So I'm a tad frustrated right now. A tad. (Story rejection post) · 7:42pm Mar 15th, 2014
Edit: Just checked the rules on what qualifies as NSFW. I think this post passes muster, but I'll try to be cautious in some of my phrasing.
First off, I believe that ponies are people, too. : ) To put that more precisely, I think the bright pastel quadrupeds of MLP (ponies for brevity) stand in for people. They may look funny, and they may lack hands, but in both the canon of the show and the fanon of fics, they show human emotions and human reactions. They live in a happier world than we do, and they can blunt the edges of rougher subjects, but it's still possible for readers to see themselves in ponies, and for pony stories to really be stories about humans.
Because of this, I have no issues with the general category of clopfic. Sex "Making a dress" is a thing that humans do, so it can be a thing that ponies do. When I read a story about, I dunno, Twilight "making a dress" with Applejack, to me that's no different than a socially awkward human librarian "making a dress" with a rough-and-tumble farm girl.
What I'm getting at is that I have some issues with foalcon.
I like to make my arguments in the form of stories, and I find that parallels and analogies make an effective form of argument. So I wrote up a comedy fic about a pony who watches and loves a show about humans, and who secretly loves "childcon" fic. Accidentally transported to Earth, he meets a little girl who tells him she'd love to ride a pony--but when he gets too pushy, he winds up getting gelded. I avoided getting more explicit than the T rating allows, but I definitely went for a South Park sort of oh-God-this-is-horrible-why-am-I-laughing. The quality of the fic would have to be judged by readers, of course, but I'm fairly proud of my work on it.
It's gotten rejected twice, both times for "pedophilia." The second rejection came after I outright purged some of the more suggestive content, complete with replacement jokes about crying koalas. At this point, I don't think it's possible to get it past moderation.
The mods were fairly nice about it, saying that the site could face legal trouble if it had pedophilic content on it. Still, I feel like there's more to this than just the letter of the law. All I did was switch the species around--it was a story about an adult wanting to, er, do things with a minor, compared to, say, Anonymous Pegasus's* stories about adults actually doing things with minors. Was there really anything that made my story different from stories that don't get rejected, and in fact sometimes show up in the featured box?
(Obvious answer: it's different because Knighty wouldn't add it to his favorites.)
I'll put the finishing touches on the next chapter of How Equestria Was Made sometime later today or tonight. For now, I feel a little too bummed out.
* No disrespect intended; he's just the only one whose name I remember, since he also writes non-clop fics I've read and liked. Still, it's a little awkward to scroll down in his list of stories written and see what's in the same list as An Affliction of the Heart.
Sorry to hear about the rejection :/ I hope it doesn't sour you to writing too much.