I wanna chime in again and state that one of the RPers I mentioned who left, when told about this discussion, reacted with excitement, then disappointment when I more completely explained the measures being discussed, but said that they would be fine with having ageplay be restricted to a different realm.
I say this in the interest of having their voice be more comprehensively heard.
I love all these mysterious “rpers who left” that keep getting mentioned.
Chamomile Gale was a respected community member, and Red-Moon/Snow and Shinyuu were moderators. I don’t appreciate your insinuation that I’m making them up.
Hi, hello!
Alexander mentioned me. I have a long list of reasons why I left Wolfery, but the growing prevalence of extreme ageplay is one of my concerns! Hi, I’m here, Alexander isn’t just making shit up. 
I was a moderator for a time and a zone owner. Now that I’ve popped out to say that I exist I’m going to go back to enjoying the read, goodbye!
Yep, and it’s notable that you were fine with things like Patchwork Square - you aren’t some insane hardliner. It was the biblical flood of toddlers in the park and the like that made you pack your bags.
That’s correct. I have a nuanced opinion about ageplay that I don’t feel like discussing here. I think the decision of the modstaff is a good one.
I hate this. I feel less welcome here. Could the moderators god dang well actually take a stance on the people who just casually, continually compare ageplay to pedophilia? It’s not okay, damn it.
The very volume of this discussion, even when it’s polite, makes me feel like it’s not worth being in a place where my very existence as a character is secretly whispered about and bashed. I literally, literally, HATE this. It is, in itself, unwelcoming that we can’t ever just seem to come to a literal ‘live and let live’. No, somebody has always gotta be complaining. Somebody has always got to be comparing certain kinds of roleplay between consenting adults to literal CSAM.
Damn it, haven’t you ever heard the line that furries are all animal rapists? Haven’t you felt the offense and sting of that assumption from anybody in your life, or just from the media in general? Why are you all willing to dish out the same kind of fundamental disrespect with abandon?
Because I can absolutely make an equivalent, absolutely equivalent, string of arguments about how furrydom is just welcoming to animal rapists, and risks getting people into zoophilia, etc. I absolutely can. And you’d all knock me out of the sky for it! Rightly so!
I am obviously emotional right now.
I appreciate all the philosophy and moralizing being done by people in defense of other people’s rights to just exist in this place. But it should not be necessary for the mods to be launching a defensive action on behalf of a group of their players against another group of their players who are continually advocating for the first group’s banning. At what point does advocating for a group’s banning actually become actionable misconduct itself? Because it sure feels like harassment. It feels like harassment with intent to dissuade certain people from even logging in.
I could swear at all of you.
I’m not going to.
I’m going to continue being a nice person, a nice example of an ageplayer, who doesn’t foist stuff in people’s faces, and who just asks not to be called a creep behind his back or to his face when he’s minding his own business.
And we’ll see what happens, guys. Keep moralizing and criticisizing me on your uncontrolled, unfiltered, unthought-through gag reflexes if you want.
That’s kinda the vibe I have here from all of this. It’s not like people are actively waving torches at us for wanting to play a younger character, but it is also evident that the mods of the site aren’t ever gonna be on our side.
I’ve already mentally prepared for returning to other less fun and good RP sites/servers etc etc over this.
Perhaps some (not you and certainly not an accusatory sense) can understand why trying to find solutions to this… disconnect seems like too gentle of a word… is so exhausting.
There isn’t a solution that will leave all people happy.
You have to decide whether this site is going to have hardline content restrictions; the site is going to have features that allow people to block what they don’t wanna see. Or whether it’s going to be a; this site is what the site is, and if you don’t like it then sorry it might not be for you.
If what’s being asked is for people to tolerate the existence of people who strongly dislike ageplay, fine. We’re not going to be changing their opinion on that anytime soon. I don’t even mind being asked to hide public content away behind content warnings, or being more gentle with approaching people.
As long as the other half of this bargain is upheld, and the mods take a firm stance against the intolerant behavior on the other camp. Who keep wanting to devolve this into an irrelevant moral argument. Who want to continue advocating for their banning. Who seem to blame the existence of ageplayers for people who have left? Geez.
Feels like the start of the “They first came for the…”
I’ve been reading this thread and trying to remain respectful, because sincerely I see why people are upset and yet why there need to be some moderation actions.
(IMO, the rule as proposed is a decent middle of the road option, and we’ve turned it into a proxy argument here in the chat for a wider issue that everyone is trying to thread the needle on)
But can we maybe not equivocate complex moderation decisions and people sharing their own viewpoints over a fraught topic over a role-playing website to the goddamn Holocaust? Like. Y’all. At the very least can we act like reasonable adults here?
Just want to add that I have a small wolfery adjacent discord server. Like this thread, members of said discord have differing opinions on this matter. It’s something we have discussed there more then once. Within our group I can think of seven where the ageplay content was either a contributing factor to them leaving the platform, or is causing them to consider leaving.
These people very much do exist and suggesting otherwise, isn’t helpful to the conversation. Clearly, as evidenced by this thread, this is a topic many people feel strongly about on both sides. I’ve certainly voiced my opinion as have many others.
It shouldn’t be surprising that either side could end up feeling like they are being forced out one way or another. I think the mods are doing their best to find a balance, and I am hopeful that the other thread will lead to a solution that will end up working for everyone.
No one is less welcome here, but the frictions between people who are not welcoming are highlighted in a forum that seeks to solve the problem. All this was present, and if it wasn’t seen before, it’s because we have been doing our jobs well enough to hide it as much as possible.
Now hiding the friction has pushed several of our community’s most invested members out. That is a problem that needs addressing.
We have taken a firm stance on this. The firm stance is that everyone has to tolerate one another. We are working on policy and game updates to make that more palatable.
It seems like a nuanced outline is not serving, and there has been a repeated request for a stance. Here is the stance:
It is okay for people to think ageplayers are pedophiles. It is okay for ageplayers to think they're bigots and queerphobic for thinking that. It is not okay for either group to use that as an attack against the other. In this forum discussing these issues, expressing both outlooks, civilly, is acceptable. Elsewhere, it is not. Thinking something terrible about someone is okay. Acting on it is not.
And really, the thing is, we have cited, chastised, and disciplined far more people for calling ageplayers pedophiles than we have ageplayers for calling their opposition bigots. Because, yes, ‘pedophile’ is a much stronger insult than ‘bigot’.
People ‘just want to exist’, and we want everyone to exist. Being humiliated and indicated otherwise hurts, I KNOW. Being told you are something you’re not hurts. I KNOW. This solution is an attempt to let everyone exist. But it requires accepting that even though you deeply, passionately, categorically disagree with someone, the person that they are who disagrees with you has the right to exist as who they are.
We are trying to make it so you just don’t exist adjacent to one another to hurt one another.
There’s a level of kayfabe here that one has to manage. I like to think about it in terms of how it might be perceived IRL and work my way backward. If two (or more) consenting adults are role-playing being some kind of child or teen in the privacy of their own home, do I have a moral or sociological impetus to tell them what they’re doing is wrong and they should cut it out?
Not really. They know it’s fantasy, they’re doing their own thing, I don’t have any involvement. So if we view ageplayers online by a similar metric we now need to understand what makes online different.
fantasies can be more fleshed out and written about online, and are concrete words that could be taken in certain ways if read by certain people. - yes, but if we’re maintaining the ‘the folks in this space have consented to this’ idea, then return to the ‘behind closed doors’ point.
people can see characters as their own distinct entities from their players online much easier than irl - yes… but you also have to keep in mind while you’re here that people are adults behind their character models.
it makes some folk deeply uncomfortable to see sexualized underage characters in a solicitous manner in a space they’re trying to be an adult in. - here’s the rub. Ultimately, having some level of ‘This is an underage character, dm me to know more or visit lamplight to know more’ isn’t a huge burden here to keep a base level of consent across the platform for folk. CW warnings are great, and as far as i know there’s solutions being worked on. For now, is it not just decent to take things in good faith, do our best to follow the rule, and then figure it out as things play out?
I’ll be the first to admit I came in here with a ‘it’d just be easier to ban all ageplay’ viewpoint that’s now softened due to examining some of those biases. I still am not comfortable with the topic. It still feels a bit dangerous to be in a space with it - to me. But, a compromise is the best we’re going to get here and this compromise - all things considered - is not the worst one.
Let’s keep discussion on topic, treat each other with respect, and do our best to make a community that’s safe and healthy for folks. Right now the world is a lot, especially for us Americans. We’re all at each others’ throats. We have to have some base level of decency if we want a space that’s safe for all folks, and the grace to know that no one can get it perfect and that everyone is trying their best.
I sympathize. You want your friends to be comfortable on wolfery, but please let’s remember one thing here.
They’re uncomfortable on wolfery because they either are 1) assuming the worst about their neighbours, or 2) unable to compartmentalize their distaste for the topic enough to be in the same room.
That’s it.
And those are literally the only two things causing this dispute. As long as these people who left can’t do 2) in particular, I’m not sure any actions the mods take will be sufficient for your friends to come back.
They already aren’t coming back, and this outlook is deeply reductionist and dismissive of peoples’ genuinely held moral outlook.
Yes, I generalized out to a thousand foot viewpoint. I don’t think i was being reductionist, though.