arcanineryu

it is kinda a funny story. but it's a bit lengthy so bear with me.

so at the time i made him, there were two big things going on in the slender fandom.

one, everyone was making slender brothers based on words that rhymed with slenderman. essentially mimicking the format that let splendorman and trenderman be successful in the fandom.

So you were getting characters like vendorman, senderman, defenderman, etc.

and secondly, a big controversy popped up in the fandom, from someone making and selling erotic content of slenderman. so everyone was in a tizzy about misrepresenting creepypasta characters and diminishing their value as horror monsters.

i was into creepypasta, but im asexual. so didn't make porn personally, wasn't interested in pornographic stuff. mostly i was just into comic books and superhero stuff.

but, i knew enough memes, like rule 34, and some edgy jokes and stuff, that simply complaining about people making porn is useless. it was an inevitable sort of thing.

but i got the idea instead that, "hey, if i just made a creepypasta it was okay to make porn about, people could use that instead, and everyone would be happy."

So i got the most sexual sounding name that rhymed with slenderman, and made a character. with the intention being to post it anonymously and let people who actually dealt with that kind of adult content run off with it and do their own thing. treating the name more like a edgy tentacle rape hentai monster joke.

though i was a inexperienced artist who wasn't actually knowledgeable about where to post the character that would make me anonymous. so i was quickly tracked down. and one person in particular said

"hey, this is a really interesting concept here, and i understand you're trying to give the character away to whoever wants it. and i'd be happy to use the character for stuff personally. but your existing content is really bare bones. it would help if you could give a bit more to reference so i would know how to use the character."

that seemed reasonable enough. so i wrote out some short stories. although, once again, being asexual, i didn't have the first idea about how to write porn stuff, cus i had no real idea of what would count as sexy or whatever cus i had no reliable internal mechanism to be able to look at something and go "okay this is hot and this is not".

So these initial stories, despite being about a character called sexual offenderman, ended up really non sexual. Since i was just trying to match a creepypasta horror vibe cus that's about the best i could do with my limited arsenal for depicting sexual content.

And apparently, people making content about the sort of topics that offenderman deals with in a non-erotic manner, is actually a pretty large untapped market. Cus i started getting a bunch of survivors of sexual abuse approaching me and going "holy shit, what? i read your stuff expecting to either call you out or to basically just retraumatize myself, but you somehow managed to write about an actual tentacle rape monster in a way that wasn't triggering for me at all. Like this is the first bit of media Ive encountered where these subjects actually felt manageable and like I wasn't being insulted or having my feelings be carelessly used as a punching bag."

And remember how i said i was mostly into superhero stuff? that wasn't just an interest. i had been teetering on suicidal depression for years at that point. only instead of wanting to hurt myself, i wanted to hurt the people who made me miserable. so i had been completely restructuring my morals based on essentially superhero ideology. and the obligations that even if your life doesn't feel like it's worth living, you still have the capacity to save other peoples lives through your efforts. and saving other peoples lives are inherently valuable and worth risking your own time and safety for.

So there i was, a freshman in college, who made a joke character based on slenderman, who all of a sudden explodes in popularity, and dumped dozens of people who had lived through horrific events in my inbox who were asking for help.

I never did, and still don't really like offenderman. But I couldn't just not help people, even if how to help them might seem counter intuitive and completely opposite to my actual expertise and interests. so i took responsibility and took the question of "what would a supernatural tentacle rape monster existing in the real world actually be like?" seriously.

lots of research, lots of talking with survivors, lots of careful thought in developing the character. i expect by now i have a comprehension of the topic of sexual harassment and abuse and the topics surrounding it that would surpass that of most professionals.

and though the fandom grew past me, i still tried my best with it and made a difference for a lot of people who came to me for help. So I wont treat it as having been a waste of time or anything, and would stand by my actions despite not having the artistic talent or financial resources to take the concept to its fullest potential.

Like i can be sure that many people were able to learn the lesson, that often times the way to respect survivors of assault and abuse, isn't to just not talk about such things or try to hide it all in a corner somewhere that regular people never have to look at it and it's only between a survivor and an expensive and often inaccessible professional therapist. more often than not, it just makes people feel more alone and ostracized for what happened to them.

what you have to actually be able to do, is know when and how to separate sexual content from porn and eroticism. and let people talk about it in other formats, such as horror, or academic terms, or even in a neutral way as a thing that exists.

And that non survivors just going about their everyday life also have a responsibility to know how to separate sexual content and porn. So they stop doing things like treating underage survivors of assault like they were participants in porn meant for the titillation of others.

and that they were able to more easily wrap their minds around these concepts with the help of offenderman getting their foot in the door, by a simple assertion that "Sexual Offenderman is a creepypasta, therefore the best portrayal you could make for him, goes into depth about rape as legitimate, frightening horror content. since anyone (except arc apparently) can make porn. but it takes skill to make stuff scary."

and it is a huge improvement to do something as basic as shift someones perspective from "rape is sex but worse and unexpected" to "rape is terrifying".

he's the bad guy. the villain. not really supposed to like him as a person. ur supposed to more appreciate the artistry of the horror and stuff.