Things have gone downhill, and continued snowballing, pretty much since updates in how FA's content policy would be enforced going forward were announced on May 19. Understandably, a lot of people are upset. Some are hurt by the implication that their art is something they have strong feelings against. Some have been accused of pedophilia for protesting the changes. In an ideal world, what would have happened would have been some variation of "users voice their legitimate concerns about the collateral damage and fallout of this change, and whether or not the changes are canceled there's productive discussion." The announcement or one of the subsequent clarification newsposts should have explicitly acknowledged that many or most of these artists probably didn't intend their art to be minor coded, and these changes are being enacted out of... whatever reasoning. That changes in 2015 were "well-received" isn't exactly compelling as an argument to support making changes with such wide repercussions.

Were there people exploiting the special status of Pokémon and Digimon to post artwork that wouldn't otherwise be permitted under AUP 2.7? Probably. Because people gonna people. Does that change the fact that this rule is a bad rule? No.

So what do I mean by "a bad rule?"
Both this update and the update to AUP 2.7 from January 3 are what I would consider bad rules. It's not about the intent of the rule; it's about other qualities. Namely, good rules must be straightforward to evaluate ("does the submission check these boxes?") and should have minimal impact on content outside of what it is intended to govern. These updates fail on both points, and that puts both users and staff in an unfair position.

An example of a good rule would be AUP 2.12. There could probably be some tweaks, but overall, it's good because it's very black and white. There's a swaztika in your image? Box is checked; your image has to go. No ifs or buts.

So onto the current situation with AUP 2.7:
I know (well, I think it's a pretty safe assumption that wouldn't have changed since 2017) that the aim of every moderation team on Fur Affinity is to have consistent and fair enforcement. The best way to achieve consistency is to minimize the need for interpretation and moderator discretion. (Sometimes those will still be necessary for exceptional cases, but I strongly believe the need for them should be avoided as much as possible.) So it's not fair on staff by means of making their jobs much harder than they should need to be.

I should hope that the aim of most users is to follow the rules to the best of their abilities. I don't think anyone wants to get their submissions removed and action taken against their account. Good rules should be clearly stated and let users figure out for themselves what is/isn't permitted before posting. Rules relying on interpretation of artistic intent ("may not be fetishized" as in the January update) inherently put that at risk - I may upload something that I don't consider fetishistic, might not even reflect over the possibility of it, but if someone else thinks it is, and they report it, my intent doesn't matter anymore, only the intent moderation staff thinks I had does. This obviously makes it difficult to impossible to judge whether a piece is acceptable under the posted ruleset or not. The more recent update requiring young-looking Pokémon to be "aged up" rather than drawn on model makes this even more treacherous, as it adds art style to the list of factors that might determine the fate of a submission. It's not fair on users by means of drastically reducing their ability to make informed decisions about what they can/cannot upload.

The one recourse users have (if they realize that their art might be a problem, which is not guaranteed) is to file tickets to ask about their submissions before uploading. That's... not exactly fair on staff, either, by means of creating a situation where they have to handle those extra tickets. I'm assuming it's a pretty significant number, even before the calls I've seen for mass reporting random submissions out of spite towards site administration at large. (Don't do that; it's petty, wastes everybody's time, and violates Code of Conduct.)

As for the collateral damage...
Babyfurs were, from what I gather, hit pretty hard by the January update. Chances are this recent update will hit that community again. In my limited understanding, ABDLs and babyfurs find comfort in many of the trappings of early childhood, which I can pretty easily see leading to things like exaggeratedly plush pampers. I don't think that the intent there is inherently fetishistic. I don't know for certain, since it's been a long time since I regularly socialized with babyfurs (and the finer details of that side of them didn't really come up), but I suspect there are non-fetishistic reasons for depicting things like soiling in babyfur-focused art, as well. To the people reporting their content it will probably always look like fetish material, but I feel like they're probably biased and maybe not always acting in good faith. (The reason I say they might be acting in bad faith is because several of the people I've seen most vocally outraged about this content are also people who feel that babyfurs and ABDLs are inherently pedophiles, which is definitely not the case.)

For the May 19 update, Pokémon artists who stay reasonably faithful to the original art style(s) are the obvious collateral damage; I assume the same would be true on the Digimon side. Specifically, the artists who had no intent for the characters to be interpreted as minors; they were simply depicted as designed. This is a decently large segment of the artist userbase; I wouldn't know what percentage or anything, but I've been around the block. I know I've seen a lot of artists draw this stuff. Hell, I've got a ticket pending requesting feedback on some old-ass art of mine with mostly-on-model Pokémon that I was certainly not thinking of as children/cubs/minors/foo. (If I get told it needs to go, can I reupload it in five years when the art itself reaches age of majority?) Artists who draw Pokémon in diapers get the double whammy, here, as there's the risk that the diapers themselves will influence moderators in determining whether the characters are child-coded.

So yeah. Bad rules, rolled out less than ideally, including representation of the history of the rule that I find to be... questionable. But then comes the community's reaction. And... wow. Just wow.

---

As I said in my opening, it's quite understandable that people are upset. I'm not putting any blame on anyone for being upset alone. The problem lies in where they let these feelings take them.

There's been the people protesting that Dragoneer has/had Digimon and Pokémon porn in his gallery. And then being just as angry when he took one(?) of those pieces down. The change regarding Pokémon/Digimon in adult content isn't slated to go into effect until July 1, so it doesn't fucking matter. It's not, at this moment, disallowed. If it does violate the rules as they will be enforced at that time, taking it down is what he's supposed to do, so these people are angry because he... acted the same way any user should in preparation for the change? Regardless, there's no law that says he can't set rules that don't 100% follow what he himself is interested in, or whatever. I can't bring a dog into the pharmacy. Are you going to go yelling at dog-owning pharmacists that they're hypocrites, now? Because, uh... that's kinda ridiculous.

Then there were the people who decided that if they couldn't have nice things, they needed to go scorched earth and take everyone and their art supplies down with them. Post-pubescent minors (what I assume was the basic intent behind the arbitrary age of 13) have been allowed to be shown pregnant since 2020, as per the most recent (at time of writing) newspost. Three years, give or take, during which there was no significant blow-up over it, or at least none that I ever saw. That it has now been banned, closing the door for people with experience to share their stories (as well as people who just have characters who got pregnant in their teens because that's a thing that happens, but the lived-experience people are the biggest victims here), is something I place the blame for squarely on the shoulders of people trying to use that carve-out as a gotcha in order to try to get the Pokémon/Digimon exception back. It's not as though the "minors may not be fetishized" clause in the rule wasn't already there. Fetishistic depictions of teen pregnancy weren't on the menu.
They just had to drag others down with them.

(On a tangential note, I understand the "18 years old" thing isn't really at FA's discretion, but HOLY FUCK it would be so nice if we as a society stopped pretending like teens don't have sex. Like, I'm not saying allow minors in live-action porn or anything, but, like... it feels utterly unnatural that fiction gets forced into a weird corner where characters practically have tamper-proof seals on their genitals until they hit 18. I'm sure this is gonna get misconstrued, but really all I mean is that it would be nice if high school dramas were allowed to include actual high school drama. All of it. It's a storytelling thing to me.)

Anyway, those people also were mighty upset with the explicit carve-out for non-sexual transformation and vore themes as permissible. And, like... the language for that part of the rule was a little iffy ("themes" would have been so much better than "interests"), but it's something so obvious it shouldn't even need to be said. "Vore" is colloquially used within fandom for, well, eating, particularly of live prey. That doesn't mean every instance of "vore" is actually paraphilic/sexual. But that's how the protestations went, right along with arguments saying that anyone wanting to create art with minors in these contexts is obviously a pedophile. Which... uh. I guess you just accused the Brothers Grimm of wanting to diddle kids, seeing as their retelling of the Red Riding Hood story is one of the most influential/common ones. Great job, you guys. You sure showed them. I believe there's some vore themes in Aesop's Fables, as well, so we're looking at centuries of "fetishes" being peddled to minors. If that's the hill you want to die on.

Transformation is even more ridiculous of a claim, given how common a theme it is in children's media. Off the top of my head, in no particular order... Ben 10 (titular character), The Twelve Swans (main character's 12 brothers), The Frog Prince (titular character), Pinocchio (titular character), Snow White (evil witch/queen), Sleeping Beauty (evil witch/fairy), Shrek (titular character, Princess Fiona, misc side characters including Donkey), The Little Mermaid (titular character), Beauty and the Beast (Beast), DO WE FUCKING GET THE POINT? Hell, we've got Greek mythology (Zeus being the most frequent offender), Norse mythology (especially but not exclusively Loki), and I believe possibly even the fucking Bible, but who am I to get in the way of your juvenile outrage?

Of course they can be depicted in a fetishistic context/manner. So can fucking high-heeled shoes. But neither is inherently and necessarily so, and acting like they are just sounds like sour grapes at this point.

---

I don't like the changes that have been made to AUP 2.7 this year. I'm not saying I do. I think they're bad changes and I've clearly stated why. I also think that it's utterly childish to attack, badmouth and harass staff over it, to try to deflect onto other subjects that are supposedly JUST AS BAD, or to call anyone protesting a pedophile or groomer. It's ridiculous to pass around screenshots of staff making completely reasonable statements and make out like they just spoke out in favor of enacting the suggestions in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.

But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. :/