“Ao3 allows people to write sexual content about underaged kids, and that makes me feel unsafe and threatened so it shouldn’t be allowed!”
For freaking the millionth time, no one on Ao3 is writing about you. No one fucking gives a fuck about you.
Everyone is writing about themselves. Everyone is writing about how they imagine things, the thoughts that obsess them, the experiences that haunt them, the opportunities they missed when they were younger, the naughty mistakes they didn’t get to make but kind of wanted to, the intrusive fantasies that scare them, the morals they want to enforce upon the world but can’t because they know it wouldn’t be fair, the dogma they had to grow up with and struggle to banish even now, the nightmares they want to see just once more but in vivid detail, the daydreams they can’t let go of even while driving.
Adults used to be teenagers. They still carry their teenage thoughts and dreams and insecurities and personalities with them. Those things might not be on the surface anymore, buried under recent experiences and changes, better understood and controlled, but they’re there; they’re lurking and sometimes aching. Every single fic about a teenage character that’s written by an adult is written via collaboration with these teenage fragments that perpetuated into adulthood. The author lets past angsts and uncertainties wash over them as they write about a character who’s wrestling with crushes, sexuality, virginity, promiscuity; they feel their own past struggles with these things in real time as the words flow. We mix and match from the wealth of our regrets and triumphs to craft new stories — ones we’ve never lived but are so well-informed by lived experience that they are brimming with universal human anxieties.
Given free reign, these memories easily resume their nagging at the author for not getting the guy when they were 16, for giving into peer pressure when they were 14, for not daring to live a little freshman year of college. Tapping into this well can all but drive you mad thinking of all the mistakes you made, chances you didn’t take, amazing experiences you’ll never have again; decades later it still can feel real. So many of these adolescent conditions have informed who we grew up to be that it’s impossible to untangle them all, examine them objectively and let go forever. We made countless choices as teens that set us on the path we are today — the friends we made and rejected, the drugs we consumed or refused, the sex he had or missed out on, the schools we attended or were too depressed to apply to. In extreme cases, people are in jail, people are homeless, people have children, people are sick, people are traumatized because of their experiences as teenagers.
Who are you to deny that the past still lives with us every day in a million different ways — setting us apart, isolating us from one another through the keen angst of all that which can’t be communicated to our friends and family? Who are you to say that the author should not be allowed to relive, explore, change, celebrate, condemn, examine, catalog, undo, redo, transform, and play with all that happened to them in the past and which continues to happen to them every day in the landscape of their private thoughts?
This isn’t about you. It’s never been about you.
