Rule 34 – Creator Reactions

"I say this to you as a fellow geek: I knew we had made it, really made it as a Web comic, about two months ago when somebody showed me the 'Rule 34' of Erfworld.... When I realized people were arguing on a porn site about my universe's rules, that was like, you know what, I'm doing something right."

— Rob Balder, creator of Erfworld

Rule 34 is infamous for having "no exceptions". This means that creators will likely discover sooner or later if their content falls under this rule. While some may not be bothered by it, others may take issue with it.

See also Oh, Crap, There Are Fanfics of Us!

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Examples:

Advertising

• Esurance sidelined its popular animated spokesperson Erin Esurance, then later got rid of her completely, when they realized that the majority of search engine results for "Esurance" were fetishistic and pornographic artwork starring Erin rather than anything having to do with car insurance.
• After AOL mascot Connie received massive amounts of Rule 34 art, she was pulled from advertising.
• While not mentioning Rule 34 specifically, Stephanie Courtney, the actress/comedian who plays Flo in the Progressive Auto Insurance commercials, is apparently genuinely baffled by the amount of... attention that her character gets, insisting that she plays her completely asexually. Like the above examples, her character started to get featured in commercials less and less for quite some time, in some cases only appearing as a voice. Progressive eventually settled on giving Flo an Ensemble Cast of fellow coworkers to regularly interact with (one of which, her assisstant Jamie, is now a mascot for the company in his own right) and introduced irregular ad campaigns starring other characters; in either case, Flo is no longer the sole focus.
• Matthew Alan, who played the brother in a notorious Folgers Christmas commercial was interviewed by Vanity Fair a few years later about the Incest Subtext. While he was surprised by the reaction, he thought it was cool to have garnered such a response.

Anime and Manga

• Japanese manga and anime artists and companies have very little qualms about fans making erotic doujinshi of their works, or even selling them; in fact, many famous manga and anime artists started their careers doing just that, and some of them still dabble in the pastime. This is buffered by the very low print runs of such work (though this is somewhat compensated by most doujinshi being downloadable at sites).
  • On the note of many famous manga and anime artists originally working in the doujinshi industry, CLAMP is notable for doing such. What they marketed was Yaoi (yes, this includes the one where Kakyoin lays an egg).
  • Miss Maki Murakami. Gravitation remixes... each more explicit than the last. Plus Gamerz Heaven.
  • According to some sources, the second season of Godannar had to resolve funding problems by selling doujinshi of Godannar characters.
  • Hellsing creator Kouta Hirano started off as a hentai artist — not only are most of the characters from Hellsing recycled from his previous works, but the plot of the first chapter as well.
  • One of the original assistant artists during the production of the Sailor Moon Manga, Oumori Madoka, was so lax to them that they ended up drawing one of their own, making a 4 volume doujin called Earth Wind; albeit under the Pen Name "Kumiko Kinjo"
  • Koushi Rikudou at one point created a Sonic the Hedgehog doujin which, although it lacks explicit sex, is decidedly NSFW and depicts the majority of the cast as extremely humanoid naked girls.
  • Excel♡Saga parodies this by having Shinichi Watanabe force Koshi to authorize making an episode out of an earlier porn doujin of his.
  • Koharu Biyori's omake at the end of volume 1 features the guy unsuspectingly buying hentai featuring himself with his robot maid because his friend couldn't make it to the con and asked him to load up. He never actually reads it, but his robot girl maid does.
  • Kyoto Animation lampshades the practice with a Shout-Out to one of their other works. An episode of Lucky Star has the girls going to Comiket, a real-life doujinshi convention, with Konata marking all the tables she wanted to see. In the real Comiket of that year, all those tables sold Haruhi Suzumiya hentai. What's even worse is that she recruited her friends to pick up these doujinshi for her, including titles such as Dripping Brigade Chief. This is only funnier when you remember who voices Konata.
  • Rei Hiroe, creator of Black Lagoon, openly makes hentai doujins under the pseudonym Tex-Mex. Apparently he does so just for fun, but never does any based on his own work. However he has published two worksafe artbooks in doujin format about characters from Black Lagoon series under said pseudonym, with the first one being simply about how he designed the characters and the other being a swimsuit special. (In an ironic twist, because of publishing them under the name Tex-Mex, these artbooks have found their way into the lists of hentai manga despite being totally worksafe.) In one of his swimsuit illustrations, Hiroe even invites readers to draw erotic scenes about Roberta.
  • Kiyohiko Azuma, author of such decidedly family-viewing-safe, and even wholesome entertainment as Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba&!, got his start doing erotic and non-erotic fan doujinshi, mostly under the pen name Jōji Jonokuchi.
  • Toshihiro Ono is best known in the US as the author of the Pokémon manga The Electric Tale of Pikachu and the Crest of the Stars manga. In Japan, he's better known as an author of hentai doujinshi with titles like Anal Justice under his pen-name Kamirenjaku Sanpei. It's not surprising considering the edits Viz had to make for US release, and even before that his editors in Japan had to clean it up some.
  • Shirow Masamune often draws up hentai artwork in between and within his published series like Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell. He actually started out with hentai artwork before moving into serialized productions.
• Genshiken has this rule come up more than a few times, as its cast consists largely of otaku. Saki suffers a bit of a meltdown on learning there are hentai doujinshi of everything early on. Several episodes are devoted to the craft of creating, publishing, and selling an ero-doujinshi of Show Within a Show Kujibiki♡Unbalance, and after it became a real anime and manga every conceivable hentai doujinshi featuring its characters got published.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • The increasingly aggressive pursuit of Fan Disservice as the series progressed, culminating in the heavy application of Squick and Nightmare Fuel in The End of Evangelion, is said to be a result of Hideaki Anno's reactions to Rule 34 — in particular, the infamous scene where Shinji masturbates over a comatose Asuka is rumored to be a specific Take That! against fans who fetishized the characters.
  • Gainax's approach to milking the franchise, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. They've licensed production of Rei and Asuka (and later Mari) figures in every fetishistic outfit man has ever conceived. There's this mousepad, right, of Rei, head and upper body. The hand rest is over her breasts. That's tame in comparison to full body pillows.
• For Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Gainax encouraged doujinshi of the series, at one point asking the creators to "work hard" for what was the then-upcoming Comiket 79. Though really, given the nature of the series itself (especially so with one of the lead characters' defining trait), it would be wildly surprising if the creators didn't allow for sexual fanworks.
• Naoko Takeuchi, creator/author/artist of Sailor Moon, enthusiastically encourages and enjoys reading fanworks based on it, including hentai material, and has been known to say so in her manga marginalia. And she herself drawing Usagi topless (and averting Barbie Doll Anatomy by giving her nipples) in the doujinshi Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon Original Picture Collection Volume Infinity, which is hardly porn but a little racy. Funnily enough the editors at Kodansha were more upset by the picture of Usagi in just her underwear than the topless picture.
• Ryogho Narita (creator of Baccano! and Durarara!!) stated that, while he doesn't understand why so many people want to see Shizuo and Izaya have steamy hatesex with each other, he can't exactly object to it when he himself ships Harumi/Chiri. He's also prone to poking fun at shipping/Rule 34 tendencies in general (Erika's biggest shipping dilemma: Trolls/Fans or Fans/Trolls?). Mind you, he even wrote a short NSFW Shizaya fiction, even though it was All Just a Dream, and an April Fools' Day joke.
• Hayao Miyazaki lamented that while he prefers to have female protagonists, "it's difficult. They immediately become the subjects of lolicon artwork," and stated that prevents him from looking back at any of his previous works with any sort of fondness.
• Aoi Nishimata makes a lot of ero doujins. She's an eroge artist so that's not surprising. What is surprising is when she made an incest rape doujin using her own characters from her own non-adult series Final Approach.
• While Keitaro Arima's Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase is borderline, he personally made several erotic doujins of the manga.
• The producers of Uma Musume Pretty Derby issued a request to fans not to produce pornographic material featuring the horse girls, out of concern that it would adversely affect the reputations of the owners of the characters' Real Life horse counterparts.
• Ben Diskin, the English voice actor for Haida in the English dub of Aggretsuko, discovered this rule the hard way when he found furry porn art of his character via Twitter. He was dumbfounded at first, but eventually decided to roll with it. Then things got more interesting when a fan artist responded to his joke about "work[ing] 'vore me, daddy' into an outtake" by creating a vore animation depicting Haida eating Retsuko, and then sending it to him! Diskin eventually confessed that the whole thing amused him and had since embraced the Furry Fandom, even changing his Twitter handle to "Haida's Humansona."
• Shortly after the 2020 anime adaptation of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! premiered, author Sumito Ōwara made a post on Twitter expressing his disdain for people who draw porn of the comic's cast and asking that anyone who does decide to post it avoid using any tags relevant to the series, before telling dissenters to "go to Hell."
• Eiichiro Oda from One Piece was asked about this in his SBS (Q&A) column by a fan who felt guilty about enjoying "naughty" stuff involving Nami. Oda's approach was rather pragmatic: he said he doesn't have any problem with it, mentioning how he agrees with a teacher once told him that mangas are product to be sold and as a profesional one shouldn't tell the customers who buy it how they should enjoy it. With that said, Oda WAS kind of creeped out with the sheer amount of requests he got involving Yamato's Side Boob...

Comic Books

• Archie Comics aggressively responds to Rule 34, threatening legal action against fanfiction.net if it didn't take down all the slash fics featuring its characters. It's not hard to see why, when you consider that the slash in question ranged from Archie/Jughead to Archie/Mr. Weatherbee. Archie is on the site's list of stories and authors that fanfiction is not allowed to be posted about at all. Archive of Our Own however has an Archie section and doesn't abide to said rules. Note that Dan DeCarlo drew hundreds of erotic drawings, some involving Betty and Veronica. Dan DeCarlo is the man who created the Archie style as we know it (until him, the comic had a more semi-realistic design similar to other comics). The exception is Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), in which porn of canon foreigners is rampant, but technically Sega owns all the Sonic characters, including the ones not in the games not created by Ken Penders.
• DC Comics:
  • They issued a cease-and-desist to an art gallery and an artist who painted watercolours of Batman and Robin in sexually suggestive poses. In contrast, Joe Shuster at one point drew pornographic depictions of Superman and Lois Lane.
  • They sent a cease-and-desist to the Patreon of a prolific porn artist who did multiple pornographic comics depicting several of their characters going to town on one another.
• In-universe example: In Watchmen, the first Silk Spectre owns a Tijuana Bible of herself. She finds it flattering and it reminds her of her Glory Days. After Nite-Owl admits to owning a copy when he was a kid, she offers to give it to him.
• Another in-universe example: in Adam Warren's Empowered the superheroes are fully aware of the existence of a prolific subculture of slash and homoerotic fanfiction about themselves. When the titular heroine, in a desperate attempt to sway Major Havoc from his chauvinistic ways presents him with entire boxes of various sexually suggestive drawings and fictions showing Major Havoc with several male heroes, Havoc just feels flattered, calls upon the other heroes involved and starts bragging about his newfound fame... even starting to write slash fanfics himself. Emp has also directly addressed the reader on No Fourth Wall intro pages, embarrassed about this stuff existing in the real world (the comic itself is softcore Porn with Plot anyway). And then it occurs to her that you haven't looked at any of that stuff.
• There are a number of fan works that have come out of Fred Perry's series Gold Digger, both for a general audience and a not-so-general audience. How does the man himself feel? Laughs it off as long as someone's not trying to make a buck off of it. He even makes a good deal of his own on commission at conventions as long as it's not distasteful to common sense. This has led to some mishaps, however, among them a fan, keen on getting his copy of Gold Digger autographed, who began discussing an erotic picture of Britney he wanted Perry to draw, much to Perry's attempted denial—which failed miserably when the fan showed Perry a set of earlier commissions he did. (Said fan did this in front of a grandmother and her two children after pushing them out of the way to get to the front of the line.)
• There is a myth at that one of the Marvel Comics writers had each artist they worked with draw softcore pictures of the cast and assembled these into a sketchbook.

Disney

• Disney is a notorious example of a corporation actively against Rule 34, or any other "unauthorized" use of their characters, for that matter; woe be a fan artist who makes a similar character to one of theirs, or any day care centers who have unapproved murals of their characters on their walls, as they have been known to file lawsuits against such "offenders". The sheer amount of Disney Rule 34 that still exists without incident suggests that at some point they finally realized it was a lost cause.
  • An infamous (and apocryphal) story from the early days of the studio tells of a staff party where Walt Disney's employees screened a cartoon of Mickey and Minnie Mouse having sex. Walt chuckled along with everyone else, invited the folks who made the cartoon to come up and be recognized... and then fired them on the spot, ordering that the reel be destroyed. Other versions of the story claim that the cartoon depicted Snow White having an orgy with the Seven Dwarves, and/or that the reel was screened at Uncle Walt's birthday party.
  • One popular variation has the gentlemen sneaking a single frame of regular pornography into the reel to see how phenomenal Walt's vision was. Walt spots it, but only slightly chastises the animators, joking "You know, if she weren't naked, I wouldn't have seen her." This is in fact famous enough to get a Snopes page (where it is rated "undetermined").
  • According to some of the older members of Furry Fandom, back when the fandom was mostly limited to southern California, one clueless artist tried for a job at Disney studios by showing them his portfolio of very creepy Disney erotica — and was banned from the grounds.
  • Equally infamous is the story of author Harlan Ellison's one and only day working for Disney; Ellison himself tells the story with his trademark mix of humor and outrage (part 3 of the link). According to him, the day started very promisingly but ended immediately after a lunch where he joked about (and acted out) a hypothetical Mickey Mouse porn film.
  • Interestingly, Disney chose not to sue The Realist or Wally Wood when he did his infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy (the image, while not showing explicit depictions of genitalia, is probably not worksafe), on the feeling that it was probably protected as parody (as well as the possibility that the lawsuit would bring unwanted publicity). They did, however, sue the poster company selling unauthorized copies of Wood's work.
  • Some animators at Disney actually draw this kind of stuff in their free time at work and joke about it. Unlike the examples above, however, they're smart enough to keep it to themselves and their co-workers. Supposedly, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting Disney keeps a secret "porn vault": according to Disney artists' contracts, Disney owns the rights of any media an artist creates while under contract, even ones made during off-time, and are legally required to keep them. What this means is that if some cheeky artist decided to draw porn of Disney characters, Disney is forced to hold onto them under contract, and eventually piled up into hundreds of pieces of art kept in secrecy.
  • Joseph Michael Linsner, in his Dawn & Beyond collectible art card set, included two Disney pieces. The first, a topless Ariel seen by a pop-eyed Sebastian, is fairly tame. The second, Beauty getting molested by Beast with Lumiere as a vibrator looking on, is rather less so. Disney went after Linsner, and the set was recalled and is now sold without those two pieces included. This stuff was being sold for real money, which of course is copyright infringement any way you slice it.
  • On an official case of this actually confirmed to exist, Disney's Nine Old Men hated the fact that Disney was toning down Tinker Bell in order to make her more marketable. They counteracted by making a silent, pencil-sketched 15-second short of Jiminy Cricket being intimate with her. Apparently, Walt didn't know about the short; however, it was used to prank on newer animators. No one knows what happened to the sequence, and it stopped being shown to Disney animators by the 70s.
  • A rather infamous case in Sweden had Disney threaten to file a lawsuit against Charlie Christensen, the creator of Arne Anka, whose womanizing, alcoholic, and utterly potty-mouthed titular main character bears a none-too-subtle similarity to Donald Duck (and several of Arne's vice-prone friends are based on other Disney characters). In response to the lawsuit, Christensen wrote a strip in which Arne faked his death, had plastic surgery, and changed his name to Arne X (which temporarily also became the comic's title) and shortly thereafter, to spite Disney, had Arne buy a fake beak in the shape of his old one, which was held up by a rubber band, and changed the comic's name back to its original title. He kept drawing the rubber band around Arne's head until Disney finally withdrew the lawsuit threat.
• On the other hand, for the second season Gargoyles DVD, Disney interviewed a number of Fan Fiction writers for a special feature on fanfic for the show (though only the cast and crew are interviewed). Some of the fanwriters in the special are downright notorious for writing NSFW stories.
• They do seem to have less of a problem if it's framed in the context of Kingdom Hearts, but that may be because that targets an altogether different audience.
• The first Disney Power Rangers season, Power Rangers Wild Force, includes a joke that was deleted from "Forever Red" about "the stories about [Jason and Tommy] on the Internet" and how they've been awkward ever since. After a gay porn star who looked like Austin St. John surfaced, this became Hilarious in Hindsight.
• The infamous Air Pirates case, where the eponymous 70s counterculture cartoonist group was the target of a massive lawsuit for publishing raunchy Satire/Parody/Pastiche Mickey Mouse comics.
• Disney certainly aren't above marketing towards the furry community, at least, as this marketing campaign for Zootopia showed.

Films — Animation

• Furry artist Klaus Doberman was forced to remove his Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron porn from his profiles after DreamWorks Animation started threatening him with a lawsuit.
• Ed Helms, the voice of The Once-ler from The Lorax (2012) is also aware of how the film’s fanbase can get pretty… scandalous with the already-mentioned character he played as.
  I heard there are people who have a sexual predilection for my character in the Lorax named the Once-ler, and that having sex with the Once-ler is referred to as Oncest? And someone just tweeted that. And that is very odd, because he’s not a real person. I do agree, however, that he’s extremely sexy. But I don’t condone sexual fantasy about the Once-ler. I don’t condone it.

Films — Live-Action

• Harry Potter:
  • Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy in the films) has responded positively to finding x-rated fanfic of his character.
  • James and Oliver Phelps (Fred and George Weasley), on the other hand, were suitably disgusted by the Twincest they learned about regarding their characters.
  • Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) actually discussed the Harry/Draco pairing on Conan O'Brien, even joking that his brother had a particularly porny photo as the background on his computer and claimed that he took it.
  • Ralph Fiennes doesn't seem to know what to make of Harry/Voldemort fiction.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins) has a sort of amused and creeped-out amazement for all the Frodo/Sam, Slash Fic and art out there. Start at 3:00 in. Apparently what makes it so "unbelievably creepy" is the quality of the artwork.
  • There's also this image◊ when Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan (Pippin and Merry respectively) were signing autographs and given a piece of photoshopped slash.
• Eli Roth managed to find the Kink Meme of Inglourious Basterds and passed it all onto the rest of the cast (including Quentin Tarantino). He's apparently quite amused at it all, though the same could not be said for Christoph Waltz◊.
  "The Bear Jew (his character) always tops."
• George Lucas, upon seeing slash in the Star Trek fandom, aggressively pursued Star Wars slash fiction (or any kind of sexually explicit fanfic). Lucasarts was still trying to shutter slashfic sites and any mention of homosexuality in the Star Wars universe as late as the early 2000s^note which is why BioWare had to get very sneaky and fly Juhani and Belaya past the censors with a boatload of subtext in Knights of the Old Republic. The only recorded action he took was suing the makers of the movie Star Ballz, a Star Wars/Dragon Ball Z porn flick, which he lost. The creators of Star Ballz thanked him for the extra exposure Lucas gave them.
• After Brokeback Mountain became a movie, Annie Proulx, author of the original short story, developed some Creator Backlash due to fans mailing her their fanfic — "They constantly send ghastly manuscripts and pornish rewrites of the story to me, expecting me to reply with praise and applause for 'fixing' the story."
• Legal action was brought against the creators of The Three Stooges porn parody.
• Mara Wilson is well aware about the existence of Matilda Slash Fic about Matilda and Miss Honey.
  "Really, guys? Really?"
• The creators of Hot Fuzz weren't surprised at all by the slash fiction, due to the massive amount of somewhat-deliberate Ho Yay in the movie. Then they decided to try making their own.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: Mark Ruffalo is aware of all the "Science Bros" slash between Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and he supports it enthusiastically for its creativity.
• Robin Williams made reference to it in his 2009 stand-up special Weapons of Self-Destruction, along with the concept of Parallel Porn Titles.
  They make porn movies of my movies! They make Good Will Humping, that's okay! Wet Dreams May Cum, alright! Snatch Adams, that was scary. ... Popeye I would watch.
• Tim Burton said the one thing that made him realize his movies had gotten big was receiving a tape of Edward Penishands ("I started watching with a crew. By the end of the movie, it was just me and another guy!").
• The qualification on this is still out, but Guillermo del Toro was shown a fanmade dildo based on the Asset from The Shape of Water. He responded that it's not accurate.
• Skinamarink director Kyle Edward Ball's response to a saucy "Skinnamatwink" parody video was simply "I could have never predicted the memes that my little movie would birth."

Literature

• In 2010, Diana Gabaldon, author of Outlander, expressed shock and horror that people on the internet were writing fanfiction of her characters in which "silky thighs" were stroked. Given the Fanservice content of her works, this is a little surprising… especially given that she has acknowledged that her hero Jamie Fraser started out as an Expy of Jamie McCrimmon from Doctor Who.
• Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Kingkiller Chronicle, not only actively looked for, but was overjoyed to find that fans had slashed his characters! He was so happy that he ever wrote a blog about it. Pat happily ends his blog entry, stating "I have truly arrived on the scene as a fantasy author."
• J. K. Rowling has said that she loves reading fan fiction of Harry Potter, but just wants to make sure that "mature" fics are properly given a warning so young children do not read them. She did order a cease-and-desist of a sexually explicit fanfic archive once.
• Naomi Novik responds with gleeful amusement to Temeraire Rule 34 on her Livejournal:
  ahahahaha, so yes, I have in fact gotten an (awesome!) porny Temeraire fanart for the contest. *is dying of laughter* I love fandom. \\o/
  Well, to be fair to them, I did practically dare someone! *facepalm*
  I mean, if someone sends me an NC-17 piece of dragon-human porn art, it will have to be a work of staggering genius or my reaction as a judge will be LOL NO, but I don't feel like there's anything I would rule out on principle. *g*

Novik, of course, got her start in fandom — she was (and still is) a prominent slash writer in several different fandoms, and her user handle is something of an open secret to the slash community — so she is undoubtedly well aware of fannish activity regarding Temeraire. One piece of erotic fanart was even published in Golden Age and Other Stories, albeit with the addition of a Scenery Censor.

• In the late '80s, Larry Niven granted permission to a fan, Elf Sternberg, to write a fanfic based on Niven's Known Space universe. The story Sternberg wrote and posted to Usenet was, in Niven's words, "a sadomasochistic homosexual gangbang" involving the kzinti, Niven's warlike felinoid alien race. Niven threatened to sue Sternberg, who withdrew the story, but that doesn't stop bootleg copies of it from circulating. Subsequently, Sternberg incorporated some concepts from his fic into his own series, The Journal Entries, which is essentially an erotic Mega Crossover of various SF works with the Serial Numbers Filed Off. Niven would later open up the Known Space universe to other authors in the Man-Kzin Wars series of story collections.
• Author of Animorphs K. A. Applegate (jokingly) stated that she loves all the fan art after being linked to a picture of an Andalite with boobs. The only exception, she said (still joking) was the ones where Tobias screws with Harry Potter. Wand on feather action isn't something she's a big fan of, apparently.
• It is possible that Terry Pratchett wrote in a scene where Angua von Überwald and Sally von Humperding end up naked in a mud bath together (It Makes Sense in Context) as a sideways comment on the use of his characters, especially Angua, in slashfic and Rule 34. Disappointingly for readers of that inclination, they decide not to have a showdown (a vampire and a werewolf, the werewolf half of whom is sore about the vampire expressing an interest in her man) — but to be professional policewomen, find their clothes, or at least some clothes, and to pursue the murder inquiry that found them both naked and up to their thighs in mud.
• Neil Gaiman wanted to post Aziraphale and Crowley's New Year's Resolutions for 2006 on his Tumblr, so he looked in the 'Aziraphale' tag to see if he could find a nice piece of fanart to go with it. He may have got more than he bargained for.
  There are things you can never unsee.

Live-Action TV

• How many fanfics do you know that have caused International Incidents? Agony In Pink was a Power Rangers badfic where the Pink Ranger gets tortured and killed — in lengthy detail — by a monster created by Lord Zedd. It resulted in the newsgroup it was posted on getting banned in Australia, and is believed to be responsible for the complete removal of adult fanfic from Fanfiction.Net.
• MythBusters: Adam Savage knows that Rule 34 applies to his own show, and has seen things he wishes to unsee. He says so here. During the reunion episode, the cast briefly discusses "MILFBusters". Savage owns a copy of the parody but claims he's never watched it. Kari Byron has seen it, and thought it was hilarious.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Joss Whedon went as far as to lampshade it in the "Season 8" comic. Guess what Issue 34 is about? Buffy having super-powered sex with Angel. And they show as much as they can without falling into porn territory.
  • James Marsters is reportedly amused by Rule 34 of his character, Spike. Anthony Stewart Head, on the other hand, is mildly Squicked at Giles being shipped with the teenage main cast:
    "Why do they have to do that?"
• At a Firefly Q&A at DragonCon 2010, a fan asked Summer Glau whether she wanted her character River Tam to have a romantic relationship in the future. Sean Maher then joked "besides me?" (he played her brother, Simon Tam), and playfully adding "why, is that weird?". Summer Glau just laughed about it, but also gave a Squicked reaction.
• Doctor Who:
  • David Tennant has seen DW porn on the internet, especially Ten/Jack Harkness. He's bemused if not a little scared, though not enough to keep him from making a crack about one sample coming from John Barrowman's blog.
  • The estate of Terry Nation leaps into action to ban the occasional Dalek porn flick which shows up every now and again. One particular example was Abducted By The Daleks, about the Daleks teleporting a bunch of naked lesbians into their ship and groping them with their plungers (ironic, considering Katy Manning's infamous naked photoshoot draped across a Dalek):
    The director of Terry Nation's estate, Tim Hancock, told The Sun: "The reason the Daleks are still the most sinister thing in the universe is because they do not make things like porn. They weren't ever intended to be sexual creatures. It's simple, Daleks do not do porn."
  • John Bishop, who played the Thirteenth Doctor's third male companion Dan in Series 13 and the 2022 specials, was highly amused to discover Dan/Karvanista shippers and actually showed off some very NSFW fanart of the pairing on his comedy TV show.
• Frankie Boyle seems to view the existence of a Mock the Week fic which slashes him and Hugh Dennis as simply being really good material for jokes.
  "And the worst part was they described my pubes as being ginger!"
• Star Trek:
  • In the 1997 documentary Trekkies, Denise Crosby and Brent Spiner (of Star Trek: The Next Generation) discuss some erotic artwork of Tasha and Data that fans have mailed to them. Both actors are equally amused and creeped out by it, and Spiner jokes that one of the artists definitely got his muscular physique right.
  • The reason the franchise originated so many Fanfic Tropes, including Slash Fic itself, is because Gene Roddenberry was a first rate Dirty Old Man and found all the explicit homebrew fanfic to be hilarious. While most creators were very quickly trying to invoke Fanwork Bans, Roddenberry more or less thought of it as great free publicity.
• Supernatural:
  • In a very surreal scene, the main characters — in-universe, via Who Would Want to Watch Us? — discover all the adult fanfiction about themselves. It's the "Wincest" that really squicks them out.
  • Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki found out about fanfiction due to Kim Manners giving them printed copies of Wincest stories early in the show's life.
  • Richard Speight Jr. doesn't mind his character, Gabriel/Trickster appearing in fanfic — even when the example is Castiel/Gabriel.
• Sherlock:
  • One of the actresses, Louise Brealey (Molly), found fanfiction of her character and Tweeted about it. She later Tweeted a second time to reassure the author of the fic that she wasn't offended.
  • When Benedict Cumberbatch found out about the significant amount of explicit Slash Fic and Fan Art and being produced for the show, his reaction consisted mostly of being very flattered by the depictions of his character. Bear in mind that Ben "found out" about the porn from Martin Freeman. He (and his partner Amanda Abbington) lurk on Tumblr, and he shares what he finds with the rest of the cast.
  • When a fan at a panel Q&A made the mistake of asking Martin about the fan-based "red pants" memes/artwork/etc and he admitted to seeing them on the Internet, Tumblr promptly went crazy, to the effect of "Oh my God, he KNOWS! Hide!"
  • And in this video, Martin Freeman is shown progressively more erotic pictures, culminating in a totally NSFW Holmes/Watson image. His response? "Yeah, I've seen that one." He is an Unfazed Everyman incarnate for a reason.
• On 30 Rock, Tracy makes a porn film on the TGS set. Tina Fey hired the porn stars who played them in the 30 Rock porn parody to appear in the actual show.
• Glee:
  • Max Adler and Chris Colfer are aware of their characters being paired together. They're fine with it, although Max doesn't want to read anything in case it influences him, and they both think that "Kurtofsky" sounds like a mean, famous, Russian ballerina.
  • Kevin McHale has earned himself the nickname of "Kevin McTroll", and is known in the fandom for visiting Tumblr (often tweeting coyly about his visits). He's stated that he's aware of a lot that goes on in the fandom, though he doesn't read fanfiction, saying that he's seen snippets that scare him.
  • Naya Rivera said in an interview that she would be excited to see the "This Ain't Glee!" porn parody because she "wondered what they did".
• Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter are at least aware enough to know that their Portmanteau Couple Name is Candy. It's been referenced on Conan a few times.
• David Duchnovny and Nicholas Lea have apparently found X-Files slash fic of Mulder/Krycek, and reportedly thought it vastly entertaining.
• John Oliver not only found Daily Show slash fiction, but shared what a surreal experience it was for him on The Jimmy Fallon Show.
• Actor Tom Price (PC Andy on Torchwood) joked about slash featuring his character at a 2014 convention. He was a good sport about it, despite apparently being subject to his wife googling it and reading it aloud.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
  • With the cast, both Chloe Bennet and Elizabeth Henstridge are aware of the Skimmons ship (their characters, Agents Skye and Simmons) and both openly support it. When asked about it during an AMA, Chloe replied "I SHIP THAT SHIT SO HARD." So, 100% Shipper on Deck for both of them.
  • In "Hot Potato Soup" Sam Koenig fanboys over Daisy (formerly Skye) and admits that people have created copious amounts of NSFW Fan Fiction and Fan Art of her on the Internet, frequently pairing her with Black Widow.
• One particularly negative example was in Blake's 7 fandom in the 1980s, when Paul Darrow (who played the show's initial Lancer and later protagonist Avon) was very very seriously unhappy about fics depicting his character engaging in M/M sexual activity (a particular problem as Avon was the show's Launcher of a Thousand Ships, most of which were slash). This interacted with other fandom conflicts to create a humungous fandom civil war.
• Game of Thrones: George R. R. Martin was asked in an interview about the porn parody "Game of Bones". He was rather amused that the porn version was actually less dirty than the books he wrote, given that it eliminated the twincest for being too shocking.
• Scrubs: Zach Braff, who plays the protagonist J.D., was apparently very approving of Scrubs: A XXX parody, as he posted a link to the trailer on his facebook page and appeared in a selfie with the guy who played him.
• Good Omens fans have shipped the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale for decades, and the release of the TV adaptation led to an explosion of new fanart and fic. This was helped by Michael Sheen, who played Aziraphale, admitting that he read slashfic as inspiration for his character and played him as though he were in love with Crowley. Since then he has been an immense shipper ally, and has retweeted shippy fanart and even slashfic.
• There is Taskmaster fan fiction out in the world, much of it slash involving Greg Davies and Alex Horne. Greg has expressed shock and horror that there are people who could imagine such stories and is especially creeped by those with complete romantic arcs. Alex, on the other hand, has said "part of me was pleased".
• The cast of Downton Abbey had mixed reactions to the porn parody Down on Abby. While being interviewed on Conan, Michelle Dockery remarked of her porn doppleganger "That's me, is it? The one with the extremely large breasts?".^note Ironically, she was pointing to her character's Absurdly Youthful Mother. During a red carpet event, Hugh Bonneville said he thought the title was hilarious and that if somebody got him a copy, he would invite the rest of the cast to watch it.
• Once Upon a Time: Multiple cast members have claimed to have read fanfiction about their characters. Sean Maguire (who plays Robin Hood) has jokingly said that he keeps a vault of them at his house so the writers don't see them and realize that fans can write better stories than they can. Lana Parrilla (who plays Regina) has also claimed on a couple of occasions that she has read some Swan Queen fanfiction and has been very supportive of it, once describing a smutty scene between Emma and Regina as "quite sexy".
• In-Universe example in one episode of the Garfunkel and Oates TV series, appropriately titled "Rule 34": Riki and Kate discover that a porn movie of their band exists, called "Garfinger and Butts". They even meet the respective actresses of the film, Chevrolet and Epiphany, who proceed to form a musical comedy duo of their own and immediately attain much more success in a few weeks than Garfunkel and Oates have over a few years.
• Holby City: The actresses who play lesbian Super Couple Berenice "Bernie" Wolfe and Serena Campbell are well aware of how beloved the pairing is, and apparently enjoy the fact immensely. Catherine Russell (Serena) has hinted that she's read at least some "Berena" fanfic (and apparently really likes fanart), though the more private and reserved Jemma Redgrave (Bernie) has not. Both, however, wholeheartedly approve of the shipping, and were pleasantly surprised when their Portmanteau Couple Name was appearing on Twitter from their very first scene together.^note The two were told from the outset that their characters would eventually become romantically involved, and so they deliberately started with the non-verbal subtext from their first shared scene. Fans took note.
• 2 Broke Girls creator Whitney Cummings decided to watch the Angela White VR parody (who was naturally standing in for Kat Dennings) when she was on the Barstool Sports podcast and later interviewed White on her own show. Cummings jokingly threatened to file a copyright suit, but was actually a really good sport about it. She's interviewed quite a few pornstars and expressed support for their work.

Music

• Musical duo The Indelicates actually ran a contest, claiming that it was inevitable that someone would make it and they'd rather be involved.
• Rock band My Chemical Romance are aware of the erotic fanfiction and fanart with them in it, and they talked about this in an interview once. Frank Iero, while creeped out at the thought of him being a character, is glad that the fanbase is being 'creative'. Meanwhile, Ray Toro is less than pleased and wants the fans to "stop making us have sex with each other". And then there's poor Mikey Way, who stumbled upon an incest fic of him and Gerard. Needless to say, he was terrified.
• Linkin Park frontmen Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda were asked on a radio show if they were aware of the fanfiction written about them (called "Bennoda"). Chester seems to be fine with it, even amused by it; Mike, on the other hand, managed to avoid answering the question altogether.
• Yesung from Super Junior stated in an interview that he's read fanfiction about the band and said he didn't understand why they (the members) had to be paired up with one another. Or why he's always paired up with Ryeowook. Overall, he was rather embarrassed by it, if not a little indignant.
• Kesha was apparently amused to learn a character based off her appeared in the Katy Pervy porn parody.
• The members of Franz Ferdinand were outright gleeful when the topic of slash fiction about them was brought up in an NME interview. The lead singer Alex Kapranos once made a direct shout out to the band's Livejournal slash community on stage.
• Gareth McGrillen of Pendulum and Knife Party is well aware of the slash fics being written about him and bandmate Rob Swire. The two aren't doing anything about it though. And when Rob Swire was asked about his thoughts on his music being used in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic porn; he responded with "I highly approve."
• Crypton Future Media is usually very lax and accepting of fan works featuring their Vocaloid characters, but on the guidelines Q&A regarding character usage, they made a point that they don't approve of sexual content featuring their characters by explicitly stating that it is prohibited to use them in such a context on the last section of the page.
• On a Twitter post of an NSFW animation featuring characters from the band Scratch21, the official Twitter account for the band stated in a reply that they've never minded fan artists making such content with their characters, but are glad they asked for permission.

Newspaper Comics

• Josh Fruhlinger, a.k.a. The Comics Curmudgeon, linked to a Rule 34 of Slylock Fox in his blog that included Cassandra Cat and other characters. Bob Weber found out after it was posted, and was a surprisingly good sport about it — he thought it was funny, but politely asked for it to be taken down so that kids couldn't find it. Weber himself then did a picture of a bikini-clad Cassandra Cat, which he allowed Fruhlinger to put on Comics Curmudgeon merchandise, just to show how good a sport he was about it.
• Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker was way ahead of his fans on this one. He once drew Ms. Buxley nude and released the drawing as a limited edition series of art prints. Walker and his staff also make several dirty gag strips that never make it past the sketch level. Mostly, they do this for their own amusement, but some of the strips have been published in Scandinavian magazines, and were later collected into a complete album. With Walker's blessings, of course.
• Luann author Greg Evans filed a cease and desist against prolific Rule 34 Image Booru Paheal, forcing them to take down every one of their posts that depicted the comic's cast.

Video Games

• A Twitter account for a NSFW Animal Crossing: New Horizons mod went radio silent after a large amout of their media tweets were given a copyright notice. It's assumed Nintendo saw the mod, which was meant to be a non-sexual nude mod that made both the player and villagers naked, and took action, because people who downloaded the mod used it for other things.
• Valve seems at least a little aware of the massive amounts of shipping and Rule 34 in Team Fortress 2 communities, but doesn't do much outside of taking potshots or jokingly Ship Teasing ("Beaux and Arrows" Achievement? Kill a Heavy/Medic pair with the Huntsman, a bow) in order to mess with fans. Given Valve's track-record, this isn't surprising. This isn't the case with Gabe Newell, who said people getting their hands on the leaked Half-Life 2 beta and making Kleiner perform oral sex on Alyx was his "worst nightmare."
• In the Create Stuff Podcast, Genow, the creator of Bug Fables, has said that post-release, his main job is re-tweeting Bug Fables fan-content. Naturally, this led to him seeing a lot of "unfortunate fan-art" as he described it. He admitted in the podcast that he doesn't like seeing it.
• Word of God says that Helltaker was made explicitly to inspire more artwork of demon women in suits. And that includes porn. To quote his exact words...
  "I think it's the artists' job to inspire inspiration. If people start flooding the internet with Helltaker porn it'll mean I did my job right."
• Epic Games is fully aware that people have noticed a Ho Yay subtext present between the main characters of their Gears of War series, Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago, and have included achievement names with mocking titles such as "Dom-curious."
• Bayonetta's creator Hideki Kamiya wasn't happy with smutty depictions of the character. Not because there's erotic work of her, but that it usually makes her submissive. Surprisingly, the doujin fandom responded by making Bayonetta the one in power in most doujins now.
• HAL Laboratory issued a takedown request to a Japanese seller that planned to release a raunchy Kirby krauta game featuring Chef Kawasaki called Chef Kawasaki Microbikini Kraut. As the name suggests, it's Chef Kawasaki wearing a microbikini and nothing else. You can see why this didn't fare too well once Warpstar Inc. saw it.
• Pokémon:
  • A rare exception to the general attitude of Japanese companies to doujins was a doujin that involved Satoshi (Ash) turning into a werewolf and doing unspeakable things to Pikachu. Nintendo came down hard on that one. They also filed a cease and desist against Paheal, the largest Rule 34 based site on the net, upon discovering that the Pokémon porn were receiving more hits than the official website (as such, the Pokémon tag was changed to Porkyman to prevent further C&D cases).
  • In general, The Pokémon Company is fine with Rule 34 as long as it doesn't involve the Pokémon themselves. After an artist released a doujinshi involving Hilda and Tepig, they forced him to discontinue it. As a result, the sequel he was writing had humans only. Some artists also seem to get around the restriction by only using incredibly humanoid mons, such as Gardevoir. Mon/mon also appears to be mostly considered less objectionable than mon/human.
  • InsomniacOvrlrd, a prolific NSFW artist who used to make Pokémon fan art, was forced to cancel their Haven comic series (a series of loosely connected stories revolving around a resort and the sexual encounters between different Pokémon found therein) in the middle of its third volume after being sent a DMCA takedown notice from Nintendo regarding their Patreon, which they were using to fund the comic. They ended up making an entirely new set of similar yet legally distinct creatures for a new comic series called Passiontail Isle, which is essentially Haven minus any connection to Nintendo property.
• When they were initially released, Nintendo bought out the Super Hornio Brothers porn parodies to make sure they never got any further distribution.
• Reportedly, the Guilty Gear developers created Dizzy to provide a sort of porn bug zapper/lightning rod for the rest of the cast. She's three years old with a sexy adult figure, almost naked, has wings and a tail, her lines generally consist of Accidental Innuendos, and only the most oblivious fan in the world wouldn't wonder if she was banging May at least once. Thus, she provides so much low-hanging porn fruit in one package that the creators hoped fan artists would gravitate entirely towards her and stay away from the other women in the cast. It appears to have been at least partially successful, though others like Baiken still overshadow her in popularity.
• ZUN, creator (and everything else) of Touhou Project, is — like most things regarding the fandom — well aware of the gargantuan amount of sexual material starring his characters, and the only thing he's requested is that if fans make it, they don't try to mass produce it or sell it outside amateur comic outlets. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), this request has been pretty unanimously followed.
• Casey Hudson, creative director of the Mass Effect series, seems to have heard of the Defictionalized Fornax magazine. His reaction seemed to be a mixture of surprise and disgust/amusement. Derek Watts also knows you have to keep the filters on when searching for art of Tali or Garrus.
• The fine folks at Rockstar know all about the L.A. Noire slash after one of their in-house illustrators found some. There wasn't any negativity about it though, they're just amused about how often Cole is paired up with Stefan.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Has an In-Universe example with The Real Barenziah, a novelized biography of the Queen Mother of Morrowind that in Daggerfall notoriously described Barenziah having sex with a Khajiit so he'd induct her into the Thieves' Guild. In later games it was censored, but by some reports Barenziah herself actually enjoyed the books and is friends with the author.
  • Morrowind adds the in-game book The Lusty Argonian Maid — a semi-pornographic play where the main character, heavily based on the author, seeks to have his "spear polished" by the titular Argonian maid. Skyrim adds a sequel, and then a "for the ladies" version with The Sultry Argonian Bard. Bethesda clearly expected this trope to happen, leaving the rest up to the imagination of the fans (which the fans took graciously, you have been warned).
• Joshua Tomar, the announcer in Skullgirls, has voice-acted in a Skullgirls porn flash on Newgrounds submitted by "ZONE-SAMA", who is a fan of the game. Later on, ZONE was hired to work on the game as an animator.
• Ken Levine of BioShock and System Shock fame is aware of the porn for Elizabeth. He would prefer not to view it.
• Claire Hummel, one of the character artists for BioShock Infinite, upon seeing porn of the Lutece twins, remarked that she was upset that people were drawing them in modern underwear. The artist then provided a visual guide on what sorts of undergarments Rosalind Lutece would actually wear.
  I’m not one to discourage this sort of thing- no no, I have sketchbooks full of Remus/Sirius stuff from high school- but I figured I might as well give everyone a leg-up with a more detailed guide to Rosalind Lutece’s potential underthings. I’ve seen a ton of drawings of her in corsets from a good 50 years before her time and I… I needed to step in.
• Moa, sole creator/producer of Hatoful Boyfriend, released a tweet◊ saying "I myself allow sexual Hatoful fan arts of course. Have fun!" When she links fanart it's always gen, but those same artists have often drawn more explicit work. A personal friend of hers draws a great deal of explicit material about her work, including pornographic doujins.
• Edmund McMillen often reblogs fanart of his work on Tumblr, and this includes the porn. Of course, his games are as unsexy as can be, so Rule 34 of them is always made for its own sake.
• maullarmaullar, an ero fan artist, drew porn of *Mute from the Hate series and presented it to Christine Love at a Fan Convention. She was very pleased with the result. Both games do feature a bit of smut, albeit text smut.
• The creators of Tomb Raider are fully aware of how popular Lara Croft is among the community, probably due to the infamous nude code legend. Video game magazines tended to joke about this over the years, like one ad for Tomb Raider III that said, "Sorry, still no nude code".
• D.C. Douglas is well-aware of the fact that people write lemon fanfiction of Resident Evil character Albert Wesker, and for a while, had a panel dedicated to reading these fanfics as Albert Wesker. He had to stop around the end of 2014, however, since Capcom was not quite as keen about a VA in their employ endorsing said fanfiction.
• Undertale:
  • The only request that Toby Fox, the creator, has regarding smut of the game is to use the "undertail" tag on Tumblr instead of "undertale".
  • Temmie Chang, the game's character designer, stated on Twitter that she dislikes porn featuring Temmies and may intervene in blogs that feature Temmie porn. Recognizing that Temmie porn is inevitable, she's asked that people who make and/or post it tag it as "Temmoi" instead of "Temmie".
  • Due to a demo of the game being released far earlier than the game itself, a few references to Rule 34 of the characters were put into the full game. One is a gag involving a frequent target of it saying that she doesn't think anyone could consider her attractive, while another character (a frequent Internet user in-universe) tells her that she has no idea. Another has a character subtly reference the game's prevalent Furry Fandom via a Double Entendre. Both cases are just friendly jabs at the fandom, with the latter being a "as long as they enjoy the work" reassurance.
    The player buys several "hot dogs" (and a "hot cat") from an illegal hot dog stand
    Sans: ... you really like hot animals, don't you? hey, i'm not judging. i'd be out of a job without folks like you.
  • So Sorry, an Optional Boss designed by someone who donated a high amount of money to the game's Kickstarter campaign, has previously been featured in furry fetish art. This did not stop them from appearing in the game, the boss being very well-hidden, to the point that players probably won't know they even exist unless they see a guide on how to find them (unlike Muffet, the other Kickstarter donor boss, who is a mandatory encounter), and omitting any mention of the character's actual name to avoid NSFW Google searches.
• Pornhub experienced a massive^note We're talking 800% increases at launch day. Not Hyperbole. spike in searches for Overwatch porn parodies in the days leading up to release. This became so phenomenal that Wikipedia has its own article on this. Blizzard Entertainment eventually sent DMCA takedown notices to Pornhub and other porn sites, instructing them to remove all videos of Overwatch porn. The initial and most prolific targets of their takedowns were NSFW videos done using modified (read: made nude and anatomically correct) 3D character models based on assets ripped from the game. Rule 34 website Paheal changed their Overwatch tag to "Overlook" in order to avoid any potential legal troubles with Blizzard, as the company really doesn't like the idea of kids and parents coming across Overwatch porn so easily. In 2017, Blizzard also issued a cease and desist on a Playboy-styled fan magazine called "Playwatch", which was dedicated specifically to sexy Overwatch fanart.
• A clause in the EULA of the Steam version of Revolution 60 prohibits altering the game's assets without permission, and explicitly bans "creation of pornography."
• After the release of the NieR: Automata demo, creator Yoko Taro said this on Twitter regarding the influx of 2B porn:
  Collecting and passing them around is a pain, so it would be great if someone could zip them all up and distribute them every week.◊
• Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford posted the Battleborn porn subreddit on his twitter◊, seemingly as a way to draw attention to the game. This instead backfired and led to the subreddit (which was suspected to be created by Pitchford in the first place, further compounded by a screenshot showing it to be empty shortly after he tweeted it) to be filled with trolls mocking the game and posting "better" Overwatch porn instead.
• The Twitter account for A Hat in Time described the game as, paraphrasing slightly, "a heckin' cute girl put in messed up situations". When a commentator facetiously asked, "is it like a hentai doujin", the account responded thusly, with that many exclamation marks:
  no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Sukeban Games, the creators of VA-11 HALL-A, very much openly endorses NSFW fan art, and has an alternate Twitter account dedicated to retweeting NSFW fanart and used to have a monthly showcase of fan art on Tumblr (before the NSFW ban). Not only that, the artist for the game drew one themselves as a milestone celebration.
• In the No Man's Sky subreddit on June 14, 2015, a Reddit user had posted an erotic fanfiction where the narrator went for an interview at Hello Games. Sean Murray himself saw it, and was weirded out, saying "I think I'm unsubscribing from this sub now. Things have got a leeeeeetttllle weird....." Four and a half years later, Internet Historian closed out his episode on the game's development and eventual redemption with an understandably redacted animated version of said fanfic. Sean shared the video on his Twitter feed, but told people not to watch past the 45-minute mark.
• After the teaser for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart dropped online on June 11, 2020, Xavier Coelho-Kostolny made a tweet about Rivet the lombax. The tweet later gained a reply from another designer, Sol Brennan, saying they're aware of how quick Rule 34 of the character was being created.
  Xavier: Even though a lot's changed since I was on the project, I'm very happy I was able to contribute in some small way to the Furry Awakening that's going to happen when the new Ratchet & Clank drops.
  Wuffles: We absolutely knew the porn that it would spawn. And this fueled us more.

That same day, the lead writer (Sam Maggs) for the game also posted a tweet saying "I've already seen her naked, the Internet has done it's thing in record time, god bless".

• Tomonobu Itagaki, creator of the Dead or Alive series, once sued a modding community that was making nude mods of the series' female characters. On top of the legal complaints, he claimed that the characters were like "his daughters" and that the mods were akin to violating them. That comment, though, doesn't gel with the sheer amount of Fanservice involving the characters in the series itself, or with the massive amounts of Hentai Doujinshi featuring them that he and Tecmo consistently ignored. Scuttlebutt suggested that he sued the community because it was American and not Japanese. Itagaki is also infamous for being incredibly protective of his games; for instance, he spent years insulting Tekken simply because Namco bashed DOA in a radio commercial and Itagaki decided to retaliate with "nuclear missiles more than 100 times for that".
• When the official Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout Twitter account was asked their thoughts on how much porn their game received, their response was simply "I hope to never see it".
• Dave Oshry, head of the publisher New Blood Interactive, was initially confused about the R34 of the robotic protagonist of ULTRAKILL... but then he and developer Hakita leaned into it, the latter now retweeting suggestive (though tame) fanart on the game's official account. They eventually created an SFM model for V1, seemingly for the purpose so that the character can be used in porn, and later started selling body-pillow covers of V1 (though the latter was mostly as a joke).
• Capcom announced in January 2021 that they would be cracking down on any fan content that contained sexual or racist content — especially Youtube or gaming streams. The announcement indicates that they will only allow any fan content that respects official canon & approved marketing materials.
• When CD Projekt Red released official modding tools for Cyberpunk 2077, one of the first things modders did was change the models of the JoyToys to Johnny Silverhand to have the sexual encounter with Johnny the game never gave to players. However, CD Projekt Red quickly took the mod down, mainly due to concerns about how Johnny's actor, Keanu Reeves, might feel about this. During an interview for The Matrix Resurrections, when the interviewer told him the story, he was pretty happy about it.
  Reeves: It's always so nice when it's nice.
• Sean Chiplock, the voice of Revali, Teba, and the Great Deku Tree in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, often gets sent Revali porn. He's not bothered by it, but finds it funny that Teba is "always drawn bigger" than Revali.
• Summertime Saga: DarkCookie seems to be a-ok with fans posting their own erotic artwork of his characters on the game's official Discord channel. There's quite a lot. While the original game in question is already an H-Game, there could still be copyright issues.

Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus
  • Once Pomni was revealed to be 25 and a fan expressed faux-horror due to it meaning Rule 34 artists will go wild knowing she's legal, series creator Gooseworx stated it's "not her first rodeo" and knows that Rule 34 is inevitable, simply "getting ahead of the curve and letting people know it's not illegal".
  • In the announcement video that the pilot will be turned into a full series, there is a bit featuring Caine and Pomni reacting to the large amount of pornographic art based on the series since the pilot aired. Caine even makes reference to the explicit subculture of fandom members who ejaculate on character figurines when he advertises some Pomni merchandise.
  Pomni: What... the *Sound-Effect Bleep* am I looking at!?
  Caine: The consequences of our actions! And it's only going to get worse from here.
  Pomni: Oh... oh, no...
• Cary Huang and Michael Huang, creators of Battle for Dream Island, are aware that porn of their show exists and have poked fun at it a few times, such as buying a t-shirt with a drawing of Firey voring Coiny.
• Chris Niosi, creator of TOME, once expressed in a "Kirblog" vlog that he was surprised how little TOME Rule 34 there was. Of course, he quickly bemoaned himself for encouraging it. TOME Rule 34 does exist, but not to the extent it does in other fandoms, and most of it is poor in objective drawing quality.
• ZONE, the internet's tycoon for Rule 34 made in Adobe Flash, has stated on many an occasion that they have no intention of making a porn game of their mascot, Zone-Tan. They, however, don't mind in the least if people make their own Rule 34 of her.
• The creators of many Rooster Teeth animated shows are well aware of Rule 34 created from their shows.
  • In an episode of The Rooster Teeth Podcast, Geoff (voice of Grif) and Gus (voice of Simmons) mentioned how yes, they know there's Grif/Simmons slash fics out there, and yes, they've read some. And wished they hadn't.
  • The RWBY cast and crew are at least aware and mostly supportive of the fandom, but they haven't explicitly (hah) said anything one way or another on the subject of the porn. For example, during a livestream, they read out the first half of a Blake/Yang fanfiction, but while the fic itself is safe-for-work the author has written quite a bit of porn for various fandoms, RWBY included.
  • The cast and crew of Camp Camp were reasonably horrified by Rule 34 art of the show, and in particular by some pictures of Max and David. Their primary objection in this case is the ages of the characters; most of the cast are children.
• The main reason behind Germaine's Flanderization by the author, J.I. Mathers, in Neurotically Yours was in order to lower the amount of this. Needless to say, it didn't work.
• In a few episodes of the short-lived podcast "Wisenheimers", Max Gilardi explains how he has received plenty of rule 34 made about his work (notably Jerry and Wacky Game Jokez, 4 Kidz!) as well as a Flash parody created by a Newgrounds user about WGJ (which was of an extremely vulgar and tasteless nature) to which Max stated that he really didn't care, and had no feelings towards them. Yotam Perel (Max's co-host), however, said that any rule 34 made about his Nameless (2005) series would be "so hot", and wished people would make tasteless parodies about his work, as he felt he would probably appreciate it more than Max would.
• ShadyVox, the voice of the title character of Button's Adventures, posted this legendary tweet◊ when he found Rule 34 of the characters less than 4 hours after the episode aired.
• Ukinojoe, the animator behind Dog of Wisdom and Literally Hitler, is really disgusted by sexual artwork of his characters.
• Doris & Mary-Anne Are Breaking Out of Prison creator Ben Levin has reacted very positively to the idea, saying that someone making rule 34 of his show will cause him to "...finally feel like [he's] succeeded in life..."
• The creators for The Most Popular Girls in School and Dr. Havoc's Diary have said in a livestream video that the fanfics they read are "jarring", that "there's some terrifying shit out there in the world", that there's "some scary stuff, but also some sweet stuff, and also some sweetly terrifying stuff", noticing there's mainly "a lot of Mackenzie and Brittnay making out", and that "there's a lot a lot of fanfiction out there".
• Eddsworld:
  • The late Edd Gould was once asked on Tumblr if he was disturbed by Rule 34 of his characters, especially seeing as most of them are based on him and his friends. He responded with "it was only a matter of time", implying that he considered it inevitable, regardless of his personal thoughts on it. Tom Ridgewell and Matt Hargreves have expressed similar sentiments, though, after Edd's death, both of them are a little more... caustic about it (not without reason, of course). Tord Larsson's thoughts on the matter have never been recorded, due to him leaving the show before the fandom exploded (though some fans speculate that aggressive shippers were part of the reason he left).
  • A major incident for the fandom was Legacy donator Patryk Dudulewicz getting his chance to be a cameo in the series. This lead to him getting shipped with lead animator at the time Paul Ter Voorde (who happens to be married) due to their characters standing next to each other and briefly showing a humorous Straight Man and Wise Guy dynamic. The problem was that the fans went so far as to use his real last name when writing fanfics and making fanart, as well as his real first name (the character version's name is "Patryck"), causing the very often sexually explicit fanworks to start bleeding into Dudulewicz's real life. He, of course, did not take this well, and eventually chewed out the fanbase for it... though oddly enough, they actually seem to have taken this to heart: Paultryck is still a very popular pairing, but the fans have taken care to not only stop using the two's actual names, but even began using the shortenings the actual Patryk suggested for them, Pat and Pau.
  • Parodied in the show's revival era, with the first episode literally being Matt reacting to Rule 34 Eddsworld fanfics. He doesn't take it well at all, but the real breaking point for him ends up being the fanart that came with it. After seeing it, he jumps out the window.
• The Brothers Chaps' stance on Homestar Runner porn is unclear; however, in the Strong Bad Email episode Fan Club they do poke fun at the concept of Homestar/Strong Bad Slash Fic. Relatedly, in one of the in-character Halloween costume commentary videos, a photo of someone dressed as Anti-Homstar — an Original Character originating from a Strong Bad/Homestar fic — is included, but the costume is mistaken (by Strong Bad at least) for a canon!Homestar costume.
• Epithet Erased creator Brendan "JelloApocalypse" Blaber has stated that he doesn't mind porn of his characters unless it's of Molly (who is underage), in which case he hates it with a burning passion and is annoyed that people aren't making porn of Zora and Mera instead. He's also confused as to why there's more porn of Bugsy than there is of either Mera or Zora.
• In an interview with Anthony Padilla, JaidenAnimations admits that she knows about the NSFW artwork about her avatar and has tried but failed to take them down through legal means. Jaiden doesn't want to bring any more attention to it and just wishes that her family and friends wouldn't be able to find it so easily. She also calls out the people who made the videos about the artwork by saying she doesn't appreciate their help and considers it selfish for profiting off of her situation. In a follow-up tweet, she clarified that her problem lies mainly in its accessibility to minors, asking that anyone who does draw such art confine it to their own adult-only communities while also asking people not to harass anyone on her behalf.
• When it comes to the character of Daki from Kakyoin Waifu Connoisseur, Daitomodachi actively encouraged his fan to make lewds of her and is quite pleased when the lewds start pouring in.
• Shgurr: On Twitter, Shgurr gave a positive reply to a piece of Rule 34 art based on one of her videos, praising the quality of it. She ended up deleting it after remembering that Twitter replies are public.
• On his "Smash or Pass" video covering his series, asdfmovie, TomSka briefly touched upon the porn parody video of Beep Beep I'm a Sheep by the infamous minus8, suggesting that he would "smash" the anthropomorphic Sheep, only to then say it's a pass and admit that "it doesn't feel right".

Webcomics

• Through some mishap of how search engines work, the webcomic Mac Hall somehow got associated with Digimon porn. This resulted in a large number of people coming to the site for this exact purpose. As a joke, the writer posted a few spoofs to make fun of this...which resulted in Internet Search engines and furry sites associating them with Digimon porn even more. Then there was one last indignity that just made it look like the universe has it in for them.
• The creators of webcomics College Roomies from Hell!!! and Queen of Wands politely asked their fanbase that if they were going to produce porn based on the webcomic to please not post it or links to it in the comic's forum as the creator didn't want to see it. Both fanbases complied. The Walkyverse fanbase is the complete opposite, with much of the explicit material contained in the site's own fanart gallery.
• The author of Keychain of Creation has a separate adult fanart gallery. Granted, it only has one picture so far, but that's not bad for a Stick-Figure Comic. He's also drawn some himself.
• The author of Narbonic once publicly lamented that no one cared enough to make homoerotic fanfiction with her characters. To her delight, several examples appeared in her inbox the very next day.
• There are two threads based around this trope on The Order of the Stick forums: "Fanservice" and "House of Horrors". Both have been locked on a permanent basis for a while now, with Rule 34 material no longer allowed on the OOTS forums.
• The author of the Blade of Toshubi had no problem when the author of the adult comic Lovemagic asked to use his main character in a story.
• Both Tim Buckley and Fred Gallagher threatened to discontinue their respective webcomics if they found pornographic drawings. They both re-thought their threats after realizing what a powerful weapon they'd given anybody who didn't like their comics.
• This xkcd strip probably explains the process behind this phenomenon. Needless to say, wetriffs.com exists. According to a Wired interview, it existed six months before the comic, the domain registered by creator Randall Monroe.
• Eric W. Schwartz is somewhat notorious for producing a document listing exactly which of his Sabrina Online characters are and are not allowed to be depicted nude or in porn. He eventually gave up trying.
• Back in its Keenspot days, someone pointed out that the Rule 34 website had El Goonish Shive porn. Everyone started discussing it. Dan's reaction: Just don't link to the forum.
• TL Welker, author of Heartcore, has been accepting of erotic fanfiction that fans write of her characters. Her one stipulation is that Ame not be submissive, a request that has been respected. She also draws porn of her own characters that she gives in return for donations for the site.
• When asked about drawing hentai based on Aoi House, creator Adam Arnold said he'd like to see it.
• Flipside, which has had some occasional nudity in strip, has had a hidden gallery of nude fan pics of the characters.
• The Penny Arcade creators have gone on record saying they have nothing against people drawing porn of their characters, and actually think it's kind of awesome. "I am honored that people would like the characters enough to want to see them fuck." - Mike Krahulik.
• Possibly the message of this scene from Scary Go Round where Shelley encounters obsessive fans of herself. It gets quite awkward.
  Shelley-Fan: Dennis, show her your tatoo.
  Shelley: Um, that's lovely, Dennis. Maybe it overflatters my flexibilty and unicorn riding abilities.
• Andrew Hussie of MS Paint Adventures seems to take a sort of perverse pleasure towards Jossing all the shipping and fanfic his fans write. Except for the people who ship him.
  • From his formspring (now deleted):
    Q: Can you send me some of your DNA so I can forcibly impregnate my sister with your children?
    A: I am calling the police.
  • He once retweeted a (non-explicit) fanart of himself and Ryan North, with whom he is friends in real life. That's probably the best explanation for throwaway lines like this:
    TG: i should probably text him soon
    TG: see whats up
    TG: because
    TG: i love him
  • He did once draw actual Rule 34 of his own comic. Of Lil' Cal and Colonel Sassacre. For the record, the former is a ventriloquist's dummy and the second is a parody of Mark Twain.
  • It seems he doesn't care all that much and/or likes joking around about it:
    "How does seeing 'adult fanart' of your work make you feel (I assume you've seen some)? I just discovered mspachan tonight; been reading Homestuck from the start and I am... a little weirded out."
    "Why don't you just embrace all the boners they are giving you, and stop bothering me about it?"
    ...
    "How do you really feel about Homestuck porn?"
    "It sure is full of naked fictional people having sex."
  • He later said this:
  ialsolikestrawberries: SO WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT ALL THIS PORN OF YOUR NEWLY INTRODUCED CHARACTERS, MR HUSSIE
  Andrew Hussie: The pornos happen fast, I will give them that.
  Thank GOD I aged them up to the ripe year of 15. Conscience totally fucking ameliorated.
• The author of Bittersweet Candy Bowl did this to her poor characters long before anyone else did, and is aware of the various works her fans do.
• David Herbert of Domain Tnemrot once said no one was famous until this trope was inflicted on them.
• David Willis of Walkyverse fame not only appears to have no problems with Rule 34 fanart of his characters, but has actually made some himself.
• Phil and Kaja Foglio originally wrote erotic fiction before Girl Genius, so normally they would be all over this stuff. They claim on their blog that their lawyer recommended they not read any Girl Genius fanfic until they have completely finished the webcomic, to avoid any claims of plagiarism. Kaja has stated that after Girl Genius ends, she intends to "make a pot of tea and read all the fanfics".
• The story goes that Scott Ramsoomair of VG Cats has a fan named Daniel Parsberg Renard who was upset with disrespectful fans, so he made a strip called Along Comes Monday to screw with them. It caused so much confusion that everyone kept messaging Scott, asking him about it, until he had to get involved. Daniel took down most references to the strip. Scott holds no grudges over it and asked Dan to make more fanart (PG) which he did do later that received a friendly email from Scott. On VG Cats FAQ, Scott mentions he didn't realize Furries were a thing until after he started the comic. It was always just "Cartoons" to him. He goes on to say, "I really don't care either way so long as it makes you laugh."
• Rob Balder of Erfworld describes it as a sign of success:
  I say this to you as a fellow geek: I knew we had made it, really made it as a Web comic, about two months ago when somebody showed me the "Rule 34" of "Erfworld".... When I realized people were arguing on a porn site about my universe's rules, that was like, you know what, I'm doing something right.
• Amber Williams of Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures is well aware that their largely furry fanbase is going to start shipping someone or other together… and then draw them in compromising situations. They restrict themself to mostly doing things of their own original characters and tends to try to encourage their fans to the same rules, on account of many early core characters like Dan, Wildy, Merlitz, and Alexsi belonging to friends. Jyrras was also originally a character of a friend, but said friend has apparently not been around in nearly a decade — long enough for Amber's restrictions to relax. With some searching, it's possible to find smutty pics of Jyrras with Abel done by Amber themself. That said, porn of Alexsi is heavily frowned on; not only was the character's player a real-life friend of Amber's, but she passed away in 2004. Alexsi's dignity is maintained out of respect for her deceased creator.
• Grey Carter, the author of Critical Miss and Erin Dies Alone had this to say on Twitter after finding out that someone had made a R34 drawing of the protagonist of his comics:
  Funny thing: The guy doing all the porno parodies of Erin thinks he's annoying me and/or undermining the politics of the comic(?), but I'd actually hire the dude in a heartbeat. He's fucking great. (...) That being said, [the artist] has done like six extra Erin hentai pieces, and none of you have put them on Rule 34. You lazy fucks. No one's updated the TV Tropes either. Fucking terrible. You're all fired. Fired from Critical Miss.
• Captain SNES: The Game Masta has a whole parody where Relm was a Yaoi Fangirl who couldn't stop slashing football players together. Fantasy football was ruined for Alex.
• Zoophobia author Vivienne Medrano admitted in a live stream that she has no issue with rule 34 unless it's made with malicious intent. Hence why she doesn't seem to mind the numerous dirty drawings of Jayjay and her other characters, but called out an artist who was drawing hate art of her having sex with her characters.
• Chrono Silverpen is perfectly okay with pornographic/fetish art of her work Nightmarish, with only two rules: One, it's in a different tag known as "Nsfwmarish" because, to quote her: "Not everyone wants to see that". Two, Greg is off limits.
• Allison Barrows, creator of PreTeena, is known to be completely opposed to Rule 34 featuring her characters.

Web Original

• Channel Awesome:
  • The people behind the site are aware that their fans can be and are slightly mental. And they're willing and cheerful enough about mentioning and hanging lampshades on this fact. Linkara even left a comment on aunt_zelda's Apocalypse!fic (also featured in Masterpiece Fanfic Theatre) claiming that he, while slightly disturbed, isn't planning on raising a big fuss about it. And does this through scaring the writer half dead.
  • And even before that (when the fandom didn't exist and the Nerd/Critic battle was just starting) Doug Walker said that he and James (The Angry Video Game Nerd) were sent fanfic and fanart links and said while it was a little weird, they mostly found it really funny.
  • Doug Walker and Uncle Yo actually read the Demo Reel Slash Fic that the characters had asked for on their DVD The Uncanny Valley.
    Uncle Yo: (exhales) This is really hot.
    Doug Walker: [stunned silence]
  • Later, he said that he's completely behind all the fanfic and shipping, and tries to read as much as he can. He just asks that the writers don't go to the bad-fic schmoop levels of "A Special Truce".
  • Lindsay (The Nostalgia Chick) has said she mostly reads the Slash Fic, but has a laugh over all the Chick/Nella femme-slash. And Nella has actually filled a (art with her saving Scarlett from a tower) prompt on the Kink Meme.
  • There was a livestream which was all about the fanfic. They found the Kink Meme and to much delight and/or embarrassment, they read out prompts and fic and even proclaimed some of it really hot. They even requested stuff!
  • MarzGurl also took part in Benzaie's Let's Fap of 3D Custom Girl... in which they made a doll of her.
  • Todd in the Shadows says in his review of Rihanna's "S&M" that sadomasochism isn't so weird, "considering I've seen porn of myself".
  • Diamanda Hagan even joined the fun — when a fanfic of her, Marzgurl, and The Nostalgia Chick was proposed, she stated she was "amused." When it surfaced, she did a dramatic reading of it.
  • Several of them have been prone to making requests... with length requirements. On official DVD releases:
    Bennett the Sage: I expect 2,000 words within the week this [the Suburban Knights DVD] goes up, or you have FAILED!
  • Rob Walker, even though in fic he's mostly fucking his little brother, wants the minimum for fanfiction involving him to be 1,000 words.
  • Kyle Kallgren (Brows Held High) mentioned finding something on his Twitter and, a few posts later, tweeted "Hey, to the people on tumblr I mentioned earlier - I really don't care. I found it flattering! Please continue as you were." and "I mean, jeez, I didn't want to send people running scared..." (He was less enthralled by the guro, however.)
  • Allison Pregler is fine with fanfic, but draws the line at Rule 34.
  • Team NChick's Live-Action Fanfics actually reenact some shipfics of varying quality, complete with the featured contributors.
  • In the Midnight Screenings review of The Best Man Holiday, Brad, Dave, and Brian have a good laugh discussing the erotic fanfiction they've encountered of Brad (generally written as the Snob). Notable examples include fics with Critic tying Snob up and stealing his food, Snob and Linkara having sex on a plane, and Snob and Angry Joe having sex in an elevator (which Brad claims "really happened"). There's also a black comedy fic of Snob (or possibly Brad himself, given that his real-life friend Sarah appears) being raped in a park and shrugging it off, calling Sarah to pick him up afterwards. The three reviewers were much amused by all of them.
    Brad: I shouldn't have gone near the park!
    Brad: Gonna need a ride home; goddamn rapist also stole my car!
• The Everyman HYBRID guys are aware, in-character, of the Slash Fic they've attracted. Their reactions were fairly tame, although Evan describes it as being simultaneously disturbing and flattering.
• Reportedly, Jadusable was not amused by Ben Drowned porn. Since a lot involves Ordinary College Students getting it on with either Eldritch Abominations or a very literal Fandom Bicycle, this is fairly justified due to the persistent No Yay factor.
• Alex Day (aka nerimon) responded to the prevalence of slash of him and Charlie McDonnell (charlieissocoollike) by penning his own, starring female YouTubers getting it on instead (they needed more love).
• The creator of My Name Is Zytherys plays the eponymous character and is a bit pettanko. This has led to a good number of fans assuming the blog is run by a male. After reading a slash fic running on this assumption, she bemusedly commented in a PM that she wasn't aware she was so well-endowed.
• When the topic of rule 34 of Demo (a female being with no arms, blue hair, and a face that consists solely of a giant eye) being made came up on the talkhaus forums during the development of A Super Mario Thing, raocow, her creator, could only utter a Flat "What" in response.
• John Green of the Vlogbrothers mentioned on a livestream that while he liked fanfic of his books, he wished he didn't know about John/Hank Slash Fic.
• Quite famously, Jesse Cox encourages the large amount of Slash Fic that accumulated from his Terraria Let's Play with TotalBiscuit. TB is mostly just disturbed.
  Jesse: Also, continue writing your creepy TotalBiscuit and Jesse Cox Slash Fiction, the only thing missing are tentacles, and Warcraft females.
  TB: All fanboys must die.
• The Runaway Guys are well aware of the Slash Fic their fans generate, especially ProtonJon. He seems to find it somewhere between funny and disturbing.
• Ian and Anthony of Smosh have actually read slash fiction featuring themselves on "Mail Time with SMOSH" on at least two occasions. They also frequently receive slash artwork, to which they respond accordingly. Actually, they're quite good sports about it all.
• Marble Hornets
  • Tim Sutton once joked in an interview about how surprised he was on discovering some of the weirder crack pairings involving his character. He also admitted that he's found some pretty interesting artwork of himself simply by inputting his name in the DeviantArt search bar.
  • Joseph DeLage looks up Marble Hornets fanfiction and is thoroughly Squicked by this Totheark/Jay fic:
    I HAVE LIVED WITH THESE PEOPLE. YOU SHOULD ALL BE ASHAMED. >:[
• Game Grumps:
  • Egoraptor and JonTron have seen Game Grumps porn. They have commented about it on a handful of episodes and have laughed it off. More specifically, Arin laughs it off and Dan finds it weird, though Arin is more comfortable with his masculinity since he was in the "D Club". Arin and Danny later clarified during their Mario 35 playthrough that it's weirder to write porn of them than fictional characters as they're "real people with their own lives," and Danny admitted that he's uncomfortable with it (especially since he has young relatives who can Google him), even though he also doesn't want to "ruin anyone's fun." They have a good sense of humor about shipping, though.
  • Arin has always been uncomfortable with people drawing porn of his wife, Suzy, as he requested that a Newgrounds artist remove her likeness from a pornographic comic (she and Arin were thus replaced by expies in the comic).
  • While he never made an official statement on the matter, Dan expressed discomfort with porn of himself in the past, to the point where Ninja Brian wrote an erotic fanfic specifically to annoy him. Ross actually read some of it during the Steam Train playthrough of Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, much to Danny's embarrassment and discomfort.
• Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, the creators/writers of Welcome to Night Vale have specifically mentioned the support they've received from, among others, the slash fanfic writers. Actor Cecil Baldwin, who narrates the podcast, had this to say on the subject:
  "When I found… the X-rated Night Vale Tumblr, you better believe I shared that with all of my friends."
• Markiplier knows fanfiction of him exists. He just chooses to ignore it as he states in that video, at least the stuff that he finds disturbing.
• The cast of Carmilla the Series reactions to the porn varies from indifference, to delight, to a live reading of one of them.
• Maximilian Dood and his friends stumbled upon a Yaoi fanart of Max and Simmons on DeviantArt. They were mostly amused, but Max was understandably creeped out. Later they found a fanart of Steve having sex with Sheeva. They were all creeped out.
• Hannah Rutherford stumbled across some disturbing fanfiction of her and Lewis Brindley and was not amused, leading her to openly express her disgusted reaction to fanfiction.
• Jimquisition host Jim Sterling, being their promiscuous not-straight self, doesn't mind porn of themself. A few people had sent R34 pics to their ask.fm and Twitter accounts.
• Given the SCP Foundation started with Creepypasta and went on to develop even more disturbing content, the thread where contributors post such reactions is appropriately named "Passing the Brain Bleach".
• In a now-deleted video, Mexican YouTuber RetroVlogs chastised people who draw porn of her mascot, Suteki, explaining that she's meant to be an Author Avatar for herself. Consequently, she considers porn art of Suteki to be both uncomfortable and disrespectful.
• Aventures: The team often jokes about the Slash Fics and seems pretty happy about it. Fred has said in one of Krayn's Twitch livestreams that he is very proud that someone made a porn parody of his Starventures character Apple. Krayn is appreciative of how active the fandom is with fan-art and fanfiction in general, but mentions that he has seen some weird stuff. Bob hasn't said anything about the rule 34 specifically, but seems to encourage the Slash Fics, as he is the one who will most often purposely provide fan-service and shipping fuel while saying "think of the fanfictions".
  "Now we have covered every single pairing!"
• Lucas Cruikshank looked up pictures of Fred and himself naked for fun and was shocked to find photoshopped porn of himself, including one of him edited with Nathan Kress and Justin Bieber that freaked him out. He did a whole video where he read old fanfiction, most of which was NSFW and involved Fred with Kevin. He was surprised, but also deeply amused. He even read some lines of the fanfiction in his Fred voice!
• Mito Tsukino of Nijisanji once talked about a time she bought a cosplay adult video based on her, only to discover that her computer couldn't play it properly (though she tried to pass the incident off as a dream). She also tried to ask her English-speaking listeners to draw more hentai of her.
• Saberspark has reviewed rule 34 art of his avatar, and seems pretty resigned to and unbothered by its existence. In his pinned comment on the video in question, he even states that he's "just gonna fully embrace it".
• Vannamelon has admitted to being a fan of pinups, and has commissioned multiple artists to draw her in a bikini. She's stated that anyone can draw her however they like, even in pornographic situations, as long as the art itself is good.
• Vinesauce:
  • At the end of this stream someone shared NSFW fanart of Joel with Undyne and Temmie which he found hilarious. He also talks about the time he discovered a thread on 4chan's yaoi board with pornographic drawings of himself and Vinny. He found it hilarious as well and took it completely in stride.
  • On the other side of the coin, Vinny has expressed discomfort with people drawing sexualized versions of him and shipping him with other people or characters, or even with anything that portrays him as a Mr. Fanservice in general, especially after an influx of such art during the Vinesauce Miitopia series. The deluge got so bad that he changed the rules on the Image Booru to clamp down on it.
  • When asked whether she had any issues with people drawing porn of Laimu, Limes responded that she was okay with it and appreciated every piece of fanart, including the risqué ones, only requesting that anything explicit be kept out of her official art tag as she'd prefer to keep that clean.
• Mandela Catalogue creator Alex Kister is Squicked at the thought of people sexualizing his characters. (Particularly the Alternates) He made two Tweets about it (one now deleted) making his stance on it very clear. An understandable response given most of said characters are portrayed by Alex himself as well as those in his personal circle.
• Lucahjin is a very avid supporter of pornographic art of her VTuber model, to the point where she created both a Twitter hashtag for it and an alternate account devoted to retweeting said porn.
• Clown Illustrations, the creator of Welcome Home (Clown Illustrations), is fully aware that people are going to make porn of his work, and has politely asked for said porn to not be publicly posted because he is unsure if he would be fine with it since the ARG is still in its prologue stage. Clown would later announce that posting NSFW of his characters is fine, but asked for it to be tagged under "PlayfellowXXX" rather than the regular Welcome Home tag.
• Youtube and comedy sketch duo Drew Gooden and Danny Gonzalez posted a video where they read and reacted to a saucy fanfiction written about them. They only seemed interested in laughing and poking fun at the story due to its absurdity. The original author of the story has since deleted the story off of Wattpad, most likely due to a mix of embarrassment from seeing Drew and Danny reacting to a fanfiction they made about them, and ridicule from fans of the two. Restorations and remasters of the story can still be found, however.
• The Noedolekcin Archives: Seismo is aware that people may draw NSFW art, and has expressly forbidden NSFW art of Kirk Odd.
• WayneRadioTV's stance on NSFW Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware fanwork is that he finds it "weird" and prefers not to see it, but acknowledges that he can't completely control anything fans do and gave permission to make it.
• SMPLive: From ConnorEatsPants's Twitter: "If you’re gonna write erotic fan fiction about me please write me with a smoking hot babe instead of @jschlatt"

Western Animation

• Butch Hartman condemns those who draw porn of Danny Phantom characters in addition to the works of shippers in general as not being true fans. He even went as far as to claim a toon porn artist on his forum was a pedophile and had attempted to seduce a girl forum member.
• Rumor has it that some of the animators of The Raccoons drew their characters in adult situations, put the drawings on the walls of the Hinton Animation Studios, and later even created print collections for themselves entitled "Off the Walls" vol. 1, 2 and 3.
• Craig McCracken, of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends fame, while answering to frequent questions on his DeviantArt account, said "Yes I have seen the porn. Let's just leave it at that." Especially when you consider that Frankie Foster was based on his wife, Lauren Faust.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Faust herself has this to say about the fandom for her own show: "I'm a big girl. When stuff gets too icky I just find something else to do." The animation FAQ on her deviantART account reiterates her stance about Rule 34, though when she discovered that fans were making porn of her personal Author Avatar she said word for word, "Gotta admit, that kind of gives me the creeps. I'd rather not know about it."
  • Tara Strong got mixed responses when sharing "suggestive" fanart◊ of her character Twilight Sparkle on her Twitter feed. That said, she does love to tease people on Twitter by posting pictures of her various animated roles with messages that make it sound suggestive.
  • Lee Tockar, voice of Snips and Steven Magnet the sea serpent, when talking about Snails (voiced by Richard Ian Cox) stated that he "didn't do him", "doesn't care what you've read", and fans should "not believe those 'deviantART' things".
  • Corey Powell, one of the writers for the third season, said after finding porn of her dragon OC "A better person would be horrified, but I can't stop laughing."
  • One of the storyboard artists, Sibsy, has an account on the image board Derpibooru, where there's some NSFW images in her favourites. When someone commented on it, she responded with "NO FILTERS!"
• Calvin Wong, one of the storyboarders for Regular Show, said that he knew Mordecai/Rigby slash would happen from the get-go, but added, "If anything we're happy that people care that much about the characters more so than any other emotion."
• According to an interview that's no longer online, a cartoonist working on the Beetlejuice animated series drew some Beetlejuice/Lydia porn in which BJ fingers Lydia while she's on her period and ends up with a red fingertip. The crew found it so funny they made BJ's fingernails red in the cartoon as an inside joke. According to that same interview, Rule 34 was rampant in that studio, and included everything from softcore fluff to things that were, to quote, "Bad. Sand-worm bad."
• Hanna-Barbera filed lawsuit against artist Jab for making naughty art of their characters. Jab has not drawn a piece of any Hanna-Barbera character since the attempted lawsuit.
• Galaxy Rangers fandom is an odd case. The fandom takes a dim view of Rule 34 because several writers lurk on the main fan list. That didn't stop Chris Rowley from inverting this Trope by commenting the writers themselves had some unsavory speculations about the villainess's sex life.
• The creator of Adventure Time, Pen Ward, generally appreciates all types of Fan Art for the show, even if it's pornographic; he just likes that people care enough about the show to draw it.
• At least in the early years of the Internet, Warner Bros. wasn't a terribly big fan of this trope, as evidenced by this 1995 Cease & Desist letter from their lawyers.
• Bounty Hamster creator David Freedman is aware there's porn of Cassie online, but he doesn't mind. He just appreciates the show is remembered.
• Giancarlo Volpe, the producer of Green Lantern: The Animated Series not only knows about it, but has actually made something of a joke about it
• Fox used to crack down hard on The Simpsons porn, especially that involving the child characters, but some time after the 90s they just gave up. In 2009, Marge Simpson even became the first animated woman to appear on a Playboy cover.
• At an interview at New York Comic-Con 2011, Superjail! creators Christy Karacas and Stephen Warbrick were asked if they'd ever seen the fanworks of the show. Karacas' reaction to adult fanart was summed up as "They're still fans, right?" as he visibly cracked up about the slash, while Warbrick appeared more visibly awkward and bothered about it (especially in regards to Twincest). A later interview with Huffington Post quoted Karacas as stating that he loved the crazy porn art, with him specifically mentioning two infamous pairings.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Alex Hirsch is not doing anything about porn of his characters, but he has stated that he's disturbed by it. Particularly the incest, as Dipper, Mabel and Stan are based on him, his sister, and their grandfather, respectively. He's also made occasional jokes about how wild shipping can get in the fandom.
  • In the livestream that spawned the "canon" human design for Bill, Hirsch mentioned that, though he was fine with people doing it, the massive amount of Self-Fanservice portrayals of Bill Cipher does confuse him slightly.
• While he hasn't read any fanfics per se, Steven E. Gordon, art director and character designer for most of Marvel Comics' animated shows and films since the early 2000s, is at least aware of how much fanart and fanfics are out there based on the shows he helped create, primarily X-Men: Evolution, including the naughty ones, and is completely willing to do commissions of the girls on the show posing in thong bikinis or intimate moments between Rogue and Gambit (or, just as frequently, Wolverine), so he's apparently fine with it.
• In Metalocalypse, this happens to Dethklok In-Universe when they begrudgingly attend a fan convention... featuring r34 drawn and submitted by Real Life fan artists. Brendon Small has gone on record saying that the slash porn is among his favorite fan work.
• For the episode "Tweek x Craig" the producers of South Park specifically asked fans to submit their Craig/Tweek fanart to be used so the episode could parody the yaoi fandom. The episode includes a lot of chaste fanart as well, but also includes a lecture on seme and uke dynamics, and several of the fanart images used are...very suggestive.
• According to Steven Universe co-executive producer Ian Jones-Quartey, the staff is fine with sexual fan-stuff of the show... because apparently "The writers room talks we have about the actual canon is (sic) waaaay sicker".
• Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar had herself previously drew softcore porn of Edd and Eddy. When asked about it, Ed, Edd n Eddy creator Danny Antonucci said he simply saw it as another piece of fanart and loved it.
• The cast of Bob's Burgers have reacted to Bob's Boners.
• Rob Renzetti, creator of My Life as a Teenage Robot, commented on a pin-up of Jenny with:
  Let me say that this particular piece of art is okay with me. It is 'sexy', which is okay with me. What I object to is 'Sex' images where things range from very suggestive to completely explicit. I hope that is clear enough for everyone but, if you aren't sure whether an image might be appropriate or not, then don't post it.
• In an episode of Family Guy where Peter and Lois discover Meg is doing foot-fetish porn online, Peter looks at the computer screen, does a double-take, and exclaims "Holy crap, Lois, there's animated porn on there of you and me doing it! How did that get on there?" This suggests Seth MacFarlane's attitude towards Family Guy porn is fairly relaxed and sardonic.
• In 1938, Max Fleischer allegedly drew a short of Betty Boop and Popeye having sex as a gift to artists who agreed to relocate to Fleischer Studios in Florida. It was fully-inked, and had both a music score and a vocal score. However, it was only seen once and it is unknown if the short ever actually existed.
• There is an infamous official example of this that occurred with Rugrats. In 1998 some artists decided to make an offensive storyboard jam that involved Stu being verbally abusive towards Angelica, Didi, and Tommy, and sexually abusive towards Angelica. An executive producer learned of the storyboards and confiscated them. Only the first storyboard (which is SFW albeit full of cursing) has ever surfaced, the other likely being destroyed shortly after being confiscated.
• While actual pornography wasn't involved, there was a small incident at the Phineas and Ferb panel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2011 where a girl tried to ask if Phineas and Isabella were gonna kiss on the show, but accidentally said Phineas and Ferb instead, causing a rather startled reaction from the panel including Phineas' voice actor Vincent Martella reacting in-character.
• Jeff Goode, creator of American Dragon: Jake Long, was once asked how he felt about people drawing porn of his characters. His response seemed to indicate he had at least come to terms with it.
  Oh, Disney sat me down and showed me a bunch of Kim Possible porn and said "This will happen to your show."
• Justin Roiland has seen Rule 34 comics and live-action porn parodies of Rick and Morty. He finds it difficult to get off to them due to finding the fact that they star characters he created/voiced distracting. He also conceded that the porn with Mr. Meeseeks are logical conclusions.
• When asked about this, C.H. Greenblatt (of Chowder and Harvey Beaks fame) said he disliked the idea of people sexualizing child characters, but liked seeing "weird" fanart of other characters as well as original characters.
• Glitch Techs co-creator Dan Milano once stated that people could draw whatever they wanted, but notes that Miko, Zahra, and Five are below 18 years old and that he'd like it if people didn't show him sexualized fanart of them. That said, the more comedic examples of such do amuse him on occasion.
• Animator Katie Rice is staunchly opposed to Rule 34, particularly if it involves underage characters. She even warned on her Twitter that any porn artist who tags, retweets or likes her posts will be blocked in sight, following an incident in which she was retweeted by an artist who made an explicit artwork of Cindy from Animaniacs (2020), who is not only underage but is also voiced by Rice's real-life niece. Given that Rice was a victim of grooming and abuse as a minor by John Kricfalusi, this reaction is understandable.

Other

• While not exactly porn, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America did sue the manufacturers of a poster depicting a pregnant girl scout with the words "Be Prepared," above her. The poster was judged as a work of satire protected by the first amendment free speech laws by a federal court. Evidently, somebody was listening to a certain song by Tom Lehrer.
• British newspaper The Guardian has a Football/Soccer podcast hosted by James Richardson. Once on the show, a user directed him to a slashfic featuring him and Sid Lowe, a regular contributor to the pod. Needless to say, both were surprised and disgusted by the revelation.
• In a less-racy and not quite-Rule 34 variation, Michael Rosen thinks Youtube Poop videos of him are hilarious, despite most of them turning his videos into tales of various sexually-deviant behaviors (and murder, and other bizarre things). Although he did legitimately oppose them at first, he eventually decided that they weren't causing any harm, likening them to making amusing edits of other media in image editing software, and actively started enjoying them — but does request that they're kept separate from his actual material, since he's a children's author and poet.
• Japanese fans are head-over-heels over Ellen Baker, a character in New Horizon, an English textbook that is targeted towards Japanese middle-schoolers. Of course, there's fan-art of her; and it is inevitable that rule 34 of Ellen was made. Thus, Ellen-sensei's original artist, Denchubo, reminded fans to tone down on lewd works starring her, or else parents and educators would eventually whine about her treatment.
• From the beginning, Vivienne "Vivziepop" Medrano has been well aware that both her webcomic Zoophobia and her various animated projects have received plenty of porn fanart. Having a rather dark sense of humor herself, she's admitted that it doesn't shock her and only asks that anyone who draws it not show it to her. She saw the infamous 50,000 USD Verbalase X Charlie AMV thanks to one of the lead animators to Hazbin Hotel making her watch it. Her reaction is as follows.

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Go back to Rule 34, but know that somewhere the original creator's soul is dying. Or laughing their ass off. Or just couldn't care less. Or rejoicing.

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