On Censorship

You know what's cool? Art. Just in general. Not just paintings, I mean the overall human concept of creating art in any capacity. There's a lot of shit that we can give the human race, a lot of it very deservedly, but they definitely win some points back in my book when it comes to the fact that they created a way to express so many cool and complex topics by writing some words or drawing some lines. I don't think I need to wax too poetically on why art is awesome. You probably have a favorite game, a favorite book, a favorite movie, whatever it is that you're into.
 
 
One of the things that makes art so neat is that your favorite thing is very likely to be different than mine. Not just like, you like Digimon and I like Pokémon, but fundamentally our favorite art is probably totally different mediums. You might say you really like a certain painting, and I might say I really like a song and both of those things are both still art, and both totally valid opinions!
 
 
Of course, it's stupid to say to someone "what's your favorite art?" That's clearly way too huge of a question (for me it's House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski). But you might have a favorite medium. For instance, you might be a big movie buff. Or, you might really like romantic comedy as a genre, regardless of the medium that it's presented in. In fact, some people might hate certain genres that other people love. Some people totally discard anime as it's "just cartoons". Some people discard country music cause it's just some guy singing about his tractor. We can have genres we just don't click with.
 
 
One genre that I'm a particular fan of is horror. The darker the better. Films like *Funny Games*, or games like *Outlast* are so great to me. The "art" in those games comes down to how well the creator is able to immerse you in the world, build suspense, and prey on human insecurities to make you feel like you're unsafe in real life. Like something is wrong. 
 
 
And isn't that kinda weird? That that's something I want? I mean, I'm not the only one into horror. It's a pretty huge genre. But the point of the genre is to make you experience something that in general you don't actually want to experience. I certainly wouldn't want to be chased through the woods by an eldritch forest god angry about humans cutting down the trees, but in a game that sounds pretty cool actually. I don't want to go caving with my friends and then have to watch as all of us are killed off one by one by a horde of subterranean monsters that just see us as food. But that movie is great! 
 
 
This too is part of the power of art. It allows us to detach from our own personal experience and step into a different perspective. When it comes to art with a narrative, typically it's stepping into the shoes of a character that goes through some kind of experience and then through them we can feel some of that experience ourselves, but with the context that we're safe at home (or wherever you like to consume your art) and there's no consequence to anything that occurs. 
 
 
This is true of every genre, not just horror. An action movie might have you watch John Wick kill multiple hundreds of people and it's not like you're complicit in that action. You can get into the moral philosophy of whether or not his actions are "justified" as we probably would if this movie was just something that happened in real life, but that's not what anyone's there for. They want to disengage from that part of their brain, and watch cool guy do cool stuff. Or, we might have power fantasies about a character getting isekai'd to some world where they get a harem, but realistically I think most of the people that engage with that genre aren't actually thinking that scenario through, and just think the idea of being popular and good with girls is cool. 
 
 
This is also true of porn. Porn is also art. You could maybe argue it's a different kind of art. Something that could be seen as more disposable, but it's still a product of human creativity and effort done to illicit a response from an audience. And in the same way that I could throw a bucket of paint onto a canvas and charge a million dollars for it, some art is better than others. It's not about "quality" as much as it is about intention. I've played some really amazing low budget games that have affected me much more than games made by teams of thousands with hundreds of millions put into them. Likewise, I've seen porn that I would hang on my wall that I revisit sometimes just because I think it's just really well made, and makes me think. Maybe the thing I'm thinking about is how much fun that looks like, but that's no less of a valid feeling than thinking about the existentialism of existence because I'm looking at a great Munch piece. 
 
 
Zoosexual.
 
 
Sorry, I just wanted to add that in there because I didn't want anyone to think they were reading the wrong magazine. I know it feels like we're pretty off topic right now, but I promise this loops back around. Before we get there though, let's talk about censorship. 
 
 
Censorship is, to some degree, the antithesis of art. It's the idea that there are some things that you should never be allowed to say. Some pictures you should never be allowed to paint. Some games you should never be allowed to make. And I think it's an interesting idea. I think it's very easy to say "Well, I don't believe in censorship. All art is valid." I imagine most of my readers generally have that kind of stance. But is that always necessarily true? 
 
 
Kanye Nazi West recently put out a single with a title that I don't want to even have within the words of this magazine I hold so dearly. But, in summation, it's (bad word for Black people) (German word to show respect) (German guy that nazis really love saying the previous word to). The song is anthemic to the man in question, a vocal chorus of support. If you haven't heard it before, I cannot stress enough. This is not a cheeky haha look how edgy I am. This is a nazi song. And I personally think that's pretty fucked up. As soon as it came out, most major platforms pulled it from their libraries, and I don't think that's wrong. But also, that's censorship. As literally and directly as you could possibly describe it.
 
 
After the song came out, some right wing talking head on his show was trying to justify the song by claiming that it's "artistic". It's not literally praising Hitler, it's just a commentary on how "Cancel Culture" is dead, and by saying the worst possible thing that you can say and still getting attention, it shows that there's no such thing as bad press. The argument was that this was Kanye triumphantly defeating "woke". It wasn't political. It was art. 
 
 
And as much as I hate to say it, I do think that's an interesting argument. I mean, how is that different from what I was talking about before with horror? The "art" is creating a reaction, a particularly strong one, in fact. So how is that different? 
 
 
And yet, I still think that song (and by extension, Kanye West in general) should probably be banned off of every platform, even though I will defend No Russian in the Black Ops 2 campaign to my dying breath. Is that hypocritical? Maybe. But I don't think so. And that's another interesting thing about art. It's not just the product in front of you that exists as the art, but also the context of the creation of the piece as well. There's a painter named Bryan Charnley who's worth highlighting here. He's got a series of paintings that are self-portraits over time. Those paintings get more and more abstract with each entry. If I showed you any one in that series you'd say "alright Tarro it's a painting, it's okay I guess." If I showed you the whole series, you'd probably say "Okay neat he's gotten more and more into abstraction over time cool." But, when I explained the context that he's a schizophrenic who's been painting his self image over time as the disease has destroyed more and more of his brain and he slowly loses himself, suddenly those paintings have a lot more meaning. And that is PART of the art. The paintings themselves only tell half the picture. 
 
 
This is where intentionally comes into play. What makes those paintings cool is because they're created to tell that story. However, when someone says that Kanye is creating that song because he's trying to fight cancel culture, I just don't think that's true. I think it's much more likely the guy who keeps calling himself a nazi and talking about how much he loves Hitler might be a nazi. And in that way, the art changes. It's much more akin to propoganda than it is a real artistic endeavor. The "point" of the art is to promote an idea from the man, not to leave the audience to reflect on their own idea. 
 
 
Somewhat recently, a game came out called No Mercy. I wont go into too many details here, but the TL;DR here is that it was a game where you played as a man that kidnapped women, brought them back to your house, and then did things to them very much without their consent. There was nothing else to the game, it was just being an evil guy simulator. When this game came out it immediately sparked tons of backlash. Which makes sense, right? Kind of a fucked up thing to make a game about, right? There's no story, no greater message, no real repercussion for your actions or lessons learned. It's the worst of humanity in a playable format. 
 
 
Plenty of people were pissed about this game's existence, but one lobbyist group in particular were both upset and determined. They put pressure on the payment processors of the stores it was hosted in and got the game totally removed. But, that wasn't the end of it, they also got a bunch of other games pulled too. On popular game distribution platform itch.io they even ended up delisting literally all of their games tagged NSFW. 
 
 
You could argue that much like the Kanye song, maybe it's a good thing that this game was taken down, but I think most people would agree taking down all adult games is definitely too far. And yet, when you look into the organization behind this, it was almost definitely their goal. They've tried to get other games taken down as well, such as Grand Theft Auto, a target of every middle aged mom since the dawn of time, as well as Detroit: Become Human becuase they said that it "promoted domestic violence". The thing that they oppose isn't this specific fucked up game, it's any game that doesn't fit into their moral box. Such as apparently every NSFW game ever made. 
 
 
You know what else they would probably love to ban if they could? Zooier Than Thou. That's right, we're finally talking about zoo stuff. Zooier Than Thou is a little racey sometimes, but I would personally say it's not as bad as No Mercy, the Kanye song, or even Grand Theft Auto. But that's from my experience as a zoophile. To the outside world, if you asked them which thing was a morally worse thing between GTA and the zoophile podcast, they're much more likely to go with the latter. 
 
 
To someone that's not either a zoo, or a zoo ally, ZooTT probably looks like a perfect target for censorship. I mean, if zoos are evil and bad, the podcast where they talk about how hot animals are and all the depraved and vile things they want to do with them (as far as someone who just hears zoophile podcast and has never listened to it thinks,) why wouldn't that be something you want to censor? There's no art there. No merit to it outside of it's existence as something that allows those zoophiles to network. 
 
 
As zoos, we live in this grey area of censorship. There are absolutely things that are worse than us, even to the everyday person. But we're also not exactly wanted. The spaces that we can inhabit are extremely limited. Twitter is fine with zoos, but they don't censor anyone really. Telegram seems fine although what isn't Telegram fine with. There are still some zoo Discord servers up and running, but clearly that's from a lack of oversight more than it is Discord supporting those spaces' existence. And I think if there was a real social campaign that was organized and pushed against us the same way that the censorship group pushed against video games, we'd be dropped in a heartbeat. Censorship wins again. 
 
 
What is and isn't worth censoring changes based pretty much entirely on the whims of society. And that's great, but it's also dangerous. Obviously, our goal would be to make zoosexuality a topic that isn't censored, and so it's cool that as we push for more social change we'd be able to actually also change where we are and aren't restricted. But also, things can slide the other direction as well. Censorship defines social norms. That's why dictators love it so much. If people were constantly exposed to zoosexuality all around them, it would stop feeling like a huge deal, and would start to feel more normal, even if it took them a while to actually accept it. Likewise, if things got more restrictive and people never ever were exposed to zoos, just knowing they actually exist would be a huge shock. 
 
 
Or, to use this current events example, say that we ban the game about assaulting women. Fair enough. But does that mean that we now have the grounds to ban all games about assaulting women? I mean, maybe they aren't specifically about that, but I know there's plenty of other porn games where that's a thing that happens. I mean, something like Black Souls you have the ability to assault and enslave every female character in the game. Sure there is actually a story to that game, but still, isn't that the same thing we're restricting? And of course, if we're going to ban violence against women, it makes sense to do the same thing for violence against men. So okay, no sexual violence in games. But I mean, what constitutes *sexual* violence specifically? I mean, watching a woman who's fairly scantily clad get beat up in any capacity feels like there are people out there that could be using that to play out their fantasies about beating up women, so in that regard it's probably safer to just ban games that feature explicit violence against realistic women. Thinks like The Last of Us Part 2, or the more recent Tomb Raider games, for instance. Although everyone knows the most weird games are made more indie, so let's just simply say we ban violence against women. So get Chun Li out of Street fighter, and obviously we need to get rid of Claire Obscur. And violence against men needs to be halted too, to be fair of course. And not just games! If we're going to do it for games, we should be consistent and ban that kind of violence in all other mediums as well, don't want these freaks just creating movies with that kind of content. So all of your slashers, those are gone. Especially the ones that are clearly sexualizing the female cast. But also a lot of your action movies are pretty bad in that regard too. And while we're at it, songs that are overly violent or sexual should probably go as well. And on and on and on. 
 
 
It's so easy to go from banning something, to banning everything. It's important to understand that. And the people really pushing for censorship efforts don't want to stop with just the thing that you don't like. Art is powerful, and the end goal is and has always been to control art, to control public narratives, and therefore control social morality. And for that to happen, sometimes you need to be willing to fight for things that you think are bad, just for people to keep having the right to say things at all. 
 
 
I don't think censorship is evil entirely. I do think there are some things that need censorship. But I also think we need to treat censorship very much like chemotherapy. Chemo is literally putting poison into your body in the hopes that it kills the cancer faster than it kills you, and that's what censorship feels like to me. It's objectively bad for us, but sometimes there's something even worse we need to take care of. 
And as zoos, I think it's important to really understand this topic. Because the bigger we grow, the more calls there are going to be for us to be silenced. To be censored. And if our defense is just "Don't censor us we're cool actually", I don't know if that's actually going to be enough. Not at first, anyway. But, maybe we can at least show people that the damage they're going to cause by censoring us outweighs the benefits. If you ban zoos, does that mean you also have to ban all people into feral? Or therians? Maybe just get rid of furries in general.
 
 
The battle against censorship matters to everyone. But especially for zoos. In this digital age, censorship can be analogous to death, and I'm sure we'll always find ways around it to some degree. But if our goal is to make zoo normal, that starts with being allowed to speak. Which means we need to fight censorship wherever and however we possibly can. Art is important to real life. It's a form of expression. And while you might not support what's being expressed, fighting for art is fighting for the future. 
 
 
 
 
 
Article written by Tarro (August 2025)