Dammit, @seebs , since you closed your askbox I can't anon you a pun about someone with the username "wendigo" and the phrase "eating our own."
necros the thread again for these posts: https://the-real-seebs.tumblr.com/p...0/i-remember-in-mlpfim-there-were-a-number-of https://the-real-seebs.tumblr.com/p...sically-lurk-and-dont-post-so-i-guess-have-an so my anecdata is secondhand because it was my mom who traumatized herself with horror novels (which her parents allowed her access to) as a child. she had horrible nightmares and ... kept reading the books...? because she enjoyed them...? until she was a teen and developed impulse control or something. as a result of her experiences she decided that she would not let her children read books they might hurt themselves with, so my books were carefully curated by her until i was around 13 (at which point i was allowed to check out library books she hadn't previously vetted. i also discovered fanfiction around then and to my memory she never tried to monitor that at all.) seems reasonable to me and i don't feel like her policy had a negative effect on my life. i had tons of books to read (because she was a voracious reader) and they were all good (because she has good taste ... maybe i'm biased though.) i read the one horror book we had in the house, which i wasn't supposed to, when i was 10ish, and didn't like it much but also don't recall being terribly affected. as an adult i have close to zero interest in horror and such a high tolerance for the kind of slightly gory violence you see in some non-horror films that i forget about it until we're in the middle of the scene and the more squeamish viewers, to whom i recommended the film because i forgot about the violence, are cringing and averting their eyes. i suspect, on thinking about it, that i would have hated the restrictions on what i could read a lot more if they'd been made to feel like rules i had to follow. (i did in fact not keep my hands off any of the books i was not supposed to read.) but because we had a lot of books in the house, and very few that i wasn't supposed to read, it didn't bother me. i don't remember ever being told to put a book back at the library but it might have happened. if it had happened a lot i think i would have been very annoyed by it.
