What do you think about this?

I got called out on TikTok for saying it’s not okay to compare toxic yaoi characters to a pedophile character. Someone argued that if you’re into toxic yaoi, you’d find Dino from Banana Fish hot if he were more conventionally attractive, as if liking a toxic dynamic between two adults means you’d also be drawn to a character whose whole thing is preying on a child. I said that comparison was insensitive, and got attacked for it in the comments.

My point wasn’t that one’s real and one’s fiction, it’s that pedophilia and “toxic relationship between two adults” aren’t the same category of messed up, even as fictional tropes. Stalking, obsession, manipulation between adults is one kind of dark. A character built around abusing a child is a different, much heavier kind. Flattening those into “well you like dark stuff so you’d like this too” doesn’t track.

And what the “toxic yaoi” being discussed actually was, Killing Stalking, CNA, Passion, Unchanged Man, has nothing to do with pedophilia in the first place. So the comparison didn’t even fit the thing it was supposedly about.

One of the people telling me I was wrong had a shota pfp, by the way. Girl gtfo

The pile on came mostly from Ivantil shippers, for context. (Just found it kinda hypocritical)

What do you think, is there a real line between finding a toxic but adult fictional dynamic compelling, and being told that means you’d sympathize with a pedophile? Because to me those are clearly different things, even inside fiction, and treating them as interchangeable feels like it’s arguing in bad faith.