Sugar got her start in cartoon fan communities during the 2000s, posting fan art to social networks like LiveJournal. Way back in 2007, her technical skill caught the eye of Cartoon Brew’s Amid Amidi — who also reported on the “disturbing” nature of much of Sugar’s work at the time. Specifically, Sugar created Rule 34 art. Among other things, she drew comics that portray the awkward, vulnerable sexual encounters of preteen characters from the Cartoon Network show Ed, Edd n Eddy. The work, which is still floating around the internet, fixates on the inexperience and uncertainty of its subjects, on the uncomfortable blurred lines of sex at a young age.

But Amidi’s prediction that Sugar had “a bright future” came true. Just two years later, in 2009, she was hired to Adventure Time as a storyboarder, and she quickly made the jump to showrunner status with Steven Universe. For an artist from the online underground scene, it was a rare honor.

Critics have hailed Steven Universe as a new standard in storytelling, emotional complexity and representation in kids’ TV. It made history as the first children’s cartoon to portray a same-sex wedding. Sugar was able to do this by very smartly creating characters who would allow her to bypass the old-fashioned censors of LGBTQ+ content at Cartoon Network. While the alien race in the show — the Gems — identify as female, they are technically genderless holograms projected by living rocks. This distinction allows the show to explore many different aspects of gender and sexual orientation usually rendered off-limits by the old guard of children’s TV.

However, at the same time, the appearance of many Gems as very young — though they are technically hundreds or thousands of years old — is used to explore sexual situations involving child-like characters.

Gems in Steven Universe can fuse, a dance-like activity that allows two or more of them to form a single, larger being. The show uses fusion as a metaphor for many things — friendship, romance, companionship. But it’s also used at times as a rather blatant metaphor for sex. Take fusion scenes like the one in “Sexy Fuse,” a YouTube upload with 4.3 million views. It’s thinly-veiled enough that many of the kids in the comments openly (via abundant emoji and confused typing) express discomfort with it. This makes fusion somewhat alarming when it’s mixed with Steven Universe’s younger-looking and -acting characters.

Peridot, despite being an alien, looks and acts just like a child. Her unique mannerisms have been hailed by fans as an all-time-great example of neuroatypical representation in children’s cartoons.

One scene from the episode “Log Date 7 15 2” is a good example. The character Garnet invites the younger and less worldly Peridot, a Gem who has never fused before and is uneasy about the idea, to fuse with her and learn what all the fuss is about. The child-like Gem tumbles backwards, blushing and flustered at the come-on. Uncertain at first, Peridot works up her courage and decides to go through with it. Garnet puts on music and Peridot straps paint cans to her feet to keep up with her taller partner. But Peridot’s inexperience and awkwardness quickly leave her overwhelmed, and she calls off the fusion before it’s finished.

In another episode, the half-Gem protagonist Steven goes to the beach with his romantic interest — a 12-year-old human girl named Connie who’s two years his junior. While flirting, they accidentally fuse into the more mature-looking Stevonnie. Steven’s Gem mentor Pearl declares this “inappropriate,” but Stevonnie states that it “feels amazing.” Later, though, the two halves of Stevonnie have a moment of uncertainty. “Are you okay? We can stop, if you…” says one side.

One of the most disquieting plotlines related to fusion comes when Pearl, under false pretenses, tricks Garnet into fusing with her multiple times. Pearl says that she “couldn’t help” herself, and continues, “When we fuse, I can feel what it’s like to be you… confident and secure and complete.” Her actions lead Garnet to split into two halves — each one a smaller Gem with a preteen appearance — who struggle to deal with the fallout of pseudo-sexual betrayal. Child-like characters are placed once again into a vulnerable position in a landscape of blurred lines and uncertain boundaries. In the end, Pearl is accepted back into the fold with no lasting repercussions.

These aren’t the usual adult jokes buried in subtext for the grown-ups in the room. They aren’t even jokes — they’re explorations of troubling themes, executed in often-troubling ways. Despite the merits of Steven Universe, and despite its progressive handling of gender and sexual orientation, the show’s missteps into disturbing territory can’t simply be brushed aside.

But Steven Universe was a hit with the internet. Like My Little Pony, Cartoon Network’s show has drawn an online fanbase of adults outside its core demographic. And this fan community, like the bronies, has become notorious for filling the internet with porn in every configuration, especially of young-looking characters like Peridot. To call this environment hypersexual is almost an understatement. Google Images is a minefield, and any attempt to engage with Steven Universe on social media quickly runs into an endless river of erotica.

The comparison between the two fanbases wasn’t lost on certain spectators, including Ian Jones-Quartey, co-showrunner of Steven Universe and romantic partner of Rebecca Sugar. In 2015, he shared a fan comic on the subject and remarked that it was “exactly” how the situation looked to the show’s team:

At the time, the Steven Universe fandom was attempting to drive bronies from the show’s online communities. Jones-Quartey highlighted the comic’s message that the two fandoms had more things in common with each other than not.

His remark was already a step beyond the general silence that the My Little Pony staff has maintained about the porn culture around their show. But Jones-Quartey went further a minute later. In a since-deleted follow-up tweet, he seemingly supported the fans’ work: “not that i have anything against risqué fanart btw. I love it all, even the gross stuff. it’s fun!”

Jones-Quartey’s comment was in line with his past statements on the subject. The director — himself a veteran of Newgrounds, and now in charge of OK K.O.! on Cartoon Network — has encouraged fans on Twitter to push the envelope with their fan art. In a three-tweet thread from 2014, he remarked that the Steven Universe writer’s room “is waaaay sicker than stuff I see on tumblr.” He drew a comparison between himself and what he termed the “gross nerds” in the community, writing, “My complaint with most weird fanart I see is usually ‘This isn’t going far enough.’ ”

When a fan noted that the director’s words could soon be “ringing through the abyss and awakening some heretofore unimaginable fanart monster,” he received this reply from Jones-Quartey: “I say bring it on.”

Ian Jones-Quartey’s tweet thread from August 2014.

The words and actions of high-ranking figures in the children’s animation industry help to set the tone for what’s acceptable there. Jones-Quartey clearly means no harm to anyone with his statements — but the problem is that kids’ TV shows like Steven Universe and OK K.O.! are for kids. If these were adult animated series being surrounded by cultures of extreme porn art, it would mean something entirely different. But that simply isn’t the case. Shows like Steven Universe have to take into account, both in their content and their surrounding culture, that they exist primarily for children.

Just as with My Little Pony, there are kids watching Steven Universe and kids looking to engage with it online. There are kids joining social media for the purpose of interacting with the creators of these cartoons or participating in the fan cultures around them. Showrunners like Jones-Quartey and Sugar create work responsible, in some ways, for drawing children into online communities. That’s the reality of making a mainstream cartoon today. The question is, are kids being drawn to safe spaces? Or is the fan community around kids’ cartoons like Steven Universe a “hypersexual and toxic environment,” where kids and adults mingle and boundaries disappear?

What kind of culture should industry figures encourage around the kids’ cartoons they work on? And where is the line drawn when artists with backgrounds like ZONE’s — an animator who has worked on Jones-Quartey’s own series — cross over into mainstream children’s entertainment?

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan art by Yoh Yoshinari, a senior member of Studio Trigger.

The Steven Universe brand has similarly attracted its share of questionable collaborators. Japan’s Studio Trigger — an animation company that’s gained notoriety in the United States for raunchy sex comedies starring underage girls — lent Steven Universe a senior animator for one key sequence. (OK K.O.! has continued the love affair.) Studio Trigger’s mascots, dubbed the “Trigger Girls,” include a prepubescent child in a very small bikini. Trigger often hires erotic artists to illustrate these characters: here’s one such image (NSFW) available one click away from its main page as of this writing. The great irony is that Trigger’s senior staff includes at least one brony, Yoh Yoshinari.

This is to say nothing of the controversial fan artist “Purple Kecleon,” hired by Boom! Studios as a cover illustrator for the official Steven Universe comic series. Kecleon’s infamous porn fan works have typically featured Pokémon and other small animals, such as My Little Pony characters (“foals” included), rendered with infant characteristics. Even before Kecleon was hired, the artist had posted publicly — on one of several Tumblr accounts they acknowledged as their own — about their overriding interest in porn that depicts “innocence being broken.”

The public flirtation of children’s media with artists like these doesn’t just risk exposing kids to porn — it normalizes the entire idea of hypersexuality being present in children’s spaces, often in its most extreme forms. The trends I’ve described above are larger than any person or group of people in the children’s animation industry. It’s a systemic problem that will only grow if it’s left unaddressed.

Just business

The spread of porn based on children’s shows, and the upcycling of porn artists from this scene into mainstream children’s animation, isn’t some kind of grand conspiracy. It’s mostly the byproduct of what was simplest from a business perspective.

The tamer fan-made bodypillows for sale at “TrotCon 2018,” photographed by the Columbus Navigator.

Something few people might realize today, given the proliferation of fan works based on corporate properties, is that fan work is still copyright infringement. Many of these artists are selling what is essentially our version of Chinese bootleg merchandise. Those Zelda and Marvel bookmarks, posters, blankets and charms you see everywhere at fan conventions and online? All technically illegal. But major copyright holders have largely let it happen for decades. They do the same with most fan-made internet porn, very little of which could legally be defended as a parody and therefore as protected speech. Why?

As with anything involving the behavior of big corporations, the first question we have to ask is: how does it benefit them? For one, they want to avoid the reputational damage they’d face for cracking down on fan art communities. But that can’t be the only factor. Otherwise, why would companies like Nintendo be so swift and merciless when it comes to fan-created games, even as they continue to face backlash for it? Why destroy history-preserving ROM sites in an act that Vice correctly called “offensive” and “tragic”? They’re clearly willing to take a stand when they feel it’s in their interests.

To explain the other side of the equation, here’s Jonathan Bailey, an expert on plagiarism and the founder of Plagiarism Today:

From a copyright holder viewpoint, fan fiction and art is usually not very harmful. Fans create works that are openly recognized to be non-canon to the story and are not replacements for the original. In fact, some feel these fan communities actually serve a valuable service to copyright holders by providing a thriving site for fans to visit, keeping them entertained and engaged between official releases. In short, since fan creations don’t take away sales of the original work, they are often seen as free promotion and a way to grow the brand without cost or effort.

Fan works are free advertisements. They increase brand engagement and recognition. No amount of money could buy the number of fan-produced artworks that accompany most Marvel movie launches, for example. And the creation and consumption of this fan work allows fans to constantly fill their lives with their favorite properties — to build close, intimate relationships with them that no corporation could create by itself.

While fan-made porn of kids’ cartoons might once have seemed like an image problem for companies like Cartoon Network, they’ve decided that they can let it slide. And it makes sense. Cartoon Network will never compete in the porn arena, and the company feels it has nothing to lose by letting its brands spread there. The Nickelodeon cartoon The Modifyers is perhaps the best example. Originally a failed pilot that came and went without much notice in the ‘00s, it surged in popularity in 2013 after ZONE created an extreme pornographic animation based on it. Today, nearly all of the comments on its YouTube upload reference ZONE’s work. Maybe Nickelodeon finds it distasteful, but the company has seen only gains.

The same logic applies with the brony scene. Hasbro has a captive audience of famously-obsessive fans, many of whom fall into what mobile game companies would call “whale” status — a statistical minority with outsize spending habits. While many internet-savvy people now perceive an unbreakable link between My Little Pony and horrifying porn, the damage has seemingly been outweighed by Hasbro’s profits. A porn repository like Derpibooru could have been issued a cease-and-desist order at any time in the last seven years, but Hasbro remained silent.

Wakfu will be spared future ZONE adaptations simply because Ankama defended its own legal rights.

The French media company Ankama made the move that Hasbro and Nickelodeon didn’t — which brings us back to ZONE, one last time. After the artist created a porn animation based on the children’s cartoon series Wakfu, an Ankama property, the company sent ZONE a DMCA takedown notice. The work was deleted, and ZONE has stated that no further adaptations will be forthcoming. “[I]t’s their right to defend their IPs in whatever way they see fit,” ZONE tweeted. “Not everyone likes porn of their work.”

In a very real way, the “hypersexual and toxic” culture that has sprung up around children’s TV cartoons is of companies’ own making. They actively allow it to happen simply by doing nothing — creating a lawless vacuum where anything goes and porn coexists with harmless fan creations. The fact that artists rise from this culture into the mainstream animation industry is just a long-term consequence of these business practices: it goes without saying that some fans of kids’ TV will want to work in kids’ TV, and those fans will be formed by whatever culture exists around the work. The boost companies get from hiring an artist already popular online just adds to the incentive. But none of it had to happen.

There’s an old adage that the internet is too mercurial, too vast and too slippery to alter or contain. While it’s true to an extent, the idea dates to the ’90s, and the internet of today is a different animal. It’s no longer a chaotic, unknowable swirl: most of what interests people is contained on a handful of sites. The “kings of the internet” are no longer shock-jocks on personal pages, hidden behind three layers of pseudonymity. Even voices as loud and dangerous as the ones on InfoWars can be silenced through a few platform bans. Discussing the death of the meme generator YTMND, Bijan Stephen noted in The Verge:

…the internet itself has changed. As more people came online, and the web became less a place for nerds and social misfits, and as the internet became more centralized because of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, … sites like YTMND became less and less important.

Certainly, there are still dark corners that hark back to the early days of the internet. But they aren’t corners where you can reliably build an audience or start a business. For the most part, the internet is now a mundane place, where 30–40 year old professional porn artists manage their Patreons, maintain engagement with their audiences and upload new content at regular intervals. Many of the old anti-establishment types rely on the exposure that only sites like Twitter can give them. Rebels like Shadman have been domesticated. They try to maintain a “naughty” aura around their work, but in essence they’ve become no more than businesspeople.

And, in return, corporations benefit from the traffic these businesspeople generate. But it would take very little to stop them from making porn based on children’s television, and even less to stop hiring the Purple Kecleons of the world onto children’s media.

Changing with the times

The original reason that the internet was created was so that adults — mainly researchers and academics — could freely share information. Its early interfaces were so abstruse that most laypeople couldn’t even use it. Over time, computers and the internet were streamlined for commercial use, and they became a commodity for the general public. Even kids could navigate the online world. Today, it has simplified to the point where toddlers can use it. And companies, for their part, are trying to maximize that use.

Computers and the internet have evolved far beyond the arcane contraptions of the past, to the point where even very young children can use them with ease. Photo credit: The New York Times, Heathkit, Huffington Post.

After all, who has more potential free time to browse the internet than a child?

The internet is no longer just a place for adults. Kids not only use the internet now — they in some ways dominate it. “Children under 13 have emerged as one of the most lucrative demographics for [YouTube] creators,” wrote Wired earlier this month. Videos for toddlers and other preteen viewers rack up more advertising money than almost any others, even as the site’s disturbing, even dystopian nature comes into clearer view. YouTube tries to dodge the bullet by gesturing toward YouTube Kids, its unpopular and ineffective Band-Aid fix that most kids don’t actually use. Hence the opening sentence of the Wired article linked above: “YouTube has a child exploitation problem.”

The attempt to place responsibility for kids’ online safety solely on the shoulders of parents doesn’t make sense anymore, and is often simply a deflection tactic to defend callous corporate practices. Per Shulevitz: “I develop anger-management issues whenever I read an advice column telling me to keep a close watch on my child’s online activity, as if an adult could plausibly hover over a teenager long enough to ensure that he never clicks on 4chan.”

All of which makes creators in the children’s animation industry seem out-of-touch when they shrug off fan-made porn. “People can do whatever they want with these characters,” Alex Hirsch said about the cast of Gravity Falls in 2015. “It’s not like I get upset about it! I’m just amused; I don’t care. Keep being weird — be weirder!” Here he echoes Jones-Quartey’s remarks in defense of Steven Universe’s porn artists. But their comments are uncannily similar to a key part of the argument that Chris O’Neill, as mentioned previously, has used to defend Shadman:

drawing anything is permissible, anything in the whole wide world! that is his choice, you do not have to look at his art. its not like you are being forced. i 100% believe people can joke about anything :)

With statements like these, what creators like Hirsch, Jones-Quartey and O‘Neill are showing more than anything is their age. They remember the underground internet of 15 or even 20 years ago, a free-for-all where no one had to consider whether toddlers were in the audience. Using the internet was treated like riding a bull; if you got hurt, you were old enough to know what you were signing up for. You couldn’t expect it to change — if you didn’t like porn of children’s cartoons, you went elsewhere online. But that’s simply an outdated way of viewing it. A better comparison today might be someone pinning porn to the walls outside a McDonald’s ball pit and yelling “don’t look!” at the kids who walk by.

A screencapture from an immensely popular “secretgoombaman12345” fetish video in which a My Little Pony character painfully inflates like a balloon, bursts and dies.

The question of porn based on children’s animation is now much bigger than what consenting adults do in their private lives. Is it really harmless fun when kids stumble across lolicon artwork of their favorite cartoon characters — characters they see themselves in? Is the internet really better off when tens of millions of kids watch fetish animations by “secretgoombaman12345” that show Steven Universe, My Little Pony and Gravity Falls characters inflating like blimps and bursting?

And how is it wrong for companies like Hasbro and Cartoon Network — even as they continue to allow most fan artists to provide them with free advertising — to enforce their copyright when it comes to extreme or disturbing porn based on their children’s properties? Would the world truly be a worse place if Derpibooru didn’t have a “Foalcon” section?

This is a systemic problem. It can be solved, but only if the children’s animation industry collectively realizes the responsibility it has to its young fans. This is much bigger than individual people, bigger than whichever unfortunate scapegoats a corporation might “cancel” to save its reputation and preserve the status quo. When Cartoon Network as a whole plays footsie with Shadman, when Hasbro turns a blind eye to brony toxicity, these actions have consequences. These companies — not at the showrunner level, but at the highest corporate and legal echelons — have allowed the problems in their communities to grow to this size. And only these companies can decide whether they want kids’ TV to be a safe space for kids again.