Funny you should mention this. >_>
Powerleveling because it's relevant and I have a feeling that if I told any of this to some mental health professional, I'd be commited for the third time before the age of 20 for sure. Be my therapists, and learn from my example.
So, as a young child, I watched HTF. I know, it's odd for a child of the time to have been so easily drawn in by it, but I was. Before I get into it, I'd like to mention that it isn't hard at all to get to degeneracy on the internet. Kind of stating the obvious, but consider for a sec the idiotic flash games such as Can Your Pet. I remember I cried slumped over on a chair "nooooo not the hecking chick

((~~~" and even told mom about it. Even though I hadn't interacted with chatrooms/forums at that point. Didn't have to speak to anyone else to be EPId by cartoons, too. Not a great idea for a child so young, but I was raised by a single mother who didn't care much for internet safety, she'd only worry about it once I became a teen. But of course, by then it was far too late. And that's that.
About HTF, I remember shipping Flippy x Flaky myself. Can't remember why. I reckon I also selfinserted as Flippy without realizing it, I'm not best known for being a stable genius anyway. I reckon that at that point children aren't sensitive to gore or cartoon gore, hence they become more "receptive" to it. But I know for certain at that point that I was more receptive to gore than other children, and the only reason I watched it was because I wanted to know what happened next. The animation is so good and it draws you in, especially the music. And of course, I would often see the fanart people had of it. The ones of cute characters doing the nastiest things to each other, or just the characters being shipped together by people of the time. I didn't know what shipping was until I had been introduced to it by someone else. It was so natural for me to ship characters at that point, I didn't know I was weird or anything for liking that. (Holy crap I'm remembering as I type and I'm genuinely having my heartstrings tugged.) But yeah, at that point, I had a very distorted view of what "shipping" was. I thought it was cute, even, to see an animated squirrel's optic nerves being torn out. It was just part of the world I was in and it was part of the cartoon. I was a kid, I knew nothing. Dunno if getting into more details is gonna help us much.
The point is this: When I look at this thread and the thread on soyjak.party, I can't help but reflect on what I COULD have become. I was just a step away... from degeneracy. I could have been an otaku, but I'm not. I could have been on the path to trooning, but I'm not. Now that I mention it, I had troony thoughts as a kid. That's an overstatement though, I simply wished I could be around girls more and concluded that "life would be easier if I were born female". It never went beyond that. But we can all see how vulnerable I was. I think it's easy for me to go down the spiral and I have to have strong will power to not do it, but I feel better with this forum than most other discussions I've seen on the matter. I can see it. I can feel it. I've been there. And I'm not a good person for it, I really am not.
Anyway, maybe someone will like the insight.