In the last few days, Deviant Art has chosen to delete a few of my deviations; Saria Squeals and The Legend of Little Tail. Some of my regular readers have noticed these absences.

The loss of The Legend of Little Tail strikes me as particularly unfair. It was classified as ‘ornographic’ (no specific criterion was listed for Saria Squeals), and indeed, it did have a sex scene in it. It took up about 10% of the story, placed two thirds of the way through. The vast majority of the story dealt with the ramifications and perceptions of an affair between a college teacher and one of his students (where I come from, a serious and widespread problem), the jealousy this provoked, and the revenge and debate over whether it was justified of another student, using the physically impossible mechanism of animal transformation as the revenge device. Even the sex scene was not classically erotic, but rather the other student forcing the discovered lovers to continue an interrupted tryst to hurt them further. That student does pay for her vigilante action in the end, as well.

Deviant Art claims that work will be deleted or classed as pornographic only if, in their own words, “the work possesses no redeeming literary qualities”. The Legend of Little Tail had literary merit, and I maintain that Deviant Art’s censors erred in removing this story.

The problem, in part, is that as an American I expect Deviant Art to behave like a democracy, and it is not one. It is owned by people who allow us to post here, who give us fairly generous and comprehensive creative control of our content, and who get to make the rules pertaining to what is allowed. I am bothered that one complainer who never has to identify himself can blacklist an author or work; and that there is no chance for the author to defend or modify his or her work before the censors render judgment (seemingly erring on the side of caution rather than rigorously standing by their written principles) and terminate it. There is an appeals process; but I have a feeling that using it would merely be a quick way to get my whole account eliminated.

It’s their sandbox, of course, and they can make or change the rules at their whim. But it’s the capriciousness of this that bothers me so deeply, as it’s been happening far too often of late.

I’m tempted to repost the story with the word REDACTED replacing all of the sexual parts, but I am unsure whether this will merely incense the censors more. They’ve taken down a lot of other TF stories of late, many with far more literary quality than mine. Heck, they even suspended one of my best friends here in a startling and questionable display of power, whose brilliant and meaningful writing contained some sexuality mixed with many mature, intelligent themes that never failed to provoke thought. I am more incensed about this suspension than I am the loss of any of my stories, but I do not feel comfortable writing about someone else’s situation here. Suffice to say, I seriously question the even-handed nature of such decisions and the un-transparent and ‘backroom’ nature by which they are made.

Most of my stories deal frankly with sexuality, although I work hard to have literary themes run through the work. This will continue to be the case, so I am debating whether Deviant Art is an appropriate home for my work. I respect their efforts to remain free from simple pornographic titillation, and I have enjoyed the chance to write both for a general audience, and for adults through the use of the mature content feature. I just expected a place that treats all art as a ‘deviation’ from normalcy, and celebrates this, to have a higher tolerance for deviance.

Again, I am still have plenty to do and am not taking more requests at this time. And even when I do, I am fairly certain that I now will not accept requests with erotic content.