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Roses//Oceans//Coffee
Personal Blog. Feel free to enjoy some funny shit, vague aesthetics, woke tea, and scum of the earth shenanigans. Witch blog @quisqueyanavaliente. Alicia, 25. Queer she/he/they. Florida. Capricorn, Taurus, Aquarius, Sagittarius.
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I saw some #discourse go by about how adults shouldn’t be in fandom writing about younger characters because it’s uncomfortable and gross to younger people to have adults ‘thinking about them’ in romantic/sexual terms.
1, This is not a restriction that any writers in any other venue have to deal with, wtf, or the entire YA genre would be banished; 2, Excuse you, children of Tumblr, no one is thinking about you.
If other people in fandom are older than you, by definition, they have been your age. When fans write about younger characters, we’re not peering through a keyhole at young people now and creeping on them.
We are drawing on our own experiences, thoughts, feelings and memories of what it was like when we were that age.
No one has the right to ask older writers to cut themselves off from their own past just because young’uns don’t want to acknowledge that people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, all of them, were also young once. I’m 41, but I remember vividly what it was like to be 14. If I write a high school AU, it’s about my high school experience, even if I were to set it in the present day and decorate it with some (probably comically out of touch) Stuff The Kids Are Into Now. If I write a high school AU with sex, it’s because I remember that too! I’m not thinking about kids today, why would I– I have my own experiences to draw on. And honestly, sometimes there are things about being young that you don’t really understand until you’re much older and have some perspective– and that’s worth writing about.
If someone is genuinely a creeper, you’ll know, because they’ll ask you questions about you. But people who aren’t even directly interacting with you, who are just expressing themselves in fiction, are not a threat to you, and it’s not creepy for them to draw on their own experiences and their own past to write about younger characters.
Some responses from younger people here, and in other similar discussions:
1) We’re making them uncomfortable by writing teen characters
2) there are all these adult characters we should be writing about instead
3) they’re here for escapism and don’t like being reminded of ‘things like that’
To which it must be said:
1) if you’re uncomfortable, stop reading it. It’s not our job to babyproof fandom for you. It’s your job to recognize personal boundaries and protect yourself. Fandom is a shared space. Get used to it.
2) we write about the characters we find interesting, same way you do. Age has very little to do with that. I know you don’t believe me now, but I also know you’ll understand when you’re older.
3) We’re here for escapism too, buddy, and if that means imaginary harking back to a time before cholesterol tests and taxes, so be it. Not our problem you can’t handle reminders that older people had young lives just like yours, and that you too will be one of us soon enough.
Plucking any one memory from high school out of my past just makes it sound so funny to hear teenagers rallying against sexual content.
“You can’t write about your own life before 30 because it makes me uncomfortable.”
Then don’t read it. I didn’t write it for you.
Then don’t read it. I didn’t write it for you.
That’s it, that’s the thing that gets me the most.
Here’s one small example that I recall from years ago: someone barely out of their teens raided an adult artist’s private account after gaining their trust, deliberately found adult erotica of animal characters, and shared it with other teenagers claiming it was to protect them and that the artist was dangerous. Then a bunch of these teens fabricated accusations, doxxed the artist, nearly got them fired, and began harassing, bullying, and threatening similar artists. The private art had been properly tagged. It would have had to have been a deliberate act with malicious intent to hack them, steal the art, and then expose it to minors. The bullies backpedaled when caught and decided to double down in the name of “it’s gross and making us uncomfortable so the artists deserve to die.”
That seems to be a trend: Threatening death and cartoonish physical harm to anyone who writes, reads, and even doesn’t mind sexual content, particularly if the characters are attractive to the antis themselves. “If I can’t have these fictional characters, nobody can” taken to a new level. They don’t seem to want to redirect their energy toward reporting actual predators, many of whom are in their own community.
These kids are obviously allowed to feel uncomfortable and grossed out when seeing art they don’t like. But the real world actions they take against artists have consequences that can be far more damning than adults writing and drawing fiction that wasn’t meant for them in the first place.
Oh yes, and then there was the anti who dove into my private messages to say “I see it as my job to purge fandom of people like you.” Because the fics I like to read involve themes that drive antis up the wall.