need to be uncomfortable and see things that upset and disgust them. Sure I'll still mark my NSFW as NSFW and tag my art as gore when there's gore and hell this site has a content warning at the start of all the stuff I want to put on here, but we really need to all start thinking about what we're doing, is what we're doing useful? is what we're doing contributing to preexisting conservativeness and stigma relating to things? Are we treating children as capable thinking people and not as little glass dolls?

I dunno I have a lot of thought I think a lot I should do more reading about what others have to say on this topic. We should all do more reading on this topic. Let's think about how everything is political especially content moderation together.