thoughts on sharing niche fetish content
this is originally from 2025, but remains prescient, so i have updated and modified it a bit.
to preface this, very obviously this post will deal with nsfw topics, as well as various fetishes, niche and otherwise, including ones that you may not like. You Specifically. yeah. so, without further ado...
Thoughts on Sharing Niche Fetish Content
by silas / ziggy prophetesque
to begin, i have been on tumblr for almost 15 years, since i was a junior in high school, with the same blog. i have seen some shit. i have Posted some shit. i'm not going to list off things, because for the purpose of this writing, i don't really care to, you can find plenty of youtube videos about ~Tumblr Controversies~. i'm not looking to add to that.
(and, as a quick aside, i'm sure you can probably find evidence of me doing the exact thing i'm about to call out if you dig on my own personal tumblr, because as i said previously, i've had it for Almost Fifteen Fucking Years, and people grow up and change; i can only hope other people who are currently doing this in the year of luigi 2025 2026 can change too).
something that i see somewhat frequently (enough that i know what i'm looking and and see red once i realize) on tumblr is that people, especially the type i'll term as Tumblr Funnypeople, you know the ones, will post (never credited, of course!) or repost or reblog content that is, to varying degrees of obviousness, extremely niche fetish content. and to clarify, i'm not talking about when, say, vore was the joke du jour on tumblr, or when piss was or whatever. i'm talking about the "Weird Shit". i'm talking about smoking kink with cigarette dronification ai images. i'm talking images made by people with a fetish for themselves or others getting haircuts. i'm talking about sonic characters taking out the trash. things like that. mundane things as fetishes are particularly often targets of this, as are small fetish accounts, as are just... peoples' nsfw accounts wholesale.
this shit makes me incandescently FURIOUS, for a variety of reasons you bet your bippy i'm going to get into here.
for starters, i feel it's very much a matter of 'our noble oviposition fetish vs. their barbaric headless fetish'. just insert whatever the 'popular' fetish of the time is, or a more socially acceptable one, vs one that is more maligned, and there you go. correct me if i'm wrong, but it never seems to be a matter of the call coming from inside the house, as it were; the people who share this content to laugh and poke fun at it, are generally not the people with said niche fetishes. 'see!' it seems to say, 'sure i may like piss, but at least i'm not into dudes photoshopped to be insanely hypermuscular! I'm One Of The Good Ones'. and maybe the people who do it aren't EXPLICITLY doing it for that reason, but implicitly, it absolutely comes off that way. newsflash! your tentacle fetish isn't more Ideologically Pure or whatever than that 20 follower tumblr account's haircutting fetish. you aren't More Woke for having a more or a less transgressive fetish than these people. you just aren't.
source: https://www.tumblr.com/wizardarchetypes/807645085306142720/
the biggest point i have in my argument against people doing this is: it's just lolcow shit, but "socially acceptable", ESPECIALLY when it's done by accounts with thousands and thousands of followers, the aforementioned Tumblr Funnypeople. you've heard of "reblogs =/= endorsement", now get ready for "i didn't MEAN to share this fetish account with a fraction of my followers, to my followers, to make FUN of it, i just thought it was funny :(". not that i've ever seen anyone apologize for doing this, for exposing people to potential cruelty via followers with lacking social skills or who just suck as people, not to MENTION the fact that it's just shitty to take fetish content outside its original context, ESPECIALLY solely just to make fun of it. genuinely from the bottom of my heart, if you do this shit (ESPECIALLY if you do it consistently), that's fucking kiwifarms behavior. it's fucking cruel. you think you're better than these people with fetishes you find laughable, but you're not. this is going to sound insane, but it's like that one tumblr post. you know. this one:
source: https://worm-suggestion.tumblr.com/post/186797365687/
"You think it looks funny. [...] But it lives its whole life. So you have to take it seriously eventually, right? And be respectful and shit." actually, i think THAT is the biggest point i'm trying to get at here. it costs zero dollars to just... leave people alone, and be Respectful toward them, and to do that sometimes is to just fucking leave people alone and to not take things out of their intended context and expose their creators to cruelty just because you think what they're doing is Funny and Outside Social Norms.
WHICH, now that we're on the topic, often happens disproportionately to minorities! think about how often you see pictures taken out of their original context and turned into memes, without the person pictured's consent. who comes to mind first is the gentlemen who is often posited as the 'prototypical neckbeard', who's just literally A Fucking Guy, but because he's fat and has a neckbeard, Things are Assumed about him. he's literally disabled, but he's the posterchild for shitty nerd opinions. it sucks! you can donate to his gofundme here btw. though i can't think of any examples off the top of my head, i feel this (and, tbh, the original point!) often happens to black people, and trans women/trans fem people. huh wonder why that is. (it's racism and transphobia/transmisogyny and not seeing the aforementioned groups of people as human, exacerbated by the online instinct to not see other users as human).
maybe you'll say something like "silas, what the fuck are you TALKING about, i've never seen this in my LIFE LOL". 1. i bet you absolutely have and just didn't clock it as fetish content. 2. even if YOU'VE never seen it doesn't mean it isn't happening, because I'VE seen it, and i've seen it enough that it pisses me off to an insane amount every time i do see it.
i don't have a very good ending to this, at least right now. i also don't have any examples, because i don't want to expose fetish content creators to people who might have less than good intentions reading this. even with names and pictures blurred out, i'm sure people would be able to find them. i just hope that in the future, Tumblr Funnypeople and everyone else can just. fucking chill and be more kind and respectful toward strangers on the internet. a tall order, and i'm not holding my breath, if i'm being honest. but i can hope. and if this little makeshift article makes even one person realize 'hey i/someone i follow was being shitty when they rbed/posted this!' then i have done my job.
thanks for reading! feel free to hit up my website's guestbook, my email, or my bluesky with any comments about this piece!