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Hi there! Before I get started, I want to be clear: I love Pathfinder's art, including a lot of really creepy stuff. I also definitely don't think it shouldn't exist--artists who like drawing spiders, deep sea monsters, gore and body horror obviously deserve work, and GMs deserve visualizations. At the same time, something that has been bothering me a lot lately is how ubiquitous it is, how hard it is to avoid, and how difficult it can be to see it coming.
I'm very afraid of spiders. From an early age, I learned to page carefully through new Monster Manuals, paranoid and skittish. I still feel nervous on the Bestiary's silver dragon page specifically because, as a kid, I always had to remember to flip two pages ahead. Pathfinder's spider art is inescapable, and it is realistic. The ogre spider is petrifying to me. The problem is, this art isn't just scary to me. It's art I mostly just don't get to enjoy at all, which sucks for both me and the artist whose work goes unappreciated. I can't look at the ogre spider. I can't look at the drider. I just hurriedly flip to the next page, put a piece of paper over the image, or, on AON, use an adblocker to hide the image for me so I can read in peace.
It's not just me, too. My girlfriend is much, much more afraid of spiders than me, and she as a GM straight-up can't access parts of the first Kingmaker book without exposing herself to art that makes her panic. The art isn't placed where she can simply zoom in and avoid it. It's right in the middle of the text.
My focus is on spider art here, but other common phobias, like trypophobia and thalassophobia, are relevant, too. Honestly, though, sometimes it feels like spider images in particular are leaned on for cheap PG scare value--"we can't do skin couches anymore, but nobody's going to give us an R rating if we put a giant realistic-looking spider on every other page."
Possible solutions:
1. Just commission art for different game elements when possible. There's no reason we needed art of the spiderlegs meal when many other meals were available to draw. It's okay to reduce the artists' focus on spider content for a lot of stuff. I'm not saying "no more spiders", but maybe keep in mind that the more common phobia art you put in, the more people are going to have trouble enjoying your books!
2. Include warnings. Page numbers at the start of the book would be nice, though I think you could go a tidge further and put some sort of marker on the edge of a page that precedes potentially upsetting art. This might be hard to get used to, but would make a serious difference.
3. Stop making the art so hard to avoid. Put it on splash pages, or block it off more carefully. Offer imageless PDFs, or even PDFs that remove specific triggers, like a "spiderless" PDF, a "kid-friendly" PDF that removes gore, etc.
4. I have no idea what the limits of the PDF file type are, aside from "significant and cumbersome". If there's any way to spoiler images, gosh, that'd sure be nice, but I never bet on .pdf having the bare minimum of utility. ;)
5. Embrace cartoony styles more, especially for scary art. This is half-serious, but I do think that varying your art style can be a great way to make the world feel more wild and collaborative, show other ways to play your game (some people play gritty, some people play Nodwick-style "bloodless battles"), and expand your options.
I understand a lot of these changes would be a lot of trouble to initially implement. The fact that I'm still asking will hopefully impress upon people that this is important to me and those I know. This is an entirely fixable problem, but first we need to admit it's an accessibility issue. A picture of spider art that scares readers off the page isn't a feature. It's a bug.
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My immediate suggestion is to try to use AoN.
If we consider that someone can have some fobia about some monster in a monster book the best option is to use the online version where you can search only what you want and ignore what you don't want because for print books the only option I can think is basically make the book having only text.
About book adjustments. The bestiary is already classified by monsters category grouping same monsters types in same cathegory (all spiders are already in same group of pages) if you follow the index you can simply try to jump to the monster that you want to get trying to avoid the others. The book already restrict one monster picture per page, just try to jump this page.
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Using the AON doesn't help for Pathfinder APs, which are, conveniently, the easiest publications to experiment with like this, since new APs get printed every year. Like I said, my GM is literally struggling to get through the material she has to read due to a hyper-realistic spider picture sprawling across the page.
Also, I appreciate your observations, but all spidery things aren't in the same group--driders, web lurkers and ether spiders, for example, are sorted separately to my knowledge. I wouldn't expect them to be sorted together, either.
I listed several options for books other than mandating text-only, actually! In fact, ideas #1, #2, and #5 (#3, sir!) all work universally across mediums.
EDIT: I should also say that if the answer to "many people can't use the books or PDFs" is "then they should use the AON", that's not a bad practical answer, but it does suggest that Paizo has an accessibility issue. Like, what if people with phobias like the beautifully-edited books better? I like Pathfinder's art.
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In addition to phobia accessibility standards, a flat file for some adventures would be a nice option as a GM. Sometimes I find the art gets in the way of the formatting for when I'm running a pre-written adventure. The art is often wonderful and evocative when I'm reading the adventure before hand but when I'm at the table its as much a hinderance as anything else. Even if its not something easily including in the print version, an artless or less-art version in PDF shouldn't be too hard to implement as a bundle in or secondary product.
EDIT: Also in general some content flags for things like that would be handy in the table of context. Put an adorable little leshy next to the page number or something.
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I think including a "printer friendly" PDF with the purchase of a regular PDF (which is black and white and doesn't have pictures) is reasonable. I'm not sure how much work formatting this would be.
Since you can't really anticipate what everybody's particular phobias or triggers are going to be- one person might get freaked out by birds, one person by snakes, one person by spiders, etc.. Personally, I'd be really sad if they stopped commissioning spider art since I adore spiders, but "accessing an artless version of the book" seems reasonable, particularly if you expect people to print out their PDFs.
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Also, I appreciate your observations, but all spidery things aren't in the same group--driders, web lurkers and ether spiders, for example, are sorted separately to my knowledge. I wouldn't expect them to be sorted together, either.
Still using the index you can avoid them most of the time.
EDIT: I should also say that if the answer to "many people can't use the books or PDFs" is "then they should use the AON", that's not a bad practical answer, but it does suggest that Paizo has an accessibility issue. Like, what if people with phobias like the beautifully-edited books better? I like Pathfinder's art.
It is precisely here where things get complicated.
You have a phobia of spiders, I have a phobia of cockroaches, a friend of mine has a phobia of pigeons (yes, as comical as this may seem at first sight, she really is terrified and I have to be careful to be as supportive as possible in these hours), another has a phobia of frogs, just as there must be people with a phobia of lizards, and let's face it, there's a giant breathing fire on the cover of the CRB!
And to top it all off, as you said yourself "I like Pathfinder's art". In other words, you end up in a dead-end situation. After all, this is an exception, and even producing a PDF generates costs and it is not technically possible to produce a PDF adapted to each one.
That's why I said, the solution, may be ideal, but what is possible for people who have a problem with the images in the book, is AoN, simply because it is interactive enough for each one to adjust to their needs.
As for the APs, the situation is even worse, because they have a cost very similar to the rulebooks, but a much smaller circulation and sale. It is very complicated for Paizo to adapt for each minority. The best that I think could be done would be a PDF-only version without images, but honestly, I have doubts about the feasibility of this.
The best way out in terms of cost-effectiveness to serve the majority of the public would be if Paizo stopped putting images in the books. But I'm sure that would lessen the attractiveness and sellability of the material.
Creative Director
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This is a complicated and difficult thing to explore in print. In video games, we're seeing some really great new accessibility options for how to customize your game play to be more comfortable—the topic of arachnophobia in particular has some games like "Grounded" giving you options to toggle a switch that makes the spiders in game look progressively less spidery, as an example.
Alas, there's no real way to do that in a print product.
We do include content warnings in our adventures when we feel they're needed or helpful, though, and the feedback to include warnings about phobias (particularly ones that are more common, such as arachnophobia) could be something we could do.
In particular, though, and as far as arachnophobia goes... "Season of Ghosts" is an Adventure Path you'll perhaps have to avoid, alas, since there's a lot of spider content in there—it's a land ruled by jorogumo, after all, but also we're including some non-hostile, spider ally stuff in there as well. Sort of akin to what we've done with anadi and Grandmother Spider in other books, I guess. But as far as phobias go, a "friendly spider" is no different than a "mean spider."
Anyway, thank you for sharing this observation and for your bravery!
I can't promise we can do a lot to address it (Season of Ghosts #1 is already off to the printer and #2 is heading there next week, for example) in the short term, but it's something I'll bring up with the team to consider including in content warnings. Not sure if that's even remotely close enough to do the job... but there are some themes in the game that are going to be difficult to change while keeping the same game that folks love and that has been so good and successful for us over the past several years.
I think including a "printer friendly" PDF with the purchase of a regular PDF (which is black and white and doesn't have pictures) is reasonable. I'm not sure how much work formatting this would be.
Since you can't really anticipate what everybody's particular phobias or triggers are going to be- one person might get freaked out by birds, one person by snakes, one person by spiders, etc.. Personally, I'd be really sad if they stopped commissioning spider art since I adore spiders, but "accessing an artless version of the book" seems reasonable.
Okay, here you already have a more salable point, which is a version without images to facilitate printing. But here I don't know if Paizo has any commercial interest. After all, a printable version competes with the printed version on sale for delivery.
For example, as much as I like the images too, for reasons of saving money I would most likely purchase the versions without images for simple reasons of economy. Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but if this happens frequently, the prices of versions with images would end up going up due to lower demand and the need to cover the artistic cost.|
Creative Director
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An art-free PDF version of every product we do is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Stripping out the art and then making sure the text-flow and presentation of the file are up to our standards wouldn't nearly be the same as doubling the layout work for every product, but it's very much not a negligible ask of a team that's already running pretty much at capacity, alas.
EDIT: Just off the top of my head, I suspect that an art-free PDF would have to be the exact same price as the normal PDF, and the visuals (pun sort of intended) of that could do Paizo a not-inconsiderable amount of PR damage.
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I'm honestly not sure how you can account for every potential phobia. I'm a reasonably well educated dude but I had to Google trypophobia and thalassophobia. Trying to make PDFs with "toggles" for every possible pitfall also feels beyond the scope of Paizo's technical chops given the level of functionality and resolution their PDFs currently exhibit. The interactive maps aren't particularly interactive, APs aren't filled with hyperlinks or anything, etc. Would love to be wrong about that though.
I think APs are pretty comprehensive with their content warnings, currently. KCG, would you still want to read an run an AP with giant spider monsters in it if you didn't have to see the art? Serious question.
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Creative Director
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We absolutely could not account for every phobia, but we could account for the more "common" ones. Of which there are still a lot. It'd make things more complicated for us to produce, but it might be worth it. Again... it's something that I'd not considered but am grateful for the topic being raised. We'll chat about it at Paizo.
From the department of expectation management: I don't know that we'll be able to do much at all about this, but step one is talking about it. And that's underway.
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I wonder, are there PDF readers that have the option to not load images?
That seems like a thing people might want for a lot of purposes.
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I wonder, are there PDF readers that have the option to not load images?
That seems like a thing people might want for a lot of purposes.
Yes, there are several online and offline tools that do this.
But it won't solve the OP's question, for example, who has a specific phobia of spiders, but likes Paizo's art. It's hard to please everyone in the end, then it has to be like James Jacobs said, you try as much as possible, but there will always be someone who ends up being either displeased or excluded.
That's why I said that in the end, the best way out is still AoN. As for the APs, the thing is more complicated to solve. Perhaps the best option is to try to remove the images with some tool even when you see that there is something you cannot read.
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The "What pages have [foo] on them" seems like a reasonable thing to do via crowdsourcing. Like if I have a book, I will happily tell you what pages in it have spiders because I like looking at spiders.
Like my single favorite piece of Pathfinder Art is the scene in the library at the Magaambya where an Anadi student is offering a plate of fruit (or cheese?) to students hard at work.
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We absolutely could not account for every phobia, but we could account for the more "common" ones. Of which there are still a lot. It'd make things more complicated for us to produce, but it might be worth it. Again... it's something that I'd not considered but am grateful for the topic being raised. We'll chat about it at Paizo.
From the department of expectation management: I don't know that we'll be able to do much at all about this, but step one is talking about it. And that's underway.
That's genuinely all I wanted, so thank you! It's an issue I know can be difficult to address (I feel like an artless PDF might also feel frustrating to some artists whose work goes ignored), but I wanted to sort of prompt people to consider it as a problem, rather than an ordinary inevitability. Spiders are, for good reason, super popular in games and fantasy stories, in part because they scare so many of us. That feels like a good "default setting" to interrogate.
For what it's worth, a "plaintext" option for adventure downloads (like, .txt) could be kind of cool, and presumably a bit easier to implement. It would also make it easier for GMs who like tweaking adventures or taking notes as they go, GMs who need to copy big descriptive text for play-by-posts or add stuff to statblocks, and, of course, GMs with weak computers.
In particular, though, and as far as arachnophobia goes... "Season of Ghosts" is an Adventure Path you'll perhaps have to avoid, alas, since there's a lot of spider content in there—it's a land ruled by jorogumo, after all, but also we're including some non-hostile, spider ally stuff in there as well. Sort of akin to what we've done with anadi and Grandmother Spider in other books, I guess. But as far as phobias go, a "friendly spider" is no different than a "mean spider."
The funny thing is, I adore spider content. I'm so excited for jorogumo. Phase spiders, aranea and ettercaps were among my favorite D&D monsters. The pictures are just rough! So I still want to play SoG; I'll just need to read very carefully.
I think APs are pretty comprehensive with their content warnings, currently. KCG, would you still want to read an run an AP with giant spider monsters in it if you didn't have to see the art? Serious question.
100%. Like, I like spiders enough that I'll write content about them as long as I don't have to look at the pictures too much. I can suffer through an AP's spider stuff, I'd just love the option to not feel super uncomfortable the whole way through.
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Creative Director
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For what it's worth, a "plaintext" option for adventure downloads (like, .txt) could be kind of cool, and presumably a bit easier to implement. It would also make it easier for GMs who like tweaking adventures or taking notes as they go, GMs who need to copy big descriptive text for play-by-posts or add stuff to statblocks, and, of course, GMs with weak computers.
Something like this would be easier, but not easy. Remember too that it's important for us to maintain quality control over what we put out into the world as well as to ensure that what we publish isn't super easy to steal or pirate. A plain text adventure with a "Paizo seal of official approval" would probably shatter both of those safeguards and make it that much easier for bad actors to steal our work or (potentially worse) masquerade as official Paizo content to promote things we don't want Paizo to stand for.
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Oof, that makes a lot of sense. Turns out problems are complicated.
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Creative Director
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We absolutely could not account for every phobia, but we could account for the more "common" ones. Of which there are still a lot. It'd make things more complicated for us to produce, but it might be worth it. Again... it's something that I'd not considered but am grateful for the topic being raised. We'll chat about it at Paizo.
From the department of expectation management: I don't know that we'll be able to do much at all about this, but step one is talking about it. And that's underway.
Just out of curiosity, do you know how difficult it would be to blot out the images, but otherwise leave the layout of the page the same? The PDFs I get from you guys are legible I'd say about 98% of the time, and I'm using a screen reader, which I believe mangles a page's layout more than covering an element would. Hopefully that would also require much less work.
Then again, if there are tools that do that already it may not be necessary.
I suspect that'd be easier, but would be even more an optic of "Paizo doesn't respect their artists" that bad actors could use to foment ill will toward Paizo.
I know that if I wrote an adventure, and then a version of it came out where significant parts of what I wrote got blurred out or changed, I'd be less interested in having my name be in the credits and also less interested in working for that company again in the future. Even if those changes DID make my adventure more accessible for part of the community, and especially if the publisher did those changes without talking to me about it in the first place.
Going forward, if we so chose, we could make a conscious decision to avoid using the content in question, but changing and altering it after it's already been in print feels disrespectful to the artist.
I do feel like, provided it's something agreed upon with the artists beforehand, offering an imageless (with alt-text, which should probably be included regardless) version would be the best compromise. I do get why an artist might feel bad about it, but no worse than I imagine the layout artists feel about the AonPRD, y'know? I think everyone's gonna be aware that the imageless version is the less complete version.
EDIT: A friend is telling me:
if I'm right, it really wouldn't be hard to write a utility that modifies an existing pdf to be imageless
and that would be just fine with alt text available, which is an absolute must-have in present year
So purely with regards to ease of implementation, that seems like it would be the best solution. You could include the artist's name in the alt-text, at least.
Oh, and this is totally in bad faith and not serious, but there technically is a version of your publications that cuts out your work, James: the supplements that provide just the images and maps! ;P
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As a longtime GM and fan of the fantasy genre who has pretty bad arachnophobia, I've learned that there are just going to be stories and books I simply can't interact with because spiders make appearances throughout. Season of Ghosts is one such example, but tragically this also includes absolutely astounding books such as Lost Omens: Mwangi Expanse. That's really sad, but I've mostly made my peace with the knowledge that some things just aren't going to be accessible for me.
The part that really bothers me is how prevalent spider art is even in stories that only occasionally include them, like Kingmaker. I've come to rely on a very cautious scrolling tactic where if I find an encounter that seems to have spiders involved, I'll veeery slowly and carefully scroll down bit by bit so I can check for art on the pages and make sure I'm not about to get jumpscared while reading. This time, the artwork appeared normal - plants and earthy tones, nothing furry or spindly, probably some kind of plant monster - so I scrolled down to the page thinking myself safe and OGRE SPIDER OGRE SPIDER AGH
Now I dread going back through the document. Even though I know which page it's on, I know that there's always a chance that I'll land on that image by accident while scrolling or paging through my book. And what's more, if I want to access any of the text on that page for the purposes of running the adventure, I have to zoom in reeeally close for fear that I might accidentally set myself off. It sucks! The best plan I've got is to send it to a friend who's not as arachnophobic and have them edit a screenshot to cover it up and send it back, but I can't replace that image in the PDF. It'll always be there, and I'll always have to put extra effort into avoiding that page when I'm using my document. It sucks.
I wish I wasn't so scared, but knowing that the reaction is irrational doesn't make it any easier to deal with. There's no simple "mind over matter" solution, and using the Archives of Nethys instead still risks a spider image on their page and doesn't carry any of the context of the adventure. I don't want the art removed or anything, plenty of people enjoy spiders in their fantasy and I'm not looking to change that. I wish there was just a way for the reader to spoiler or remove certain images from a PDF without changing any of the formatting during viewing so I could interact with the book the way it's intended.
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From a software engineering standpoint, it sounds like we need a pdf viewer that allows you to choose pages to prevent displaying of images on.
That, combined with an image table of contents, should do a lot to alleviate the problem. Read the table of image contents. Note the pages that have 'spider' images on them. Block images on those pages in the viewer.
I don't know if there currently exist any such pdf viewer software that does that though.
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Like I said, my GM is literally struggling to get through the material she has to read due to a hyper-realistic spider picture sprawling across the page.
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Could you get a friend who doesn't have arachnophobia to cover up those images for your GM? Perhaps permanently with something like Wite-Out?
It's not a long-term, global solution, but it might be a way to quickly address this particular instance.
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Between AoN, thourough indexes, and phobia-free friends modifying your books, it looks to me like you already have all the tools you need to largely avoid the subject of your fears.
Besides being mindful of image placement (to avoid surprising people as some have described above), I'm not sure what kinds of practical solutions Paizo could realistically take.
As a graphic designer and technical illustrator, I make art for books for a living, and I know better than most how seemingly simple requests like many of those mentioned in this thread are anything but simple.
I hope you all find an elogent solution and prove me wrong, especially if it doesn't unduly inconvenience the rest of Paizo's customer base.
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Between AoN, thourough indexes, and phobia-free friends modifying your books, it looks to me like you already have all the tools you need to largely avoid the subject of your fears.
Besides being mindful of image placement (to avoid surprising people as some have described above), I'm not sure what kinds of practical solutions Paizo could realistically take.
As a graphic designer and technical illustrator, I make art for books for a living, and I know better than most how seemingly simple requests like many of those mentioned in this thread are anything but simple.
I hope you all find an elogent solution and prove me wrong, especially if it doesn't unduly inconvenience the rest of Paizo's customer base.
Note that AoN often shows images for creatures.
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Note that AoN often shows images for creatures.Between AoN, thourough indexes, and phobia-free friends modifying your books, it looks to me like you already have all the tools you need to largely avoid the subject of your fears.
Besides being mindful of image placement (to avoid surprising people as some have described above), I'm not sure what kinds of practical solutions Paizo could realistically take.
As a graphic designer and technical illustrator, I make art for books for a living, and I know better than most how seemingly simple requests like many of those mentioned in this thread are anything but simple.
I hope you all find an elogent solution and prove me wrong, especially if it doesn't unduly inconvenience the rest of Paizo's customer base.
I'm aware, but you can generally see names (and sometimes descriptions as well) before clicking a link on AoN. It may take an extra step, but there's also a way to turn off browser images. Doing so would allow you to read descriptions before deciding if they want to reveal the image.
As Easl stated above, these are all simple solutions which will likely help long before Paizo will be able to do anything worthwhile.
The d20 srd has monsters without art. Not sure if it is as comprehensive as AoN but it should at least cover your bestiary stuff.
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Even if nothing changes, I think helping raise the issue that spider/spider adjacent creatures have become rather prevalent for surprise encounter/ surprise artwork is useful feedback. An awareness of unintentional patterns, especially when those patterns align poorly with some of the more common phobias, can help revisit future decisions.
Certain creature types often feel over utilized in adventures, Golems are an example. The author needs something that makes sense in an abandoned complex and decides undead aren't a good fit. Suddenly every dungeon has golems.
Warm-up or setting establishing encounters likewise often reach for mundane animals ( and spiders can fit in that category) so they often get over represented especially as the first encounter/artwork in a chapter.
These things always feel like they make sense in the adventure you're looking at, but when viewed across the entire collection of adventures, it starts to feel a bit off. So a reminder, like this thread, to think a bit more about " does this need to be a spider, again" is a good thing
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Personally, one option I think'd be handy is maybe a purely digital document listing pages that include elements of various phobias (lets say, three or four very common phobias which'll appear for all of them, plus maybe an extra or two in special events where the deisngers feel it is good), and maybe a very brief description on what it is specifically (like, not to a spoiler-y level or anything, but something like "detailed description of a spider" vs "image of a spider". Maybe also note on how easy to 'avoid' it is). That way, whilst it doesn't take up space in the book itself, it's still very available.
Honestly, now that I think about it, this seems fairly possible for us to even do as a community if the designers doon't have the time/ability to. Feels like that'd be worth doing.
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As long as the solution still lets me have spiders in my books I'm down. They're one of my favorite animals. I do wanna say though for anyone it might help, treatment for a fear of something like spiders is pretty effective if you can and are willing to seek it out. Spiders are a very important animal, and being afraid of them to the extent you can't use a book because it has paintings of them is in the real of a mental health issue that is debilitating, worsens quality of life, and would qualify as something worth treating. However if you have "trypophobia" you'd be doing something to deal with a disgust response not a fear response. All studies, at least that I'm aware of, on the topic show it isn't a fear response. It's a misnamed phenomena
Thalassophobia though, it seems like everyone with it tends to seek it out and want to trigger the fear response. Or everyone I have met. I think we should see how many people are so terrified of the ocean they don't use these books and work from there if it is worth doing anything about
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Possible solutions:
1. Just commission art for different game elements when possible.2. Include warnings. Page numbers at the start of the book would be nice, though I think you could go a tidge further and put some sort of marker on the edge of a page that precedes potentially upsetting art. This might be hard to get used to, but would make a serious difference.
The problem with this is that you're speaking about a highly specific and unusual phobia.
Once they start doing this - more or less every creature int he game would need warnings and no more art for it.
What is a phobia for you is actually a sacred creature for some of us. Grandmother Spider that's part of Mwangi art actually comes from the real world mythology of the same name among many Indigenous cultures of both North and South America. As a child, I had dreams of an elderly spider woman saving me from the monster in the basement, and for my childhood that old grandma spider was my spirit guardian - as that is the worldview I come from.
I now live on the edge of a major city, up in the hills. We've got all kinds of spiders here. They keep out other bugs, for which I am grateful. When I see one I pick it up with a piece of paper or cup and carry it outside to my lawn or the bushes and let it go. Or sometimes I just ignore them if I think they're happy staying in their corner.
By contrast, the view you have of spiders. For me that's owls. They are creatures of death. The sight of one means someone has or will die. Get those things away from me.
We can't cater to everyone's different thing or we've got nothing left in there.
There are some general things we can do: not too graphic of violence and avoiding bigotry for example.
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+1 to what Seadar said. All of the yikes. I got asked recently why I pull away from these forums, so here I am, pointing out that Themetricsystem's post sets a great example of why. The topic was started, discussion was friendly, James Jacobs himself responds well with expectation setting and mentioning what solutions could be more practical to do, OP and everyone else clearly walks away from it having felt heard, people are generally understanding of each other (admittedly some don't quite seem to understand what is feasible in products like these, but James Jacobs already answered those above, so whatever), and things are fine.
And then suddenly we get an entire essay throwing all of that out the window. Holy crap.
So here I am, instead of just nopeing out of the forums for another couple days, answering the question posed to me and saying, "This. This right here."
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Pictures of scary monsters and art are NOT harming people, the individuals who have those problems and sensitivities have serious mental disorders that need treatment, not to be catered to so they can live their life without ever being exposed to their niche-niche-niche triggers. This kind of thinking or insistence that it SHOULD be the proposed way is a prime example of toxic positivity whereby preferences and actions emerge to ensure that no negative emotions, reactions, feelings or expressions are viewed as worthwhile and it invalidates the reality of the human condition and experience.
Folks who have certain phobias, if you're here or reading this, you have my sympathies but at the same time you should also know that instead of being catered to like this that you should instead be encouraged to seek therapy, not a safe space, it's not okay, normal, or healthy to try to enforce your problems on the world around you to confirm exclusively to your needs.
Maybe you should had worded this part differently; you know how people around here will look for the worst possible interpretation.
Anyway, even as someone with arachnophobia, I agree with most of your post. It's my own problem, it doesn't kill me, and I would never ask people to do things in a different way than they like in order to cater to me. Well, probably to family and close friends, but that's beside the point.That said, "I don't like spiders: remove them" definitely wasn't the OP's whole argument. Their suggestions that went in such direction weren't the one that the rest of the thread - including the replies from JJ - engaged with. Having an option to hide images that could set off common phobias would be nice indeed, as long as it's that - an option.