I feel like I keep derailing Veth posts with the child thing, but it still irks me to this day that I couldn't find good fan content about her in the early days because every one was so hooked on her being a child. And I just never really saw it.
no, i completely get it. like, i don't mention it all that often in posts because I wasn't personally in the fandom when all that was happening, but i am pretty familiar with the history of the discourse at least and i think about it all the time. i never understood it, either, obviously, and it especially egregiously is like. what did people think was going on? child dropped out of elementary school to become an alcoholic thief? like it makes no sense as an actual viable dnd character at this table if you give it a moment's thought, and her approximate age (adult) was honestly addressed fairly quickly for those who weren't giving it a moment's thought. i think in particular, the weight given to the "little goblin girl" line always felt off to me, because i only ever perceived that as sam like. making a little joke as he broke it to the cast that he was playing a woman this campaign. like the immediate interpretation of "girl" as "child" and the refusal to reassess that has never really made sense to me, and was the first thing to make me think the general audience was actually quite bad at figuring out what was and wasn't a joke coming from sam.
all's to say: i completely get it, and if i'd been in the fandom at the time i would also still be hung up about that discourse. hell, i wasn't even there and i still think it about a lot, too
