When 4kids moderators are asleep at the wheel…
So I was a member of the 4kids forums a number of years back, mostly hung around in the Ninja Turtle section yammering with people, reading and writing fanfictions, yadda yadda. Now this was one of those forums where your posts don’t show up the instant you hit the post button; the mods have to approve it and such to keep it kid friendly (or, in some cases, to prevent you from giving calm criticism to someone who amounts to an art thief. Er, anyway). Which begs the question how two…no, now that I think about it, three incidents in particular got past them…
Incident 1: So there was a story I was reading. Started off fairly interesting, Leonardo captured by the Foot, everyone else rushes to save him, fair enough. Then he gets turned into a girl. A human girl. Who, the author makes it very clear, is stark naked because, after all, turtles don’t wear clothes. This is a KIDS forum. I should’ve stopped reading there and then, but no. No, it went on to get worse as the author decided to make this story an inter-species romance. Between the turtle who was turned into a human girl and one of his/her brothers. Needless to say, I never finished reading it.
Incident 2: Another story I was reading. Which also turned the very same turtle into a human. Well, okay, at least he was a human male this time, so not quite as creepy, right? Sure. Until the scene where he and April get in bed together. Time-skip to the next morning, and they’re still in bed together. Stark naked. April later has a child. THANKS, mods, for remembering that this was supposed to be a KIDS forum, and for not seeing the obvious implied SEX SCENE in this story.
Incident 3, by far the most…scarring. I had a rather lengthy thread where I’d been posting a fanfiction and a couple sequels- totally g-rated stuff, mind you; I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. One day, I see that I have a reply to the thread. Except this person had decided to post what was essentially a chapter of a Ninja Turtle fanfiction which focuses on one character in particular and his…issues…with jacking off.
Now I’ll grant, they kept it G-rated in terms of language, and being the naive preteen I was, I had no clue what was going on- I was just miffed that they had posted their *ahem* ‘story’ in my thread. Even still, I knew that SOMETHING was off when I read the post- something just told me that this didn’t belong in this kind of forum, based on content. And once I got a little older and learned about, well, things, I became absolutely mortified that anyone would post that on a forum for preteens. Anyone who’s not as naive as I was would probably figure out what was happening preeeeeetty easily. The post was removed soon enough (I think) but I’d still like to know- how did that slip by the moderators in the first place. What was it doing in my thread. What sicko thought it was a good idea to post that on 4kids. What sicko thought it was a good idea to write that and share it with the world on a kids’ site.