#age issues

Today a random boy (around 16 y.o) stopped me on the street. He asked me to buy a newish stuff for his vape. He is under 18, so he can’t buy it legally. I agreed. He was so excited. Then suddenly his smile was gone and he asked “are you 18 years old?” , I answered “I’m much older than that. I’m 24”. He surprisingly replied “wow. you don’t look like that at all”.

Honestly, it’s so annoying to look like a teen, be 24 and be 35+ emotionally at the same time. I’ve always been way too emotionally matured for my age.

The whole situation reminds me of a scene from Twilight

– How old are you?

– 17

– How long have you been 17?

– A while.

I have ambitions and I know how our surroundings shape us. If your two friends are millionaires, so the third millionaire is you. I just wanna more. It’s a normal desire. So, it’s so freaking hard to connect with others. I can’t handle meaningless conversations with peers, I get bored quickly. Also I don’t want to be mommy for them. At the same older folks judge me by my youngish cover and don’t want to deal with such kid as me. They just don’t know who am I and what can I bring to the table. When 30+ people get know me better, they start to learn from me. Some of them become mad or jealous of my maturity and awareness (I don’t show it of), I become a trigger for them - an alive reminder that they wested lots of time doing meaningless things during their 20s. To tell the truth, not all older individuals are interesting for me, lots of them are lack of personal evolution and complexity.

I know that 10 years later I will love and appreciate my young appearance way more, and roll eyes remembering my previous complaints.

they need to real quick make a vampire/zombie movie before this dude moves on...

First of all let me say that I am 100% here for people trying to protect young actors and prevent sexualization of minors. I'm here for you. however.

Writing fluffy pg puppy love fics about kids that are totally age appropriate... is not sexualizing them. If something makes you uncomfortable for whatever reason that's fine, but childhood crushes and romances are normal parts of the human experience and it's okay to write about those things and calling fanfic authors pedophiles for writing about these things is unnecessary and bad. I've been seeing this about Richie/Eddie from IT and it's frankly stupid. They're 11-13 year old kids and when I was 11 I was in innocent pg "love" all the time. It's okay to write about this experience.

And to expand on that point, I only see this about fanfic. Published authors write childrens/young adult novels with romance plotlines all the time and nobody calls them pedophiles. It doesn't suddenly become not okay in fanfic and so long as it's innocent it shouldn't be a problem? Call out gross shit about young kids all you want but cute puppy love fics aren't sexual or gross or even unrealistic. So.

Another thing is that aging up characters literally means you are not writing about them as children. If you are writing about a canonical child/teenager as an adult, and things get sexual THEN, that's also not an issue because exploring character development as they age is once again a normal part of the human experience. People age. By extension, characters age. I've written novels that start in childhood and end in adulthood and sometimes there's sexual content... because they're ADULTS by that point. No one exists in an ageless bubble. Everyone was a child once; that doesn't mean it's pedophilia to be sexual with them or think sexually about them as an adult because you are not sexualizing them AS children. There is a difference between writing Harry Potter fanfic about adult Harry/late teens Harry and writing it about him as an 11 year old at the beginning of the series. Writing nc17 shit about 11 year old Harry is bad... but writing nc17 shit about adult Harry is not. Because he's aged. And you're no longer thinking of him in the context of an 11 year old boy. I'm hoping this is making sense.

I know this is complicated because with actors, you don't want to think sexual thoughts about a young actor pretending s/he was older. This is totally valid as a concern. But at the end of the day, actors are not their characters. I can get behind protesting rpf about young actors but fic about their characters isn't about them. Grey area, I know, but they're not.

I also want to point out that a lot of fic written about ships like these are written by kids (not always, and I am also defending adult written fic here, but). You're literally shitting on people writing about things they experience at their own ages. And for adult writers, it's things they experienced or could have when they were that age. Again: it's part of the human experience.

there’s a book series I read years ago, the Imperial Radch books, that had a teenage character who was possessed by this ancient AI that was, like, the ruler of their space government and had been for a long time. and was very big, as in the AI was spread out across a lot of different but connected bodies, or disconnected bodies that checked in with each other. and to my memory it wasn’t just human bodies that it took over, but it also ran space stations. so this AI was always observing people and knew a lot.

and then after the teenage character was freed from being used as a vessel for it, she was very traumatized from the experience of having that perspective in her head. like, imagine cringing at the memory of your younger self and make it a million times worse. because from the AI’s perspective this girl was just so stupid and her thoughts were just so facile and not unique among the variety of human stuff, merely typical teenager things. and everything she ever did was the bad attempt of a beginner. and this left behind in the teenage character just so much shame and it was so painful for her all the time and made it difficult for her to function at all.

I think it’s neat that, however the Wisdom of Solomon is portrayed as functioning, the kids don’t have this problem, either in judging themself when they’re transformed or in struggling with this effect at any level after changing back. I think maybe there’s one scene in an issue of The Power of Shazam! (1995) where Billy and the Wizard are having a disagreement and then Billy transforms partway through the conversation because he has to fly somewhere and he’s like, ‘actually now that I’m thinking this through, you’re right,’ implying that there is level of maturity difference, but that’s one minor moment and there was no judgement from Billy towards himself there.