The Four Horsemen

Content tagging is important and useful both for finding specific stuff you’re into, and avoiding specific stuff you really need to avoid. I generally don’t tag posts here, not because I’m philosophically opposed, but because I’m lazy and inconsistent. (If that means you can’t safely follow, then as the top post says, take care of yourself and no hard feelings.)

The four exceptions to the above general rule, and the things I will try my best to consistently tag, are what I call the “Four Horsemen”: rape, pedophilia, incest, and bestiality. These tend to be a hard no for a fair number of people, yet they show up in illustrated (as opposed to filmed) pornography at a rate that I can only guess is much higher than the general level of interest in that kind of content - to the point where I just sort of expect some of the above in any given artist’s body of work and am pleasantly surprised by its absence. The reason I’d guess for their over-representation is that A) they’re illegal and harmful to actually film and B) the appeal relies on contextual truth. It’s possible to film a simulated rape, or a young-looking person, or two people who pretend to be related, or a person having sex with an animal facsimile, but the viewer knows that either what they’re seeing is fake or someone was actually hurt in the process; the former kills the fantasy and the latter has obvious moral implications that, contrary to some popular opinion, aren’t automatically obliterated or overridden by the presence of some kink or paraphilia.

In purely fictional content, on the other hand, because nothing is real in the first place, everything is equally real within the story. Whatever you need to be “actually happening” is actually happening to the same degree that anything in the work is actually happening. Being as I am personally not specifically into any of the Four Horsemen (monster girls don’t count, shush) I can’t offer even anecdotal evidence that this is true, but it seems to make sense to me.