u/HoneyBadgers_

Whenever someone posts art of an alien or a pokemon or an anthropomorphic animal (or basically any slightly non-human character) anywhere, inevitably this exchange will happen:

Person 1: I think that creature is hot

Person 2: That's disgusting, it's literally an animal/child/non-human eldritch abomination. What is wrong with you?

Person 1: Actually I am allowed to find this attractive because [Harkness Test].

I hate this for so many reasons:

1. The Harkness Test will never convince Person 2 that wanting to fuck a fictional creature is not gross. Fundamentally, the people you are arguing with aren't generally concerned with whether this creature can consent or not, but the fact that it's an inhuman creature to begin with. Most of the time when I see people arguing about this, the Person 2's of the world just think it's gross and weird, and the Harkness test just won't convince them otherwise. They aren't worried about you fucking this fictional creature nonconsensually, they are worried about you jacking off to a weird looking creature.
2. It doesn't really have any basis in reality. The structures of consent that exist in the real world, with real people, have nothing to do with people wanting to have sex with fictional creatures. The fact of the matter is that even if a fictional creature "passes" the Harkness test, you still can't fuck them and they still can't consent because they AREN'T REAL. This entire argument is being had over hypotheticals that literally cannot possibly be acted upon.
3. Because this is entirely around fictional hypothetical creatures, any potentially problematic character can instantly become unproblematic by making your own identical version that "passes" the test. This is the "well actually she's a 1000 year old dragon" argument. If you are weirded out by someone jacking off to pictures of anime children or Vaporeon, the argument of "well actually they are intelligent consenting adults" isn't gonna make you feel better about it. For a less bad-faith application, even an OC that, say, looks like a normal dog, but is an adult, consenting, and is very intelligent and articulate, would still weird a lot of people out if someone said they found it attractive or if they started defending why they should be "allowed" to have sex with it.
4. It distracts and shields from actual debate about the nature of the action. People find fictional non-human creatures attractive and want to have sex with them, and other people think that's gross and they shouldn't be doing that. By slapping the Harkness Test onto the argument, you aren't really addressing the pertinent moral question about what is actually happening in the real world, only the fictional moral dilemma, which, as I said in point 1, Person 2 doesn't really care about. The real debate isn't "is it ethically okay to fuck Sonic the Hedgehog?", it's "Is it socially acceptable to publicly post and celebrate your attraction to non-human things in shared spaces?".

Art credit goes to Serpent X for the borderless proxy, and for the regular card to u/SigmaLibrae