Is this like a sexual assault survivor coping mechanism or something?
Not necessarily. Some people are just self-taught—you can get into anything with enough elbow grease.
Mentally, I mean.
The thing to understand about lolifags is that, if they don't like to think of themselves as being under the pedophile umbrella, they the make the distinction that what they're doing is all on the Autism Plane and doesn't correspond to reality; they'd say that you're taking it too literally.
The best comparison is furries: the animal imagery is mostly analogical and meant to represent qualities of a person. It doesn't really cross the line into being zoophilic outright (rather than just autistic) until the appeal is that it's meant to be an animal—when guys start calling drawn dog vaginas "cookies", for example, and focusing heavily on the animal anatomy in a literal and non-analogical sense.
Furries have the distinction between "anthro" (human-shaped with animal attributes) and "feral" (animal-shaped with human soul". They distinguish both of these from "animal" (neither human shape nor soul).
You'll notice that these distinctions don't stop tons of real-world animals from being raped in their subculture.
What I've described are, in reality, more accurately described as
initiatory stages towards annihilationist hedonistic antinomianism than distinct "orientations" (to use the child abusing trans-inventor John Money's term). The purpose is to simultaneously deny and affirm the reality of the next initiatory degree: this allows the frog to boil—the initiate is told that he's in no danger of going further (which keeps him from leaving), while at the same time he's immersed in the ethos of the next stage until he's acclimated enough to move deeper by his own free will.
This is the same model that freemasonry uses, by the way, and is the point of their rituals.
Even so, animal rape is arguably much more common with "feral" and "animal" enjoyers than anthro-only types, who see the latter two as the dog-rapists and may never progress to the next stages (although they might still rape animals for boilerplate-hedonist-auto-humiliation fetish reasons rather than for dog-lust).
Lolifags try to use the same rationale, but are even less successful: there's no such thing as an "anthropomorphic fifth-grader". Lolifags only have equivalents of "feral" ("1000 year old dragon in a child's body) and "animal" ("um it's not pedophilia because it's not real").
It's ironic that both groups tend to hate each other when they all, at the highest degree of their initiation, meet at the same basin full of tranny gooner blackmailed openly Satan worshipping (and often posessed; I've come across "prophets of the porn goddess" who claimed to have visions) fed assets and pleasure-through-death-craving annihilationist methheads anyhow.
By the way, I saw someone earlier giving Buddhism a pass just because they're quiet—there's a lot of crypto-annihilationism going on there, too. People need to be more wary. The guys destroy sand-mandalas; those things represent the soul and also the cosmos. Some of these guys are trying to snuff out the universe. Wouldn't be surprised if once you get into the deepest gooner-spook discord DM group you take a plane ticket to Tibet.
