In today’s episode of “what’s going on with the internet in the past few days?” we’re talking about shipping and fan art, specifically, “Dora the Explorer.”
If you’ve been receiving a good supply of memes shared by different Facebook pages and certified memers on your feed, then you may have encountered some really weird and disturbing fan art of the beloved cartoon “Dora the Explorer.” For those of you who haven’t seen the nasty “artworks,” it’s basically ecchi (in other words sexual but not too sexual) Dora shipped in a love triangle with Swiper and Boots (and sometimes including Map). The fan art takes the form of a manga containing sexual innuendos that are definitely NSFW.
While people online shared these works for gags just like every meme, this raises the concern of excusing pedophilia as fan art. Dora, as we know her, is a ten-year-old girl who explores different places and activities with the help of Boots and some “assistance” from the viewers. And as a viewer who grew up watching the series in the early 2000’s, seeing her and the other characters drawn together in a sexual context whether as a child, teenager or adult just doesn’t sit well with me.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time in pop culture history that a children’s show had fans promoting such relationships. Back in July 2019, people called out fans and official storyboard artists for creating fan art of Disney’s “Amphibia” promoting pedophilic relationships. Amphibia storyboard artist Hannah Ayoubi tweeted a photo of characters Sasha and Grime drawn in a romantic context. The problem with the photo was that Sasha is a teenager while Grime’s age remains to be indeterminate.
While Ayoubi claimed that she saw Grime as a teenager, fans still found the image disturbing as they have always seen the deep-voiced toad as an adult and claimed that he was drawn as an adult in Ayoubi’s picture.
Other storyboard artists defended Ayoubi and claimed that they saw no problem with the art considering that Ayoubi and other fans interpreted the drawing differently. The “Amphibia” fandom responded by starting the #NotJustADrawing movement to speak up against pedophilia and child porn in the form of fan art.
Some of us may glance at the sexual drawings of shipping Dora with Swiper and jokingly think, “Oh god my childhood is ruined,” but there really is a serious issue behind it.
Writer BrazyDay makes a good point about this in their Medium article. There are a lot of adults both in fan communities and the animation industry that have made fandoms of children’s TV extremely unsafe for children. One notable example was the adult fanbase of “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” a.k.a. the brony fandom. There is nothing inherently wrong with adults joining the fandom of a children’s TV show, but bronies created a vast collection of fan content sexualizing the cartoon animals of “My Little Pony.”
One famous example was the fan-made blog site called “Ask Princess Molestia” dedicated to talking about the fan-made sexual content of the cartoon.
Columnist Nicky Vaught explained in the Technician, “Molestia [is the] parody character of the show’s character, Celestia. The site, ‘Ask Princess Molestia,’ operated in blog format, [and] often dealt in pornographic fan art of cartoon ponies and even more often in rape and molestation jokes.” He added a quote from a member of the “My Little Pony” fandom who petitioned for the deletion of “Ask Princess Molestia”: “I recently babysat a child who upon seeing my massive ‘My Little Pony’ collection, ran to my ‘Friendship is Magic’ shelf and started naming them. Once she got to Celestia, she told me she rapes people.”
If you search “My Little Pony” on the internet, it wouldn’t take long to find sexual content and extreme fetish art made by fans. With children growing up in the age of the internet, it’s almost second nature for them to look up their favorite TV shows online and to follow the artists who brought their favorite characters to life. Following the issue of Ayoubi promoting suggestive fan art of “Amphibia,” it’s become difficult to separate sexual fan art from canon works because the artists who work for the show also come from communities that promote them.
Moreover, a number of animators and artists from huge TV networks have collaborated with and are still associated with Shadman, one of the most famous artists of internet porn. Known for creating sexual fan art of several cartoons such as “The Loud House” and “Ben 10,” he has art that depicts characters in often violent and disturbing situations; his illustrations also involve children or drawing child-like characters. Whether it was putting two characters together or creating a romantic fantasy with the viewer, its appeal in children’s TV fandoms fails to keep inappropriate themes away from a space that is supposed to be for all ages.
The sexual fan content of “Dora The Explorer” and other cartoons remains to be a risk for two reasons: sexualizing children and exposing them to pornography.
Studies show that drawing child porn has the same effect as actual child porn. 85 percent of online offenders who have downloaded explicit content featuring children have sexually abused minors in real life. Experts say that exposing children to pornography could lead to depression, social anxiety and self-harm. Moreover, it could also lead to an addiction if the child was exposed to porn continuously at such a young age.
Entertainment giants have allowed this problem for the longest time by letting fans “do whatever they want” with these characters, as told by “Gravity Falls” creator Alex Hirsch. However, the internet remains to be divided on this issue.
Some creators and artists argue that not all animation fandoms are for all ages and that content warnings exist to separate explicit content from young viewers. The same group also finds that demanding cartoon illustrators to keep all their published content suitable for all ages is ridiculously limiting. While artists argued that they have the freedom to create different content for different audiences, let me bring you back to the fact that we’re talking about NSFW content featuring minors in the fan communities of TV shows meant for children.
Thankfully, one artist called out the problem of the ecchi “Dora the Explorer” fan art as it is: “The fact that [these creators] are thinking about a minor already worries me. Making them look ‘older’ doesn’t help. Tolerating NSFW content with a minor is just the same as validating them in real life—that they are okay with pedophilia.”
Hopefully, people would soon become more responsible in creating and promoting fan art in support of their favorite TV shows, being more mindful of its effects for the shows’ audiences. Thus, keeping the fan community of children’s TV truly a safe space for all ages.
Screengrab from the official Nick Jr. YouTube channel
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