uncomfort realm

More vampires who are like, “I don’t know, man, I spent most of that decade in an opium den.”

More vampires who weren’t paying attention because they didn’t think it would be important.

More vampires who don’t know because there was lot of conflicting gossip and they don’t want to point any fingers.

More vampires who are just bad at dates. “Back in 1620, or was it 1645, wait, what year is it now?”

“Oh yeah, the only thing I remember about the American Revolution was this nice candlemaker I met sometime, and she was wearing this really cute red shawl…”

Recent events.

As a teenager, you are growing and learning at a phenomenal pace. Month by month you are becoming savvier, wiser, more socially equipped. That rapid development continues into your 20s. So as a teenager, a big age gap is a REALLY big age gap, because you are learning and changing so much so quickly during that time. It’s not totally about “maturity” though - it’s about power. As you get older, younger people start to look up to you. They might trust you to know things you really don’t, because you’re older and you know how to say stuff convincingly. Getting older also means learning all the different ways people  pressure or manipulate each other. Most of us are still learning about this stuff into our 20s - even if we’re really smart and mature. Someone having a lot more of this knowledge than the person they’re dating means the power in the relationship is uneven, because the older person can pressure you in ways you can’t recognise or defend against.

And I’m sure teenagers have noticed that if you get into a conflict with an adult, other people take the adult’s word over yours. Even if you’re right. Even if you need help. So if you date an adult, that person has power over you that, even if they don’t try to use it, really does effect how the relationship works. There’s no way to have a healthy relationship with that big a power difference, because you can’t make choices the adult doesn’t like without worrying about what they’ll think or do. You’ll end up in situations you’re uncomfortable with and not have the tools or social power you need to get out of them.

The other piece is - adults who date teenagers are looking for something they can’t get in their usual dating pool. For most adults, dating a teenager wouldn’t even occur to them, because they understand how wrong it would be. Adults have our own groups of friends, our own ways to meet people our own age, and if an adult is flirting with kids they’re looking for something they can’t get from someone who’s old enough to catch on.

The adults who seek out teenagers want someone they can pressure and manipulate. They’re looking for an abusive relationship, and like all abusers they’re really sneaky about it at first - but they have the added advantage of knowing tricks you haven’t had time to learn yet, as well as the advantage of being listened to when you won’t be.

It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.

The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats - but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.

It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true - but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.

The like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates - it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.

They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need - it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.

They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.

It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.