As a writer myself, I can only imagine how many the “All characters are 18 or older unless specifically said otherwise” blurb has saved. I feel like that blurb has become standard in fanworks and web original stories, even when they don’t involve sex. If there’s even the slightest chance anything that happens could be interpreted as someone’s kink, you better believe it’s there now.

I actually have one character from a series I wrote ages ago, I kind of abandoned it because I’m not edgy anymore, but I still use the lead character from time to time for art projects; commissions mostly, as she did have a fun character design being an undead gerbil and all.

I’ve retroactively upped her age from 17 to 19, just to be safe.

Though as I said, I was REALLY edgy when I wrote the book series (I was around 19 myself, I’m 33 now), so this is a change I’m actually happy to have made.

It wasn’t pornographic, it was based on the movie “I Spit On Your Grave”, only if the lead character was killed and got revenge from beyond the grave, so there was a sex scene with her, but it was intended to be immorally wrong and disturbing… and mostly talked about how this otherwise fearless street tough was suffering… It was also over quick and not elaborated on too much beyond giving the sense that “This is horrible and she’s very much not a fan” as the point of the book was that she died horribly, but was given a chance at revenge in the afterlife. (There wasn’t even a content warning, because this was so long ago that “CWs” weren’t a thing)

I’ve actually considered doing a reboot of her story and making it lighter and softer, maybe removing the rape from her death entirely.

Not because of fears of being targeted mind you, but because I like the character I created and would love to tell more stories with her, but I’m not the edgelord I was when I first wrote her and if I wrote about her today would never have handled her story the way I did.

The point I was making… Is that the article brought a red herring fact that has nothing to do with anything

Why did they bring it up?

It was not a red herring in the least, and it struck to the very core of my own criticisms: while some vigilantes may be very stringent about their own investigations and targets, others may not.

In this example, these vigilantes artificially engineered a target where none was likely to ever exist. They drew the target in using the profile of a perfectly legal 18yo woman, but then turned around and claimed that the target was actually chasing the profile of an 17yo - and illegally young - girl, when he was in fact not doing so.

This was a very clear situation of entrapment by false pretenses.