A little rant/history. Rantstory

Hey there. This is going to be different from my regular posting. Recent events involving anime, games, my work, and the world at large have become and continue to be aggravating, and I want to say something about them. I hope this doesn’t come across as a manifesto; it’s simply me explaining my history, my situation and my stance on things. If this sort of thing isn’t your jam, I totally understand and you can skip it entirely. The tl;dr is just that I like anime, loli, and drawing and I think what’s going on these days sucks, but I’ll continue to try to do my best and hope things get better.

The Past

I was born in 1980. The very first memory I have of anime is of the localized television airings of Macross, know as “Robotech” in 1985. (I did technically watch Voltron first, but I have no memory of it and it left no lasting impression on me.) I watched it with my brother who was 6 years older than me, most likely only because he was watching it. As a small child I watched things passively, never really seeking anything in particular out. But my brother loved robots and Robotech had the Valkyries; jet fighters that could transform into robots. So because he loved them, I loved them. (Most of my likes were informed by what my brother liked, well into my high school years.)

But something happened when I watched Robotech; something about it was seeded in my mind, it took control and I hyper fixated on it. And I know exactly what it was: the eyes. I loved the eyes of anime characters. They fascinated me, enthralled me. And as a child in the late 80's I sought them out wherever I could, limited as my resources were.

The next time I could truly see anime in it's purest form was Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, shown in it's terrible localized form on the premium cable channel HBO. I was so obsessed with it that my father even tracked down a VHS copy of it, which I can only imagine would be a collector's item today if I still had it.

After that, it was spotty at best when I could get access to anime. But every time I did, it was an event for me. I remember waking up at 6am at one point, idly turning on the TV in my room with the volume off so my parents wouldn't wake up and yell at me to go back to bed, and catching an episode of Dragon Ball, and later Dragon Warrior as it was localized. (Toriyama's work was so distinct that I knew they were related somehow, but this was pre-internet so there was very few ways to find out.) But I immediately fell in love with the style, the humor, and the adventure.

At the time, anime was still seen as strange and a fringe cultural import for weirdos. One of the only places you could reliably find it was at local video rental stores, where the owners were of questionable morality and would routinely order weird videos just to break up the monotony of living in the rural northeast of the US. My dad loved movies and visiting movie rental shops was a weekly routine for the family, and a few of the local shops would get in releases from the freshly burgeoning anime importing industry. A notable entry was “Vampire Hunter D”. Admittedly, I shouldn't have been watching something like that at my age, but my dad didn't seem to care and watched it with me, and enjoyed it just as much.

The other place that was a much steadier source of anime was comic book shops. It was at such a shop, looking for Japanese robot model kits, (another thing my brother got me into) that I saw, and purchased, my first ecchi anime VHS, “Project A-KO”. I got it because there were robots and power suits on the box; the school girls in torn up skirts was just window dressing to my mind. (But I can't imagine I wasn't also subconsciously drawn in by their eyes, which at this point in anime history had started to get quite large as the moe aesthetic was on the rise.)

And when I watched A-KO, I became acutely aware that I was watching something special. It was nonsense to be sure, but the style was undeniable. The city pop music, the sleek, shiny robots, the kinetic force in every explosion, and of course, the near constant fan service. This was the first time I owned something that I knew, “I can't let my mom know I have this.”

By this time, my local comic book shop, Mint City Comics, was now renting out anime VHS tapes. And I constantly pestered my dad to take me there, a near 30 minute drive one way. That's were I started watching the original Ranma ½, and this time the fan service also contained nudity. This is also when I started reading manga, and when I started to draw it. I always liked to draw, but this was when I set in stone that “That's the style I want to do.”

It was around this point that my brother had entered college. And he had made friends with people that let him borrow some, choice items. I hate to admit this, but I was a precocious younger brother, who would sneak into my brother's room and look for such items. And I ended up finding two things: one that would scar me, and one that would enthrall me. Both of which informed my tastes to this day.

The one that scarred me was a VHS copy of UROTSUKIDOJI: Legend of the Overfiend. That was the first time I ever saw actual hentai. And guro. To this day I contribute seeing this as the reason I still can't handle ero guro.

The other items were a collection of manga, specifically a book with the works of Satoshi Urushihara, and several issues of “Bondage Fairies” by KONDOM. The latter I contribute to my continuing love of fairies. Needless to say, I consumed the content voraciously.

In my mind, I don't think I ever considered any of this to be “wrong”. Dirty? Yes. Inappropriate? For mixed company, sure. But it never seemed evil or insidious. And I never, even at the time and being in my early teens, did I think it was real or meant to inform reality or behavior in real life. It was something special to be appreciated and enjoyed, separate from reality.

After that, my new focus was now ecchi and hentai content. I still loved manga and anime, but ero was what was most important to me. And that's how I've remained over 30 years later. There was a time when I let it go; I tried to reject it in an attempt to placate a girl I fell in love with. And for 16 years I repressed my desire to pursue ero manga and anime, even to the point that I stopped drawing for years at a time. Only after that relationship and subsequent marriage dissolved did I return to it.

That is my distant history, spotty as it is. I sort of rushed it for time, and to gloss over the parts I don't remember or don't want to remember. But I hope it gives a slight understanding of where I came from and why I do what I do. I could go into detail about certain aspects later on if it's of interest or I feel like rambling again. But for now I want to talk about my more recent past.

LOLI

Observing my past, I don't really see any time where I was into “loli”. To be honest, loli wasn't a thing when I was growing up. Not in the US anyway. And people did not obsess about the age of fictional characters back then.

The first time I saw lolicon content was in a doujin I found on the internet in the early 2000s, specifically “Sokkyuu Ou 3.1 Speed Ball King 3.1 Anal Angel”. At the time I just really enjoyed the cute proportions of the girls. In my mind it was just artwork; an expression by the artist of their personal interpretation of beauty. And it really resonated with me. I didn't think of them as real children, (or really children at all), just as sexual fantasies made manifest as drawings.

I, being in my 20s, of course had my worries about what it meant to be attracted to these young characters. In the same way everyone questions their personal preferences and what it means about them in the grand scheme of things. Pondering your own sexual identity. But because I felt no inclination towards real little girls, I didn't feel the need to entertain it as meaning anything beyond simple appreciation of the art in a sexual way. But because I was in a complicated and domineering relationship with my then girlfriend, and she quickly began to try and control what I did in all aspects of life, I distanced myself from hentai as best and as often as I could.

Fast forward to after we broke up in 2016, and I was free to look at whatever I wanted, I still didn't look for lolicon material. It was only when I began drawing in earnest for commissions online that it came back into focus in my life. Ironically, because of people who were against it.

At the time, I had made a Patreon account and was drawing as often as I could for a meager number of people. I primarily drew anime girls with big boobs and wide hips. But I'm fairly certain it was around a year or so in when I found that many of my posts were locked, and I got a message from Patreon's support team saying that I was posting work that violated their regulations about under-aged characters in artwork. When I asked for clarification about what drawing violated the rules, then sent back a laundry list of pieces, most of which were NOT under-aged, and would not even fall under the loosest classification of loli. For example, one drawing was of the main characters from the game “River City Girls”.

I had a fairly long back and forth game of email tag with several reps at Patreon who ultimately said that anything I drew in an anime style and was even slightly sexual would be rejected. And even if I didn't post them on Patreon, if I posted them ANYWHERE on the internet and they found out, they would continue to suspend my account indefinitely.

That was when two things happened: I gave up and moved to Fanbox, and I decided to not care and start actually drawing loli. Because in the process of fighting, I looked up art that actually was of under-aged characters, and found that a TON of it was normal, everyday art from video games and popular shows. And I found that I liked it and wanted to draw it. Not exclusively, but I did not want to be limited with where I wanted to go artistically and expressively.

Since then I have had varying degrees of success and failure. I've lost friends to drawing loli, but also gained new ones that I hold very dear to me. I've become friends with people all over the world who liked my art and I'm a lot happier with myself and what I draw.

All this being said, what has been happening for the past few years and is now escalating faster and faster recently has put a lot of strain on me personally. I've been banned from social media sites, restricted in others, and lost thousands of followers that I don't get back. While at the start of my drawing loli I was making a fair amount of money that helped me pay off a credit card and improved my life dramatically, I find it hard to get any work anymore. This is either because people can't find me, or because the economy is too bad right now, or because people are just not comfortable with wanting to potentially take the risk of exposing their interests to strangers. (Which is honestly not surprising when you look at the current state of things and how people act.) And of course, because I'm an artist and a pessimist, I can't help but feel that the real reason is because I'm not good enough; that I suck and I'm wasting my time. But my personal paranoia is nothing new.

So why am I writing all this now? I'm normally a very private person, and I want to continue to be. But more and more I see the hobby that I love and make what little money I can off of constantly being attacked, threatened and criminalized; to the point that people are being scared into silence even more than they already were. I see the culture I love and have loved since I was 5 years old vilified and by extension, the friends and other people that make it intimidated into hiding or into giving up entirely. I see prices of legitimate, innocent goods skyrocketing right along with the adult items. I've seen some goods entirely barred from being sold.

You see, I don't think that all of this is a coincidence. The tariffs, the banning of loli content, the banning of adult games, etc. Because it's not just governments that are doing it; it started with credit card processors. Call it conspiracy theory nonsense, but I think this is all a concerted effort by the puritanical, the greedy, and the megalomaniacal. I've been around and have watched this happening long enough to know that the mentality of “doing it to protect children” has been used as the scapegoat for a myriad of reasons. I remember when table top role playing games were attacked for warping children's minds with satanic ideas. I remember when rock music was attacked for eroding the moral fiber of young people. I remember when violent video games were making children into murderers. And now I'm here to see that Japanese cartoons are sexualizing kids. And none of that was or is true. While certain people who are prone to antisocial behavior may be attracted to and enjoy certain types of media, that media does NOT cause the antisocial behavior.

Growing up I was taught that evil people crave money and power. That if you succumb to greed and egomania, you're a bad person. And while I agree that some people with no moral compass that gain power could be called evil, I don't feel that the impetus of their actions is.

More than money and power, people (and I mean ALL people) crave control. It's a basic human desire. I'd even call it a basic desire in all of nature. Control over themselves, control over their surroundings, control over the people they interact with. Without control, without agency, all actions are meaningless. And I used to think that the lust for control was primarily found in the disenfranchised and lower class, especially in the era of the internet; where everyone can talk, but no one listens. Where there are millions of voices, but only the elite can be heard. Where governments and corporations dictate policies while the common people can only sit by and watch helplessly. Never more than now has humanity been able to see just how pointless their actions are, thanks to the internet.

But now I see that the lust for control is still very real even in the elites, where you would think they already have control. But they don't, not really. Humans separate themselves from animals by their free will, and it's that free will that people with power want to control. More than anything else, people simply want control over what they think is theirs. And when you think you are above everyone else, you think you own everyone else.

Maybe I went a little off topic there, but I don't think so. I think that things are bad, and they're going to get worse. And I'm not sure if there's anything any of us can do about it.

I'll keep drawing what I want, and posting it where I can for as long as I can. It shouldn't be this hard. I draw silly lewd cartoons that don't hurt anyone. You'd think that wouldn't be a problem. It wasn't always. I just want to be left alone to enjoy my hobby, but that may go away. And on that note, if you care about the silly lewd drawings on the internet as much as I do, I suggest you get a big external hard drive and save everything you can. Because tomorrow it might be gone.

Thank you very much for endulging me if you read to the end. I know I sound rather fatalistic, but that's sort of the frame of mind I keep returning to. I DO hope things get better. And I hope there's something we can all do to help get us there.

~Poe =-.-=