Cautiously Optimistic

I have a few reasons to hope that after getting worse, things will get better.

1 ) The anti's vigilante tactics are beginning to backfire on them by creating the stench of a witchhunt and sympathy for their targets. While the sympathy is initially begrudging; it retrains the mind to think of Peds as undeserving of these assaults. And as more people examine the nature of the anti's campaigns, they'll see the sameness of this witchunt to the discredited ones of the past; and see that the nature of the victim is purely incidental to the bully.

And that leads me to...

2 ) Since the anti-campaign is a historical aberration and the targets are arbitrary; in any significant cultural shift we wouldn't come up as targets again. Most of our cultures give a lot of lip-service to their historical continuity from their predecessors. But real shifts happen over time. Its easy to believe that the concerns of our era will matter to our great-grandchildren. But that's just a form of narcissism.

And Trucker will hate me when I say...

3 ) Anime and Manga. Within my lifetime I've seen a cultural shift from the notion that comics are for 11 year old boys and the socially-retarded to the acceptance by the current generations that the format can tell all kinds of stories. Shojo Manga have become almost required reading by girls from pre-teen to adolescents. While they aren't a realistic primer for MAA relationships, most Manga and Anime aren't hostile towards such relationships. For older teens who can look beneath the fantasies to the culture which produced them; they reveal the arbitrariness and isolation of the antis by showing a culture which is resistant to their alien mores.

While much of online Anime and Manga fandom is represented by the same "Otaku" who were comic-book-geeks arguing over the minutiae of the lives of fictional situations back in the day, the real readers and viewers are an overwhelming majority of average kids from all walks of life. And the only way to see the impact on todays kids are to talk to them. I believe that the cultural re-set button is being pressed by over 25 years of Japanophilia and absorption of their pop-culture assumptions.

( Dante admits to being old enough to remember a time when there was no ubiquitous presence of translated Anime and Manga in the Anglophone world. )

Dante