Readers of my journal of Friday, 19 September seem to have fallen into two groups.

The first group being those who actually read my journal and understood what it was about; that subject being the sexual portrayal of underage fictional characters.

The second group seems to have been composed of highly dramatic individuals who seem to be under the impression that the journal was some sort of indication that I or my staff were "targeting" certain specific artists or "attacking" fan art in general.

It is unfortunate that the members of the second group were predominate and that their tactics of name calling, throwing accusations, dictionary quotes and general over-dramatization turned what could have been an enlightening and educational discussion into a quagmire which is of little use to anyone.

To clear the air and hopefully prompt a more useful discussion on the matter I will once again repeat the contents of my last journal and address those rare comments who actually had some sort of contribution to make.

Most will notice that I did not bother to reply to specific comments in my last journal; while I did read each comment not every comment deserved a response.

This journal will attempt to serve as a response. I prefer this method to endlessly repeating myself to individuals restating information or statements already made by others.

My viewpoint is if you are truly interested in following this subject after reading the last journal you'll most likely be reading this one; if you aren't then a personal response to you probably would have been better spent elsewhere and I've saved myself the bother of repeating myself a few dozen times.

If you feel that I've ignored you or your input then this is possible. If you wish for this to continue in the future please follow on the options below;

Insult me; Type in ALL CAPS; Clearly fail to actually read the journal; Tell me that I do not understand the deviantART policy which I personally wrote and trained others to understand correctly; Provide irrelevant information such as the age of consent in feudal Japan; Spout dictionary definitions verbatim; Rant for the sake of complaining and not to advance the discussion.

The goal of any policy is to give clear guidelines, have as little grey area as possible, and be capable of being applied consistently from media to media throughout the site.

The policy concerning fictional child characters, specifically nude art and erotic art concerning these characters, springs directly from the policy which we produced to address photography of actual children. The news article announcing these changes can be found here for those who may be interested.

Photography is, of course, only a single media but the concerns motivating the policy could be applied to other areas as well so obviously research was done into how these concerns apply outside of the realm of photography.

What we discovered is currently fictional child nudity and child erotica is not legally treated in the same fashion as photographs of real children, however the United States has pushed at least twice to remove this discrepancy and treat fictional children in the same manner as real children in regards to erotica.

It was decided that while deviantART policy did not legally have to treat fictional characters in the same fashion as real children and teens we would do so nonetheless for consistancy.

Unlike photography, addressing fictional characters presents unique difficulties.

As far as photography is concerned only one factor is a concern; the age of the model at the time of the photograph. As far as nudity and erotica are concerned the minimum age is a legally proven eighteen(18).

Fictional characters however present several problems. The first is that the characters do not age "naturally"; they remain their original age regardless of the passage of time so you cannot simply wait for them to grow up.
Fictional characters can also be subjected to temporary magical or technological aging or reversal of aging according to the whims of the series plot; they can travel in time and meet their future selves, they can meet older or younger selves from alternate dimensions, and a host of other fantastic and impossible occurrences which simply do not happen to real people and that doesn't even address the fact that the same character can appear in several different series and contexts and can be presented as several different ages depending on whether or not it's television, comic book or video game or movie.

In short, a fictional character never changes age until somebody wants it to and then all bets are off and the sky is the limit.

To compound the problem character designs seldom change at all during the series; this is especially true in television where characters wear the exact same outfit day-in and day-out.

For our policy involving nude and erotic work we needed to address this with clear guidelines and as little grey area as possible.

The first decision was that we would apply policy only to characters who had been assigned a clear age or age range assigned to them. Due to differences in style and the fact that fiction does not need to obey basic anatomy this was the only realistic approach and it means that the policy most often applies specifically to fan art.

The next major problem which needed to be addressed was the fact that age of fictional characters could be changed at a whim and that many fan artists would try to claim an older age for a young character in order to show the character nude or erotically.
Our solution here was to disregard claims of "aging" in most cases. We can and do make exceptions if significant changes in the character design were made and those changes could not be dismissed as merely due to artistic style.

Lastly we needed to determine how the policy would apply to characters who might be presented as several ages. Maybe they were underage in a video game, really young in the comic but older in the TV series; or perhaps their age skips around a bit during the run of the series or any number of other situations.

The decision here is that the age of the character would be determined by the specific character design used in the fan art; this is primarily because any significant change in age or circumstances is often accompanied by a change in character design in a series.
In any situation where a character keeps a certain unchanging character design or where the work cannot be associated with a specific character design the staff will treat the work as depicting the character as underage.

This is the policy as it has been enforced for several years now and it minimizes the subjectivity and grey area from the staff determination and allows for the most consistent application of policy in those situations which come to the attention of the staff.

To reiterate;
This policy applies to works which feature nudity, erotica, or other mild sexual themes.

It does not apply to simple swimsuit shots, romantic scenes, or other similar content.

If you truly cannot tell the difference between erotic content and other types of content then you will need to wait until I explain the difference in another journal.

For those who were able to make it through this lengthy explanation with a clear mind and understood what they read, thank you; feel free to further the discussion below.

For those who merely skimmed what I've written and who plan on simply ranting and complaining, please apply that time and energy elsewhere where it may have a more useful purpose.