beep beep

I wanted the fantasy that one of the people with power around me not only WOULD but COULD actually make the bad shit stop. (Because I sometimes even had adults who wanted to but it turned out their help actually made it worse - through no fault of their own.)

And I’m not alone. I’ve straight up HAD KIDS go ask to be pointed to stories where Someone Helps. Or talk about how much they hate it when a story tries to imply that so and so has okay parents but their parents are still [letting them fight demons/the government/whatever] alone for no reason.

Some of these were kids who had felt a LOT of the sharp end of adults totally failing them. They wanted the fantasy of adults who WOULDN’T. And sometimes they wanted that fantasy WITH dragons, or dystopia, or saving the world.

On the same theme, I had one 14yo who told me once about how a particular quite long fic was the most important thing she’d ever read “because it was the first time I knew what a safe adult looked like.”

Is that every kid? No, of course not. But they also exist.

It’s almost like - and hear me out, maybe this is a new idea - different kids need different things and it’s a good idea to have both and also everything in between because this also isn’t a binary.

Part of what made that fic important to that kid was the story having very visible DIFFERENCES between not only safe adults and harmful adults but also “well meaning but clueless” and “thinks they’re helping with every fibre of their being but are actually fucking you up.” Part of what made the good adults good was deliberate steps THEY took to empower the fictional kids.

Like it’s absolutely valid to say “often this happens bc the power fantasy that the author is writing for, which many kids love, is shaped like X”.