It’s too true. Though I think it’s also important to remember that the adults who claimed violent video games would make us all murderers had all the power and all the influence; they “put the stickers on your record sleeves,” as Chumbawamba said. We had no money and no say in anything and they just fuckin’ did it. Whereas the kids claiming fictional ships will make you a pedophile are, well, kids.
That’s not to say they’re dumb or clueless, or that they can’t cause real harm. It’s just that unlike the adults, they haven’t got much real power. In fact they are probably one of the most restricted generations of children in decades, if not in the past century.
I think that’s often why that specific sector of fandom frames interaction the way that they do: as people without much power or autonomy, the only way they know how to exert control or assert authority is by using that powerlessness. When you don’t like your parents’ rules, you situate them as dictators, but because most adults out in the world aren’t really trying to control kids they don’t know, they have to be framed as predators who are actively seeking to hurt kids. Being powerless is what they’re used to, and now there’s this weird new way of weaponizing that powerlessness.
And this has the nasty side effect of minimizing the very real abuses that kids who are actually subject to predators and abusers suffer.
I mean, I don’t know, I don’t talk to these people, and the teens and young adults I do talk to in fandom are generally enviably smart and self-assured. Like I wish I had my shit as together at thirty as they seem to at sixteen. So I can’t really speak to the motivations of the rest. But I can see how, having found a method of asserting independence and authority, kids without much of either in their brickspace lives would find that narrative attractive.
“now there’s this weird new way of weaponizing that powerlessness”
I think it’s a reflex of the cult of victimhood and oppression that started with Christianity – or “slave morality,” in Nietzschean terms, which is both a specific component of Christianity and a more general phenomenon that is separable from Christian theology and persists in secular forms in post-Christian Western culture. There’s a tendency to equate victimhood/oppression with virtue and moral importance, which is part of why conservatives, the Christian Right, “men’s rights activists,” et al. like to insist that they’re oppressed despite all the obvious evidence to the contrary.
Interestingly, though, the internet does give kids a power they never had before: the power to harass strangers without any material consequences to themselves; the power to find and distribute those strangers’ contact information and make their lives hell. But of course, it’s easier to justify such actions to themselves if they can convince themselves that the strangers deserve it because they’re evil predators.
Loki is the Philosopher King 