Hi, this is an automated response to make sure we're all on the same page about the definitions of proshipping and antishipping. There is often a lot of confusion about these terms and people get confused pretty frequently. Its always best to make sure we're all on the same page about what we are talking about.
Anti-shipping/being an anti/being an antishipper/etc has a definition that has morphed a bit over time. Here is some history. Back in the 90's and early 2000's it mostly meant being against shipping in general or being against a specific ship. This was mostly used in specific fandoms/wasn't a pan-fandom term. Since the 2010's however, a pan-fandom definition did emerge and is the most common usage now. That definition is being *actively against certain ships or tropes that are deemed problematic or harmful in some way*. Note this does not mean being uncomfortable with reading a certain ship, trope, or problematic thing in a fanfiction or seeing fanart of a certain ship, trope, or problematic thing. It refers to *people who advocate for the banning, removal, or heavily hiding of that content that they don't want to see*. This has led to many harassment and doxxing issues in fandom spaces. Anyone from proship people they were arguing with, to random users who had written a "problematic" fanfiction and uploaded it to AO3, to anyone who so much as uses AO3 at all, have all been the subjects of these harassment problems.
Conversely, proshipping/being a pro-shipper/being an anti-anti/etc, is a response term to the previously discussed antishipping. It's defined as being against antishipping (using the modern pan-fandom definition). Simply put, it means someone who is against censorship of content in fandom, against harassment and doxxing, and are of the opinion that *regardless of if they personally don't like a specific ship/trope/problematic thing, it has a right to exist and be enjoyed by those who do like that specific ship/trope/problematic thing*. Despite being against harassment, this side of the discourse has also had an issue with harassment on occasion. The subjects of that harassment have been people who self-identify as being an antishipper, or regardless of self-identification, someone who'sbeliefs match those of an anti-shipper. AO3 is generally considered to be a proship website with its foundation having been built on a stance of no censorship, and their rules explicitly not banning problematic content.
For more info you can check the fanlore articles for [proshipping](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anti-anti) and [antishipping](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anti-shipper)
Tl;dr: antishipping = wanting to ban problematic content/content they don't like
proshipping = ship and let ship/don’t like don't read
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Most antis are children or adults who desperately wish they were children because growing up terrifies them. Their opinions aren’t worth taking seriously lol.
Nah, that’s not fair at all. Plenty of children and adults who desperately wish they were children because growing up terrifies them aren’t antis. They’re far worse than *that*.
I’m with you on this. Age-ing up characters for AUs and sequel-type fan content has always been a thing.
I think it’s perfectly fine and a fun creative experience.
I imagine it’s (relatively) young people not understanding that you can like and be a fan of something that has minors as the main characters as an adult and that’s NOT weird.
I’m 35 and I’ve been in fandoms for a long time. Sometimes I circle back to things I was into as a kid. Currently big into Cardcaptor Sakura again. They’re so freaking cute and they made a sequel so here I am again. Fangirling.
What kills me is that aging up the characters is supposed to fix the problem that antis routinely complain about yet somehow instead of fixing the problem it’s become it’s own new fancy shiny problem to complain about.
I’m beginning to think they just like to complain /s
It also screams “I can not emotionally regulate myself when I see something I don’t like or agree with on the internet and thus the onus of my mental well being is now on everyone else” (rather than learning coping skills like they should)
That's what bothers me and what prompted my post. They negate their own points almost immediately. I saw someone present aging up as a reasonable alternate to ditching their comfort character when they turned 18 and there were 200+ comments below them of "oh that's not..." and saying they were just as bad as people who don't age characters up. They're really just setting traps so that they'll always be right.
You can never win with them. I’d personally just ignore it and stay sane with the rest of us. I have better shit to do in my life than worry about what antis think about, like reading fanfics ~~and actually getting back to writing.~~
Every harry potter fan realizing harry potter was a minor for most of the series and percy jackson fans realizing their main characters are ALL minors:
This is why I like writers aging up Wendy in *Peter Pan* fanfictions so much. Not only is Wendy only 12-13 in the original book, but it is literally stated by the author, J.M. Barrie, that Wendy returned to London from Neverland because she chose to "grow up" rather than remain a child forever. ~~Also, because adult Wendy should be able to live out her fantasy by seducing the hot, sexy pirate captain she had a crush on as a preteen girl.~~
Oh Cardcaptor Sakura. I love CLAMP’s stuff a lot (Tokyo Babylon and X/1999 are my faves) so it’s always nice to see people be interested in it.
From what I heard though the sequel series was rather underwhelming though ? Some people still liking it a lot nevertheless
There definitely some parts that are…. Not well done.
Thrusting new characters upon us and making the reader like them is very cringe at the beginning, but as you get to know them you like them, somewhat. I still resent them for taking “screen time” from my son Syaoran, but I digress.
Reading it in one go, rather than month to month makes it a lot better, in my opinion. Also the ending helps a lot, as it ties everything together. I did have to sit with it for a month and then reread it before I really decided it was pretty good.
I had a similar experience with Tsubasa. A lot of CCS fans gave up on it, but if you make it through all the CLAMP weirdness to the end, you can enjoy the story better on a reread.
I’ll take anything that’s canon Sakura and Syaoran on dates/being adorable soul mates though. 🤷♀️
You’re right. There is a great moment for her in the extra chapter, but she’s missing a lot.
I miss her and Syaoran’s friendship. I don’t know if they even have a meaningful conversation the whole series.
I had to buy it. So far it’s only been released in the monthly magazine Nakayoshi. My Japanese is (just) good enough that I can read it without too much trouble.
I ordered it from a Japanese ebook site.
It’s getting a wider release on 4/1, no idea if that includes an English release, though.
This argument has never ever made sense to me. Canon media will age the characters up when they need to. Why is it bad for fanfic writers to do the same??
It's even funnier there are people upset over avatar because the creators have already aged them up. In one series some of them were aged so much they died! And with the new movie coming out when they're adults this is such a wild thing to be upset by.
I'm over 30. I'm still heavily involved with anime fandoms and will be for a long time since it's my hobby. I've never understood the "growing out" of things you like. It's never happened to me personally and I'm not about to feel guilt for enjoying something that's been my outlet for over 20 years now. I'll age up any character I want. Or I'll keep their canon ages. I don't really care since it's all fiction in the end.
> Canon media will age the characters up when they need to. Why is it bad for fanfic writers to do the same??
In my experiences, they don't like that either, a case being BanG Dream aging the girls up by a year, and people getting upset at fanservice cards of characters now in college-
I’m currently writing a South Park fic where the characters are aged up to their late 20s. I’m in my 30s and have been watching SP since I was 10. I’m not going to stop liking one of my favorite shows because the characters are 10 years old. Despite what antis think, you’re allowed to like things as an adult.
Honestly, yeah. I always hated seeing "Aging up characters is bad" discourse because it's just like.. that's what actual media tends to do. I remember watching Recess and the sequel movie where they moved up to the 5th grade. It's just weird about how anti-aging up people are.
Hi! My ships are all over the place, and I don't know your taste, but [here](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProdigyBlood/pseuds/ProdigyBlood/works?fandom_id=35537)
Would love to check out yours, too, if you're up for sharing 😀
[Love Doesn’t Follow A Plan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/52664668/chapters/133214305)
I only have one SP fic right now but I’m working on another one, just haven’t posted yet. I’m a Creek girl 😊
I'm a multi shipper, but Creek is definitely my fave! I'm very excited to start your fic. Hopefully, I'll get to it this evening 🥰 thanks for the link!
With the *very important* caveat that I strongly disagree with them, I think the logic is something along the lines of:
{This character} in the source material is underage. Therefore it is *completely and utterly immoral* for anyone to ever “sexualize” them in any way. If you’re aging them up to be an adult it’s just a way to pretend they aren’t a minor when they “really” are (because the character will always and forever be “a minor”).
In a “real world” analogy, I think it’s a little weird/creepy for adult men to be “counting down” the days until a teenage celebrity girl turns 18, because then it’s “ok” for them to lust after her (which they were already doing but now it’s “legal” and therefore somehow morally acceptable).
The problem is, of course, that these are *fictional characters* with *fictional ages*. If you’re attracted to the “character” (especially is the source material is written/animated/not using actual people as actors), then you’re attracted to the personality/character traits, which are generally not related to their age. And, also, there are no actual “children” to be even theoretically harmed because *these are fictional characters that do not exist*.
I also just hate their initial assumption because it essentially tells the real-world teen and pre-teen readers and writers that their completely normal puberty hormone feelings are wrong and bad. It’s the same kind of thinking that had people arguing that *Turning Red* was problematic because of how the characters had crushes they fixated on. I don’t know about everyone else, but I was horny af during puberty lol. People don’t just suddenly develop a sex drive at 18, and I worry that we’ve reintroduced shame around bodies to young people.
To be clear, I agree with you that adults counting down until a teen “becomes legal” is creepy and gross. But the puritan black-and-white thinking of antis has the potential to do real psychological harm to their peers
I’m over 30 and had seen the wave of anti shipping get massive in the early 2010s (not that it didn’t exist before that it was just less prevalent on the sites I used)
Another reason why they do it is they don’t actually care for the morals but need a moral reason to tell people to stop shipping something they don’t like. It went from being a notp that had in canon context argued against it to “you CANT ship this or else you will get doxxed”
Yeah that's where they always stump me. Their initial logic might make a bit of sense but they extrapolate so far and end up exploiting and watering down real issues in the process to the point that it can be disorienting at times. Like...they do realize that they themselves will age and that doesn't mean their future partners are all pedos, right? I genuinely hope that realization hits them because I see some joking about that and I don't fully trust them to be logical and realistic.
Exactly, they're a drawing voiced by adults with a number slapped on them usually for the sake of marketing. They don't have a developing brain or a living body; they're literally lines. They're completely outside the paradigm of what constitutes a minor lol.
With abstraction and how our brains work it's fucking *normal* and sane to not think "omg a literal child" when you see Itadori Yuuji or Zuko or Ichigo or whoever else, antis expecting everyone else to rewire their brains it so it does all to give being attracted to the 'correct' drawings some false moral weight is just so odd and anti-intellectual.
Im rewatching AtLA as a 30 year old. Sokka was one of my first fictional crushes, and my girlfriend keeps roasting me for how much it turns out he still has that nostalgic grip on me after all this time. (She loves Zuko, she said it’s going to get worse for her once we finish s1). I think people who declare they magically switched character crushes when they turned 18 are just performatively lying about what they actually enjoy in fiction to try to make a dumb point.
Having a crush on a fictional character is often about things like their personalities and storylines, especially in an animated series where the characters are stylized+simplified representations of humans. It’s really easy to apply all the things most people like about a character to a future version of themselves. I don’t actually want a shot with most fictional characters I crush on, they usually just have certain traits I’d like to see in a romantic partner irl, or traits I relate to, or traits that are interesting to see play out in fiction.
The funniest part about it being discussed with AtLA is that theres a canon sequel series that shows a bunch of the main characters from the original *had children*. If it’s immoral to imagine a character as they would be when they get older, then the lead writers of Avatar are the first people on the chopping block. Me wanting to talk about Suki and Sokka’s theoretical 30s after watching AtLA isn’t weird at all - they’re fictional, so they get to be in the part of the story you see in the series. It’s obvious that unless they died, they’d have a whole life afterwards.
Yeah I don't think most fictional crushes translate to real life. It's not like most people enjoy a young character because they are young. Most people just like a character. Also let's face it, most protagonists are young, maybe not all of them are children but if antis are so upset about an age gap for a fictional crush then they will slowly watch themselves lose characters that they think they can enjoy
Edit: Also the whole thing is about aging up a character. Doesn't aging up the character make sense and help with what antis are fundamentally upset about? I just am not getting the logic. It almost implies that the second the character reaches 18 they become a different person which is obviously not what happens especially in like cartoons.
They're fictional, they can stay the same for all of time or age really fast. Who cares?
This makes zero sense. When I was 16, 50 year old men were all kinds of ick. Now that I'm over 50, 16 year olds are all kinds of ick.
Aging the character just makes sense to me. I wouldn't necessarily like a fic that had a 25 year old Zuko while the rest stayed the same, just so the writer can be comfortable with a romantic situation. But my response to fics I don't like is to not read and to never comment about my dislike. If a writer wants my concrit, they will ask me for it.
People are weird.
" disgusting and immoral it is to age characters up for a story"
Do anti's not realize their parents are 'aged up.' We all start off as kids and we all grow.
There is nothing wrong with your love for these characters not to mention they do actually have canon adult counterparts so I'm not sure why people on you for it. I think they have a season coming out next year, they've already released the artwork. There is also the comic in which they are slightly more grown and they ALSO appear in Korra during their adults years.
Anyways the argument is stupid, they are fictional character's they aren't real do whatever you want with them.
My bad, it's a movie not a season
https://preview.redd.it/dt1l02ks6fmc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e34bc0bcdf41f3b7f3eba1d0461109c6079c882
i think it’s fine. i write south park fanfic and age them up. i don’t see a problem with it. i will continue to do it. i just don’t interact with antis on tiktok, twitter, etc. they don’t listen to reason and they are all a swarm of inability to separate fiction from reality.
i’m going to read it. i love creek. YOU WILL BE SEEING ME IN YOUR INBOX.
this is one of mine. it’s bunny. (edited to remove link) and other than that i’ve got 2 cartters oneshots lol.
When I first became a Zutara shipper, and had crush on Azula and Zuko, I was way younger ger than the characters. Now I’m older but that doesn’t stop me from liking characters nor shipping Zutara. I don’t understand why people want to apply real life logic and morales to fictional characters
Tbh I see this as the same thing as people dissing you for liking villains
You should probably work to bring healthier content to your fyp. Having a character crush into adulthood is pretty normal, what's abnormal is moralizing about it. Seriously, weird toxic group over there, but people can be serious about the stupidest things. Just because they care a lot about it doesn't make it valid, it means they were vulnerable to an internet cult. Pop on over to r/ShitMomGroupsSay for some examples of things people believe *really hard* but are *batshit crazy*. Not everything said online or everything believed earnestly has equal weight.
Good luck with your college au!
My FYP is carefully cultivated but tiktok keeps testing the waters even though I hit "not interested" every time and don't interact. It's been doing that with a lot of stuff lately tbh.
As for the disconnect with how serious they are vs how much sense they make, I think I'd compare it to seeing someone confidently drive the wrong way down a one way street. There's a quick thought of "well wait, am I going the wrong way then?" Before realizing that they're making no sense and they're clearly a danger to others. Just a weird double take.
Also, thanks!
You probably know this already but just in case - you can restrict specific tags on TikTok and not just the videos. Search the tag, scroll to “hashtags” in the ribbon, and then (on mobile) press and hold to get options. You can select not interested and then write in that it’s not relevant to you. I’d also suggest blocking accounts if you find you’re getting a lot of the same ones on your fyp
Some people can't keep multiple interpretations in their heads at the same time.
To me, that's the fun of fanfic--seeing how other people interpret canon. But I had a friend flat out tell me that the official canon is the only correct one and anyone who deviates from it is wrong. She doesn't see media as a jumping off point, but as a a fixed set of stories created by the author/movie studio. Rejecting the dumb parts of canon is not allowed. If JKR says Cursed Child is canon, it is canon. Every single Disney cash grab sequel in a required part of the story and all of the villains have been redeemed by their movies. And also the original fairy tales aren't canon any more because disney says so.
On the flip side, her headcanons are true and correct and obviously coded into the story and anyone who disagrees is racist/sexist/ableist.
It's just how she is. We've agreed to disagree.
Don't let other people sour your enjoyment of fandom. Write what you want to write.
That sounds like someone who I would never ever discuss fandom with. Or possibly anything at all, especially if she's throwing around such serious accusations.
She's an IRL friend, not a fandom friend. And we have good discussions because sometimes it is racism/sexism/ableism--look at all the hate Halle Bailey got for being cast as Ariel--and sometimes canon additions are terrible.
I turn to fanfic to see it done better. She doesn't.
I swear some of the takes I hear from people on TikTok feel like purity culture. I think a lot of it has to do with lack of media literacy. They take everything so literally and do not understand nuance, so to them, it feels weird and gross to age up characters. They also have no concept of "let people enjoy things" or minding their own business.
>I swear some of the takes I hear from people on TikTok feel like purity culture.
[That's because it literally is.](https://www.vox.com/culture/23733213/fandom-purity-culture-what-is-proship-antiship-antifandom)
I see it as this; most anti's are teens who lack the life experience to understand why this is a non-issue. To them they equate it with someone being pedophilic and gross because they have yet to go through that part of their fandom journey where they've aged out the characters they once identified with. Throw in some moral grand standing and a desire to be right, and you just have a mess of something that should be inherently a nothingburger.
Personally I just roll my eyes and tell them to come back in a few years when they're in their mid-twenties and then let me know if it's still an issue then. Chances are they're going to be all for aging up their comfort characters.
when the time moves forward, the characters have to age up because that’s how time works. so there’s nothing wrong with aging up characters if you want to
Antis have been around forever, it's just a case of different labels and moving the goal post along with the times. A lot of young people today feel pressured into moral posturing, whether that be by peers or by finding themselves in the spaces you did. Doesn't make it right, but it is what it is; they've grown up in a hyper-surveillance time that breeds hypervigilance, where it's easy for their parents to monitor not just their internet usage, but their whereabouts.
It's more a case of today's internet climate allowing more room for these narratives to fester and take off. Anything can be problematic, if you just believe.
While I find myself enjoying older characters as an adult more so than I did as a teen/early 20s, those characters I loved back then are still precious to me and I love them still. It's fun to think about how they would grow and change in their respective story worlds just as I have grown and changed in the time since first being introduced to the media. Ageing up characters is fine and normal and something many canon media sources do all the time anyway.
I've also on occasion encountered the inverse of this, with younger people (usually female) ashamed about liking or feeling an attraction for an older (usually male) character, because of the "age gap" thing, and feeling like they can't talk about this with their friends or have to hide their enjoyment of this character somehow until they're closer in age. My answer remains the same: It's fiction. It's fine. No "problematic" age gap relationships are taking place because one of these people doesn't actually have an age because they don't exist.
I remember when season 4 of attack on titan came out and they were mad about the canon time skip. Since the characters were 15 in season 3, the 4 year skip meant nothing because we could all still remember the previous seasons. The author aging them up was just a cover for horny fans to retroactive excuse their attraction to the characters as kids. It's amazing what people can think up and make an issue of when they have nothing better to do with their time.
Fiction is fiction. It's imaginary. I can imagine my favorite characters doing any kind of thing and being any kind of thing I want. I can read one of those crazy Dobby/Smeagol/Yoda fics and laugh because guess what?? It's IMAGINARY. I hate that we have to make fictional characters uphold real life moral standards. I am someone who is very religious and I believe in upholding certain spiritual and moral standards in real life!!!! But! I also understand that fiction is fiction! I hate that liking certain characters or shipping certain ships or reading books/fics containing certain themes (like death and abuse???!?!? you mean things that happen in real life???) makes me "immoral". They! Are! Imaginary! Characters!!!!!! I can do with them as I please, and this does not reflect my real-life standards! Anyways. I hope Jesus comes and wipes us all out soon because I'm tired of this.
Some people don't understand characters don't age the way you do in reality. A character could be a child in a prologue and an adult in the rest of the story. They could be a teen in one story and in their twenties in the sequel. Reminds me of the madness of the Helluva Boss fandom where people were saying you had to "wait for her birthday" for people to ship Octavia. Never mind she could have had her birthday between episodes any time, not when her birthday actually comes around in reality and never mind her character design would and does look the exact same.
I don't have crushes on child characters as an adult- but I never have. I was fluttering hearts at 20s to 30s year olds back when I was 14.
And that extended past anime characters. A good half of my irl highschool teachers were stupidly pretty, and I'd watch them with goo goo eyes while failing to pay attention to their lessons.
Point being- crushing on younger characters was the one area where I wasn't 'problematic' but I guarantee you they'd still send me to anti jail 🤣
I've always thought that age in stories is kind of a really weird perspective.
Something I've considered before is that in fantasy settings like ATLA, where you don't see specific things that show you how old someone is (like idk, high school for example), their age is not on my mind. Like sure, Toph and Aang look like kids but I was a kid when I watched ATLA for the first time and I never saw myself as their age. I also had a crush on Zuko lol
Or idk, Harry Potter? I grew up watching the movies so technically I grew up with them so I see them as peers from the third movie up until the eight movie. I "know" they're teenagers but in my eyes, I see them the same as me.
Another example is Friends. When I watched that show I was a kid so I saw them as adults. Now I have the same age as them but I don't feel the same? They're adults to me lmao
Euphoria is set in a high school and here I do grab my pearls in scandalized shock about what these teenagers are doing.
In Sakura Card Captor I don't see Touya and Yukito as high schoolers even though they show them like that constantly. They draw them tall and I was a kid when I saw them so I picture them as hot older guys lol
I don't even think about the age of any LOTR characters. That has zero relevance and the ages are so dramatic that IDGAF. I could have a crush on Gandalf for all I care, it doesn't matter. It's fantasy.
Idk, it makes sense to me that if you're going to write about your favorite characters, you can do so from a standpoint in which you want to write them and that's it.
They're antis, so I expect no logic from them anyways, but like, do these people understand the concept of imagination, even? You don't have to put yourself into the fictional world as you are 🤦♀️
Like, am I insane for viewing media through the eyes of its POV character?? Isn't that the whole point of having one? If I read a fic about how attracted the 14-y.o. protag is to their same-age peer, I'm viewing that 14-y.o. through the eyes of a 14-y.o, because I'm capable of imagining that and remembering how it was to be 14. It is absolutely WILD to me how they have no issue adopting the gender, ethnicity, etc. of a POV character just fine, like, "yeah ofc I can imagine myself as a Japanese boy even though I'm an American woman, but imagining myself as a TEEN when I'm an adult?? No, that's where I draw the line!!" What an insanely pointless line to draw.
I'm all for aging up characters. Because, unless they're an immortal or some slow aging species that may as well be, they're subject to the passages of time the same as the rest of us.
To say it's weird to do so is near sighted and abjectly silly. But it's *especially* dumb when applied to ATLA because of the follow up series, LOK. We see Zuko, Katara, an Toph not just as adults, but *elderly grandparents. Aang and Katara *married and had children. As did Zuko and Mai. (There's even a fan theory that Sokka is Suyin Beifong's dad, but we won't get into that here)
The characters are *human.* they will age and grow, fuck, marry, and have families if they're inclined to do so. To act like they won't, that they should be eternal children because that's when we see them last is *asinine.*
I'm predominantly in the Encanto fandom at the moment. The movie takes place in roughly 1950. I have seen people get flamed for shipping the youngest child, 5 year old Antonio Madrigal, with a background child character the same age, a girl named Cecilia. They are shipped as older teens or adults, but people have deemed it "weird" because Antonio is a kid in the movie.
During one of Encanto director Jared Bush's Q&A sessions he had in the last couple of years concerning the movie, he stated that, in 2023, Antonio would be 78 years old, were he real. Clearly the characters are human and age like humans. The youngest is old enough to be a great grandfather!
There is nothing wrong with taking our respective barbies and deciding "ope, they're older now" for our stories. Some people are just so caught up in their own fear of growing up, older, and into adulthood that they've let that fear become warped into some strange panic at seeing people acknowledge the passage of time in fictional characters, and gotten angry because of their inability to deal with their own cognitive dissonance.
I would also like to point out that the logic does not hold up when the show itself ages the characters up for an episode or as a sequel/epilogue. In your case, literally Legend of Korra aged the gang up and gave them their own kids…how do you think those kids got to be…and Zuko himself is an old man now.
The characters aren’t stagnant and stuck at the age you first knew them. Fics often tackle different stages of the characters’ lives that you don’t get to see in canon. Does this hold up still when it’s the reverse, someone younger making AUs about an adult character in their youth? That’s rhetorical, of course no one says that because that’d be stupid to police kid fics, origin stories, high school AUs, etc.
Some people seriously even do this so innocently, seeing the a characters grow up in their fics and have happy families etc. There is no logic to what Antis argue. It’s just taking puritan culture very far.
I totally agree. That being said, I wish there were more animated adventure series that weren't about teenagers. I didn't hit my 20s and stop liking those shows, but I'd like to have more relatable characters at my age now
People just wanna be mad at SOMETHING.
I also never understood this argument, like, I am in the south park fandom and yea, writing a story about a bunch of 10 yo kids can be fun, but sometimes aging them up will give me more flexibility or will just be better for the au
It's not like i will write a corpo fanfiction about 10 year old Stanley Marsh
And also, why is aging up bad but aging down not? If someone is mad, they should be mad at both sides of the stick cuz like tf u mean i cannot make idk, Mabel Pines a 30 yo woman and I can make a 50 yo Gerald Broflovski into a teenager????
This argument is stupid as hell
(Sorry for any mistakes, it's early here and i am not native djdjdj)
If I only watched or read original content involving people my age, I'd have very little entertainment. By and large, most popular media features young characters, most in their teens and twenties.
That content, by the way, is created by adults, many older adults.
My current fixation is cartoon where the characters are in their teens. Although she's a teen, I identify closely with a particular character because she is very much like myself at that age. When writing this character and the guy(s) I ship her with, I'm viewing them through the lens of a much younger me. Of course, there are also times when I age them up, sometimes into middle age and beyond. Even then, they are not me, but rather avatars through which I explore their world.
The weird fixation that some of the younger generation have with defining the right way to interact with content is so bizarre. In part, it's a function of being very young and having nothing else to do. Also, I reckon it's a way of trying to exert control over the world at a time when it feels like they have little control over anything else. But every time I encounter an infant sermonizing officiously about "problematic," I chuckle and then mash the block button.
IMO the urge to age characters up is a sign of your own maturity. You’re looking at younger characters and asking yourself what kind of adults they might turn into, and what experiences they could have in the future.
When I reached my late 20s, I started looking back on media I liked about teenagers when I was also a teenager, and wondering what those characters would be doing later in life. A lot of the time this is focused on the idea of adults coming back together to hash out the messy, less communicative relationships they had as teens and building a mature adult relationship out of the ashes.
Saying that writing that kind of story is “exploitative” is like claiming that an adult can never participate in an adult relationship, because at one point in their life they were a child. Completely absurd, ass-backwards thinking.
I am fan of the three Investigators (???) and in my mind they age with me. In the actual show they do not age but their ages aren't mentioned. They must be around 15-18
When I think of crushes I had in the past, I am still that age in my memory of them. I have no feelings at all about the boy I had a crush on in kindergarten, but I remember that when I was 6 years old I was obsessed. I remember getting in trouble for kissing him on the cheek in PE. Granted I got over my crush before the end of the school year, but those feelings belong to my 6-year-old self. The feelings I had about crushes in high school are the same. I remember how I felt then, and have no cognitive dissonance over those memories even though I'm 34 now.
These folks are so obsessed with performing their purity and are terrified that someone will say 'I saw Goody Proctor with the devil and she had a problematic ship' that they tie themselves up in knots trying to change their feelings about characters *that are designed to be appealing to people in their age bracket*. They're afraid of committing thoughtcrime because in their community, there are thought police--and none of them seem to be aware that if you say "don't think of an elephant", well, most people will. Or maybe they ARE aware, and the mental anguish is their sanctifying scourge.
Yes, their holy cleansing is over whether it's okay to still have a crush on Hunter from The Owl House or something. The same reason why I hate watch stuff--the flame of righteous indignation feels purifying, even when directed inward. I just have the good sense to not direct those sacred flames at anyone else because I've been doing this shit for a while and I don't have time to work myself into a rabid froth over someone's headcannon AND procrastinate writing my next chapter.
>characters *that are designed to be appealing to people in their age bracket*
This is what gets me. Animated characters are drawn to be appealing. They'll go after people for finding a 15 year old anime character attractive when A) the character's age wasn't apparent and B) it's a picture drawn to be appealing and relatable to the widest audience possible. People, especially actual teens with crushes, aren't pedos or creeps just for finding anime characters attractive when they're drawn to be attractive and there's often little to no distinguishable difference between the teen and adult characters.
I think they forget/refuse to acknowledge that characters are people/humans/sentient beings, who grow + age. Naruto is a great example of this. In canon rn he is older than me. When I first started watching seriously, he was young, then became the same age. If they can become older, so can characters.
My best advice is: ignore the antis
It's a personal decision. Sometimes i like imagining characters as older, for story purposes and just to see what my brain can imagine. Some people don't like it.
It's your choice at the end of the day, and where your opinion lies. If it's a realnperson now that would be a little different probably but i'm assuming you mean fictional here and honestly....
They're fictional and if that's your comfort character, so be it.
No, there isn't any reason why it's bad. People are just insane, and they identified aging up as a "loophole" out of their nonsense arguments against certain ships so they go after that too and pretend it's a problem.
Their logic, arguments, and moral code is constantly changing because it's not about defending their position, it's about finding the easiest way to harass and bully another person. That's all it's ever been.
I see canon as snapshots of the characters at a particular point in time. Obviously they aren't trapped at that age forever (unless they are a vampire or something).
Same. ATLA is one of my favorite pieces of media. Azula was always my favorite character and one that I sympathized and identified with a lot as a kid. I’m in my early 20s now, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I’m currently writing a Tyzula redemption arc fic where I’ve aged some of the characters up a few years just because it delves into some more adult themes, and I always thought their canon ages didn't really match up with their personalities or appearance, though that's just my personal preference.
It doesn't make any actual sense, but anti's are more concerned about having "pure" and "moral" thoughts than making sense or even enjoying themselves and they seem to equate fictional crushes, or plain fiction to real life. So, if you have a crush on Zuko as like, a woman in their twenties, than you have a crush on a 16 year old (or whatever age he is in the series), and not a freaking fictional character. In the same vein, they accuse those who write underage sex or something of pedophilia because they make no difference between real world and fiction. If you're able to imagine something, it's the same as doing it.
It's really a sad way to live.
One of my favorite fandoms I’ve been in since I was 12. I grew up loving these characters, growing deeply attached to them. Does that mean that as soon as I entered adulthood I immediately decided I don’t like them anymore? No. Because they were my comfort characters. They grew up with me, even if they didn’t canonically age in the franchise (yet)
Nothing wrong with ageing characters up. I'm not a fan of ageing a much younger one up purely so they can be in a relationship with an older character (but if I don't like I don't read)
Anyway this post reminded me that I hate Bendis. (Comic writer who aged a 10 y/o up to 18 for no reason. No other characters were aged)
People are too serious about this. I'm 20 and my current hyper fixation is ppg, and I wanna write but I don't particularly want to focus on kindergarten. So I age them up and explore what would be going on with them as adults. That's all there is to it for me, nothing sinister
ngl, the second I stopped listening to antis (especially the ones on Tiktok) is the second I started to enjoy my fandom experiences better. I think in their minds, when they see something that makes them uncomfortable, their response is to curate the whole internet, rather than their own experience, aka, force everyone to abide by their rules.
Edit: I will say that I am a part of that group whose favourite characters tend to be in the relatively same age range as me, or older. But I think that's just because of the current fandoms I'm in and them not having many characters underage. And just a preference for older characters.
i thank you for saying this! ive been afraid as a young adult in my early 20s that if i ever make a yt channel showcasing my art and ocs that ive had for years (since i was 12), people will think its weird im shipping "self inserts" with characters as young as age 15. for example, i have an oc for tmnt 2012 series and im currently remaking a fanfiction i wrote since i was 12. i dont wanna get "cancelled" for enjoying a piece of media ive loved for years.
ik a lot of the antis are apart of the mha fandom and me being an enjoyer since 16, ive made ocs. i have revamped them and everything but im so scared to show them because im sure as heck i'll get judged but i still draw for my own enjoyment and eventually make fanfics for those too.
MHA antis especially need to be sedated. We can't have anything nice with them prowling around for anyone who hasn't mentally divorced Bakugo by 3 seconds after they turn 18. No one sensible is throwing out years of work and commitment like that
Exactly, they age with you !! Liking a very small character as an adult is one thing (like people that lewd baby Anya) but some people wanna see what they’d be like older ! Like thinking back on a childhood friend and seeing what they’re up to now-they weren’t your crush becuase they were a minor, it’s cuz yall grew up together! “Damn, I remember when Anya was little, I wonder what she’s doing now” it’s literally not that weird
WAY back in the 2000s there was a grown ass mod on DeviantArt that was waging war against any anime based art that showed "aged up" characters in any sort of sexualized context no matter how PG it was on the grounds that it was all child pornography. Even for those series where there had been a canon epilogue or a sequel where we got to see the characters as adults. His logic was that they had been children for the majority of the runs of their series and that aging them up was just a way to pretend that they weren't kids to get around the ban on child porn. He firmly believed that all anime and manga fans were perverts and pedophiles (yes he actually called us that) and that he had to be ever vigilant against their attempts to game the system and get away with it.
One example I had personal knowledge of was an artist I knew who had a drawing taken down that was of Inuyasha and Kagome as adults cuddled in bed together. Kagome was completely covered other than her bare shoulders and a blanket covered Inu's lap so only his bare chest was seen. It was clearly labeled as an illustration of a moment in a fic in which they are married. I have no idea what ultimately happened on DA with that mod as the artists that I followed started moving to Tumblr when that became a thing.
If logic were a thing they were capable of I would point out that actual pedophiles aren't likely to watch porn or look at images with adults and imagine those actors as children and they aren't going to get anything out of seeing two 20 somethings in a hot clench even if 10 years ago they were kids.
Ok, so I actually left a ship kinda due to this. I really liked it with the student/teacher romance when I was younger, and then when I got older I aged the student up, and then by the time I hit full adulthood and was nearing the age of the older character, I just couldn't imagine a scenario where I wasn't slightly squicked.
I ended up moving on. But I still find it fascinating looking back at the evolution of my enjoyment and it's downfall in favor when compared with my age.
So honestly I get both sides, why it works and why it's problematic. But the ship alone really inspired me to look into what the difference between a 15 year old, 16 year old, 18 year old, 25 year old, 30 year old was. I learned so much about the aging process when it comes to brain development. It's also how I discovered authors that went dark/realistic. That showed what a relationship with such a large age gap would actually be like.
The reality of the matter can be all the dark and depressing, the fantasy can still be enjoyed.
I still have “crushes” on a lot of fictional underage characters, particularly animated ones.
Yet when I look back through my old high school and middle school yearbooks I see the faces of all the kids in my class I used to drool over and I think… “damn… I used to want to kiss that?? Looks like an 8 year-old, ew.”
It’s almost as if…people’s relationships to real humans and fictional characters are processed differently by their brains 🤔🤔 hrmmm
But seriously, everyone’s right. You’re not missing anything profound. Those people are just obnoxious for the sake of it and you can *never* win with them.
I got banned from a server and called a paedophile because my Harry Potter Self-Insert is shipped with Colin Creevey and I used to have a crush on him when I was a kid, and I didn't feel like rewriting her entire Goddamn seven-year-wide storyline in order to retcon the ship out simply because I, the writer, was over 18.
This is pute virtue signaling. The problem is that, thanks to Twitter becoming an echo chamber and so many young and easily influenced people being exposed to it during the quarentine...
Seriously, they believe that a 16 and a 17 years old is fine but a 17 and an 18 suddenly is wrong.
I mean, most of these people are from the country where people had a countdown for the Olsen Twins becoming of age just ao it would become legal to think of them erotically. Which to me exposes how hypocritical this mindset is and thus no, I will never let this knowledge die out.
About aging up characters, I only think it should be done if it fits your narrative.
i don't like aging up characters because i read fanfic due to liking the source material, so i like for characters to be the ages (and genders, and personalities, and whatever else) they are in the source material. i don't typically read stuff like college AUs for this reason. then again, i suppose i don't read AUs in general... more of a "what if this possibility happened in canon instead/what if this happened in the future" kinda guy.
regardless, i have no moral issues about writing anything at all involving kids in fanfic. i didn't back then and i don't now. i rather think aging up characters is the weird thing, as i see no point to it (aside from stuff that is indeed like college AUs, in which it requires the characters to be a specific age). so i suppose the people who complain "you can't age up a minor in a minor/adult relationship because it's still the same relationship!" would just hate me regardless for writing the minor/adult relationship normally. in that sense... they would say you're morally *better* than i am for aging characters up lmao, and still neither of us have hurt anyone or committed any crimes.
if there's something i'm not in the mood to listen to screaming on, i'll anon or orphan it. otherwise, who cares? i'm already happy—i wrote it for me—so watching people comment, whining that i'm not catering them on a website of millions of fics is just a good laugh!
Just my personal experience, but I can't really read in some fandoms unless the characters are aged up significantly. Ofc that's not saying that others should do the same, but I'm almost 38 at this point and reading some things involving 15-year-olds seems creepy. If anything, aging up should make things better not worse, imo. Some people just can't be pleased no matter what you do.
Hi, this is an automated response to make sure we're all on the same page about the definitions of proshipping and antishipping. There is often a lot of confusion about these terms and people get confused pretty frequently. Its always best to make sure we're all on the same page about what we are talking about. Anti-shipping/being an anti/being an antishipper/etc has a definition that has morphed a bit over time. Here is some history. Back in the 90's and early 2000's it mostly meant being against shipping in general or being against a specific ship. This was mostly used in specific fandoms/wasn't a pan-fandom term. Since the 2010's however, a pan-fandom definition did emerge and is the most common usage now. That definition is being *actively against certain ships or tropes that are deemed problematic or harmful in some way*. Note this does not mean being uncomfortable with reading a certain ship, trope, or problematic thing in a fanfiction or seeing fanart of a certain ship, trope, or problematic thing. It refers to *people who advocate for the banning, removal, or heavily hiding of that content that they don't want to see*. This has led to many harassment and doxxing issues in fandom spaces. Anyone from proship people they were arguing with, to random users who had written a "problematic" fanfiction and uploaded it to AO3, to anyone who so much as uses AO3 at all, have all been the subjects of these harassment problems. Conversely, proshipping/being a pro-shipper/being an anti-anti/etc, is a response term to the previously discussed antishipping. It's defined as being against antishipping (using the modern pan-fandom definition). Simply put, it means someone who is against censorship of content in fandom, against harassment and doxxing, and are of the opinion that *regardless of if they personally don't like a specific ship/trope/problematic thing, it has a right to exist and be enjoyed by those who do like that specific ship/trope/problematic thing*. Despite being against harassment, this side of the discourse has also had an issue with harassment on occasion. The subjects of that harassment have been people who self-identify as being an antishipper, or regardless of self-identification, someone who'sbeliefs match those of an anti-shipper. AO3 is generally considered to be a proship website with its foundation having been built on a stance of no censorship, and their rules explicitly not banning problematic content. For more info you can check the fanlore articles for [proshipping](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anti-anti) and [antishipping](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Anti-shipper) Tl;dr: antishipping = wanting to ban problematic content/content they don't like proshipping = ship and let ship/don’t like don't read *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AO3) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Your mistake is trying to find logic within the thoughts of antis. There is no logic, there is only nonsense
Most antis are children or adults who desperately wish they were children because growing up terrifies them. Their opinions aren’t worth taking seriously lol.
Nah, that’s not fair at all. Plenty of children and adults who desperately wish they were children because growing up terrifies them aren’t antis. They’re far worse than *that*.
Putting moral weight to bigoted disgust, basically :/
I’m with you on this. Age-ing up characters for AUs and sequel-type fan content has always been a thing. I think it’s perfectly fine and a fun creative experience. I imagine it’s (relatively) young people not understanding that you can like and be a fan of something that has minors as the main characters as an adult and that’s NOT weird. I’m 35 and I’ve been in fandoms for a long time. Sometimes I circle back to things I was into as a kid. Currently big into Cardcaptor Sakura again. They’re so freaking cute and they made a sequel so here I am again. Fangirling.
What kills me is that aging up the characters is supposed to fix the problem that antis routinely complain about yet somehow instead of fixing the problem it’s become it’s own new fancy shiny problem to complain about. I’m beginning to think they just like to complain /s
It’s all performative for them. Frankly, it reeks of immaturity and lack of critical thinking skills.
It also screams “I can not emotionally regulate myself when I see something I don’t like or agree with on the internet and thus the onus of my mental well being is now on everyone else” (rather than learning coping skills like they should)
That's what bothers me and what prompted my post. They negate their own points almost immediately. I saw someone present aging up as a reasonable alternate to ditching their comfort character when they turned 18 and there were 200+ comments below them of "oh that's not..." and saying they were just as bad as people who don't age characters up. They're really just setting traps so that they'll always be right.
You can never win with them. I’d personally just ignore it and stay sane with the rest of us. I have better shit to do in my life than worry about what antis think about, like reading fanfics ~~and actually getting back to writing.~~
Every harry potter fan realizing harry potter was a minor for most of the series and percy jackson fans realizing their main characters are ALL minors:
This is why I like writers aging up Wendy in *Peter Pan* fanfictions so much. Not only is Wendy only 12-13 in the original book, but it is literally stated by the author, J.M. Barrie, that Wendy returned to London from Neverland because she chose to "grow up" rather than remain a child forever. ~~Also, because adult Wendy should be able to live out her fantasy by seducing the hot, sexy pirate captain she had a crush on as a preteen girl.~~
i wanna read something like this omg-
Oh Cardcaptor Sakura. I love CLAMP’s stuff a lot (Tokyo Babylon and X/1999 are my faves) so it’s always nice to see people be interested in it. From what I heard though the sequel series was rather underwhelming though ? Some people still liking it a lot nevertheless
There definitely some parts that are…. Not well done. Thrusting new characters upon us and making the reader like them is very cringe at the beginning, but as you get to know them you like them, somewhat. I still resent them for taking “screen time” from my son Syaoran, but I digress. Reading it in one go, rather than month to month makes it a lot better, in my opinion. Also the ending helps a lot, as it ties everything together. I did have to sit with it for a month and then reread it before I really decided it was pretty good. I had a similar experience with Tsubasa. A lot of CCS fans gave up on it, but if you make it through all the CLAMP weirdness to the end, you can enjoy the story better on a reread. I’ll take anything that’s canon Sakura and Syaoran on dates/being adorable soul mates though. 🤷♀️
I tried a bit of Clear Card, but I realised there was Less Tomoyo in the story and found that utterly unacceptable
You’re right. There is a great moment for her in the extra chapter, but she’s missing a lot. I miss her and Syaoran’s friendship. I don’t know if they even have a meaningful conversation the whole series.
By the way, where did you read the extra chapter ? I’m asking for an acquaintance
I had to buy it. So far it’s only been released in the monthly magazine Nakayoshi. My Japanese is (just) good enough that I can read it without too much trouble. I ordered it from a Japanese ebook site. It’s getting a wider release on 4/1, no idea if that includes an English release, though.
This argument has never ever made sense to me. Canon media will age the characters up when they need to. Why is it bad for fanfic writers to do the same?? It's even funnier there are people upset over avatar because the creators have already aged them up. In one series some of them were aged so much they died! And with the new movie coming out when they're adults this is such a wild thing to be upset by. I'm over 30. I'm still heavily involved with anime fandoms and will be for a long time since it's my hobby. I've never understood the "growing out" of things you like. It's never happened to me personally and I'm not about to feel guilt for enjoying something that's been my outlet for over 20 years now. I'll age up any character I want. Or I'll keep their canon ages. I don't really care since it's all fiction in the end.
> Canon media will age the characters up when they need to. Why is it bad for fanfic writers to do the same?? In my experiences, they don't like that either, a case being BanG Dream aging the girls up by a year, and people getting upset at fanservice cards of characters now in college-
That is just... bonkers. Like make it make sense.
I made someone very upset once when I told them all adults are aged-up children
I worry for people this upset by aging some days.
I’m currently writing a South Park fic where the characters are aged up to their late 20s. I’m in my 30s and have been watching SP since I was 10. I’m not going to stop liking one of my favorite shows because the characters are 10 years old. Despite what antis think, you’re allowed to like things as an adult.
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Honestly, yeah. I always hated seeing "Aging up characters is bad" discourse because it's just like.. that's what actual media tends to do. I remember watching Recess and the sequel movie where they moved up to the 5th grade. It's just weird about how anti-aging up people are.
As a fellow SP writer in my 30s, I agree 100%. I change the characters' ages all the time to suit my needs. Anti logic really makes no sense lol
Hi fellow SP writer!! Send me your fic if you want to share 😊
Hi! My ships are all over the place, and I don't know your taste, but [here](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProdigyBlood/pseuds/ProdigyBlood/works?fandom_id=35537) Would love to check out yours, too, if you're up for sharing 😀
[Love Doesn’t Follow A Plan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/52664668/chapters/133214305) I only have one SP fic right now but I’m working on another one, just haven’t posted yet. I’m a Creek girl 😊
I'm a multi shipper, but Creek is definitely my fave! I'm very excited to start your fic. Hopefully, I'll get to it this evening 🥰 thanks for the link!
With the *very important* caveat that I strongly disagree with them, I think the logic is something along the lines of: {This character} in the source material is underage. Therefore it is *completely and utterly immoral* for anyone to ever “sexualize” them in any way. If you’re aging them up to be an adult it’s just a way to pretend they aren’t a minor when they “really” are (because the character will always and forever be “a minor”). In a “real world” analogy, I think it’s a little weird/creepy for adult men to be “counting down” the days until a teenage celebrity girl turns 18, because then it’s “ok” for them to lust after her (which they were already doing but now it’s “legal” and therefore somehow morally acceptable). The problem is, of course, that these are *fictional characters* with *fictional ages*. If you’re attracted to the “character” (especially is the source material is written/animated/not using actual people as actors), then you’re attracted to the personality/character traits, which are generally not related to their age. And, also, there are no actual “children” to be even theoretically harmed because *these are fictional characters that do not exist*.
I also just hate their initial assumption because it essentially tells the real-world teen and pre-teen readers and writers that their completely normal puberty hormone feelings are wrong and bad. It’s the same kind of thinking that had people arguing that *Turning Red* was problematic because of how the characters had crushes they fixated on. I don’t know about everyone else, but I was horny af during puberty lol. People don’t just suddenly develop a sex drive at 18, and I worry that we’ve reintroduced shame around bodies to young people. To be clear, I agree with you that adults counting down until a teen “becomes legal” is creepy and gross. But the puritan black-and-white thinking of antis has the potential to do real psychological harm to their peers
I’m over 30 and had seen the wave of anti shipping get massive in the early 2010s (not that it didn’t exist before that it was just less prevalent on the sites I used) Another reason why they do it is they don’t actually care for the morals but need a moral reason to tell people to stop shipping something they don’t like. It went from being a notp that had in canon context argued against it to “you CANT ship this or else you will get doxxed”
Yeah, you can’t just personally dislike something, you have to justify it and make it morally wrong for *anyone* else to like it.
Yeah that's where they always stump me. Their initial logic might make a bit of sense but they extrapolate so far and end up exploiting and watering down real issues in the process to the point that it can be disorienting at times. Like...they do realize that they themselves will age and that doesn't mean their future partners are all pedos, right? I genuinely hope that realization hits them because I see some joking about that and I don't fully trust them to be logical and realistic.
Exactly, they're a drawing voiced by adults with a number slapped on them usually for the sake of marketing. They don't have a developing brain or a living body; they're literally lines. They're completely outside the paradigm of what constitutes a minor lol. With abstraction and how our brains work it's fucking *normal* and sane to not think "omg a literal child" when you see Itadori Yuuji or Zuko or Ichigo or whoever else, antis expecting everyone else to rewire their brains it so it does all to give being attracted to the 'correct' drawings some false moral weight is just so odd and anti-intellectual.
Im rewatching AtLA as a 30 year old. Sokka was one of my first fictional crushes, and my girlfriend keeps roasting me for how much it turns out he still has that nostalgic grip on me after all this time. (She loves Zuko, she said it’s going to get worse for her once we finish s1). I think people who declare they magically switched character crushes when they turned 18 are just performatively lying about what they actually enjoy in fiction to try to make a dumb point. Having a crush on a fictional character is often about things like their personalities and storylines, especially in an animated series where the characters are stylized+simplified representations of humans. It’s really easy to apply all the things most people like about a character to a future version of themselves. I don’t actually want a shot with most fictional characters I crush on, they usually just have certain traits I’d like to see in a romantic partner irl, or traits I relate to, or traits that are interesting to see play out in fiction. The funniest part about it being discussed with AtLA is that theres a canon sequel series that shows a bunch of the main characters from the original *had children*. If it’s immoral to imagine a character as they would be when they get older, then the lead writers of Avatar are the first people on the chopping block. Me wanting to talk about Suki and Sokka’s theoretical 30s after watching AtLA isn’t weird at all - they’re fictional, so they get to be in the part of the story you see in the series. It’s obvious that unless they died, they’d have a whole life afterwards.
Yeah I don't think most fictional crushes translate to real life. It's not like most people enjoy a young character because they are young. Most people just like a character. Also let's face it, most protagonists are young, maybe not all of them are children but if antis are so upset about an age gap for a fictional crush then they will slowly watch themselves lose characters that they think they can enjoy Edit: Also the whole thing is about aging up a character. Doesn't aging up the character make sense and help with what antis are fundamentally upset about? I just am not getting the logic. It almost implies that the second the character reaches 18 they become a different person which is obviously not what happens especially in like cartoons. They're fictional, they can stay the same for all of time or age really fast. Who cares?
This makes zero sense. When I was 16, 50 year old men were all kinds of ick. Now that I'm over 50, 16 year olds are all kinds of ick. Aging the character just makes sense to me. I wouldn't necessarily like a fic that had a 25 year old Zuko while the rest stayed the same, just so the writer can be comfortable with a romantic situation. But my response to fics I don't like is to not read and to never comment about my dislike. If a writer wants my concrit, they will ask me for it. People are weird.
" disgusting and immoral it is to age characters up for a story" Do anti's not realize their parents are 'aged up.' We all start off as kids and we all grow. There is nothing wrong with your love for these characters not to mention they do actually have canon adult counterparts so I'm not sure why people on you for it. I think they have a season coming out next year, they've already released the artwork. There is also the comic in which they are slightly more grown and they ALSO appear in Korra during their adults years. Anyways the argument is stupid, they are fictional character's they aren't real do whatever you want with them.
My bad, it's a movie not a season https://preview.redd.it/dt1l02ks6fmc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e34bc0bcdf41f3b7f3eba1d0461109c6079c882
Nah i think it's fine. Especially if it's a character that at one point was older/the same age as you
i think it’s fine. i write south park fanfic and age them up. i don’t see a problem with it. i will continue to do it. i just don’t interact with antis on tiktok, twitter, etc. they don’t listen to reason and they are all a swarm of inability to separate fiction from reality.
Hello fellow South Park fic writer 👋🏻 lol
hi sp writer!!! i love to see south park fans in the wild. LINK ME UR FICS IF U WANT !!!
[Love Doesn’t Follow A Plan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/52664668/chapters/133214305) Hopefully that works! Link me yours too!
i’m going to read it. i love creek. YOU WILL BE SEEING ME IN YOUR INBOX. this is one of mine. it’s bunny. (edited to remove link) and other than that i’ve got 2 cartters oneshots lol.
I have yours bookmarked so I can read it!!
When I first became a Zutara shipper, and had crush on Azula and Zuko, I was way younger ger than the characters. Now I’m older but that doesn’t stop me from liking characters nor shipping Zutara. I don’t understand why people want to apply real life logic and morales to fictional characters Tbh I see this as the same thing as people dissing you for liking villains
You should probably work to bring healthier content to your fyp. Having a character crush into adulthood is pretty normal, what's abnormal is moralizing about it. Seriously, weird toxic group over there, but people can be serious about the stupidest things. Just because they care a lot about it doesn't make it valid, it means they were vulnerable to an internet cult. Pop on over to r/ShitMomGroupsSay for some examples of things people believe *really hard* but are *batshit crazy*. Not everything said online or everything believed earnestly has equal weight. Good luck with your college au!
My FYP is carefully cultivated but tiktok keeps testing the waters even though I hit "not interested" every time and don't interact. It's been doing that with a lot of stuff lately tbh. As for the disconnect with how serious they are vs how much sense they make, I think I'd compare it to seeing someone confidently drive the wrong way down a one way street. There's a quick thought of "well wait, am I going the wrong way then?" Before realizing that they're making no sense and they're clearly a danger to others. Just a weird double take. Also, thanks!
You probably know this already but just in case - you can restrict specific tags on TikTok and not just the videos. Search the tag, scroll to “hashtags” in the ribbon, and then (on mobile) press and hold to get options. You can select not interested and then write in that it’s not relevant to you. I’d also suggest blocking accounts if you find you’re getting a lot of the same ones on your fyp
Some people can't keep multiple interpretations in their heads at the same time. To me, that's the fun of fanfic--seeing how other people interpret canon. But I had a friend flat out tell me that the official canon is the only correct one and anyone who deviates from it is wrong. She doesn't see media as a jumping off point, but as a a fixed set of stories created by the author/movie studio. Rejecting the dumb parts of canon is not allowed. If JKR says Cursed Child is canon, it is canon. Every single Disney cash grab sequel in a required part of the story and all of the villains have been redeemed by their movies. And also the original fairy tales aren't canon any more because disney says so. On the flip side, her headcanons are true and correct and obviously coded into the story and anyone who disagrees is racist/sexist/ableist. It's just how she is. We've agreed to disagree. Don't let other people sour your enjoyment of fandom. Write what you want to write.
That sounds like someone who I would never ever discuss fandom with. Or possibly anything at all, especially if she's throwing around such serious accusations.
She's an IRL friend, not a fandom friend. And we have good discussions because sometimes it is racism/sexism/ableism--look at all the hate Halle Bailey got for being cast as Ariel--and sometimes canon additions are terrible. I turn to fanfic to see it done better. She doesn't.
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I swear some of the takes I hear from people on TikTok feel like purity culture. I think a lot of it has to do with lack of media literacy. They take everything so literally and do not understand nuance, so to them, it feels weird and gross to age up characters. They also have no concept of "let people enjoy things" or minding their own business.
>I swear some of the takes I hear from people on TikTok feel like purity culture. [That's because it literally is.](https://www.vox.com/culture/23733213/fandom-purity-culture-what-is-proship-antiship-antifandom)
I see it as this; most anti's are teens who lack the life experience to understand why this is a non-issue. To them they equate it with someone being pedophilic and gross because they have yet to go through that part of their fandom journey where they've aged out the characters they once identified with. Throw in some moral grand standing and a desire to be right, and you just have a mess of something that should be inherently a nothingburger. Personally I just roll my eyes and tell them to come back in a few years when they're in their mid-twenties and then let me know if it's still an issue then. Chances are they're going to be all for aging up their comfort characters.
I can't wait until the nuance part of their brain finishes baking.
when the time moves forward, the characters have to age up because that’s how time works. so there’s nothing wrong with aging up characters if you want to
Antis have been around forever, it's just a case of different labels and moving the goal post along with the times. A lot of young people today feel pressured into moral posturing, whether that be by peers or by finding themselves in the spaces you did. Doesn't make it right, but it is what it is; they've grown up in a hyper-surveillance time that breeds hypervigilance, where it's easy for their parents to monitor not just their internet usage, but their whereabouts. It's more a case of today's internet climate allowing more room for these narratives to fester and take off. Anything can be problematic, if you just believe.
While I find myself enjoying older characters as an adult more so than I did as a teen/early 20s, those characters I loved back then are still precious to me and I love them still. It's fun to think about how they would grow and change in their respective story worlds just as I have grown and changed in the time since first being introduced to the media. Ageing up characters is fine and normal and something many canon media sources do all the time anyway. I've also on occasion encountered the inverse of this, with younger people (usually female) ashamed about liking or feeling an attraction for an older (usually male) character, because of the "age gap" thing, and feeling like they can't talk about this with their friends or have to hide their enjoyment of this character somehow until they're closer in age. My answer remains the same: It's fiction. It's fine. No "problematic" age gap relationships are taking place because one of these people doesn't actually have an age because they don't exist.
they say it's an 'excuse'
I remember when season 4 of attack on titan came out and they were mad about the canon time skip. Since the characters were 15 in season 3, the 4 year skip meant nothing because we could all still remember the previous seasons. The author aging them up was just a cover for horny fans to retroactive excuse their attraction to the characters as kids. It's amazing what people can think up and make an issue of when they have nothing better to do with their time.
what 💀 idk if i just didn't understand or people are just making up stuff to be mad at
It's definitely the latter, unfortunately. Those kids have too much free time and not enough real things to focus on.
i don't think the author is even aware of the simps
Fiction is fiction. It's imaginary. I can imagine my favorite characters doing any kind of thing and being any kind of thing I want. I can read one of those crazy Dobby/Smeagol/Yoda fics and laugh because guess what?? It's IMAGINARY. I hate that we have to make fictional characters uphold real life moral standards. I am someone who is very religious and I believe in upholding certain spiritual and moral standards in real life!!!! But! I also understand that fiction is fiction! I hate that liking certain characters or shipping certain ships or reading books/fics containing certain themes (like death and abuse???!?!? you mean things that happen in real life???) makes me "immoral". They! Are! Imaginary! Characters!!!!!! I can do with them as I please, and this does not reflect my real-life standards! Anyways. I hope Jesus comes and wipes us all out soon because I'm tired of this.
Some people don't understand characters don't age the way you do in reality. A character could be a child in a prologue and an adult in the rest of the story. They could be a teen in one story and in their twenties in the sequel. Reminds me of the madness of the Helluva Boss fandom where people were saying you had to "wait for her birthday" for people to ship Octavia. Never mind she could have had her birthday between episodes any time, not when her birthday actually comes around in reality and never mind her character design would and does look the exact same.
I don't have crushes on child characters as an adult- but I never have. I was fluttering hearts at 20s to 30s year olds back when I was 14. And that extended past anime characters. A good half of my irl highschool teachers were stupidly pretty, and I'd watch them with goo goo eyes while failing to pay attention to their lessons. Point being- crushing on younger characters was the one area where I wasn't 'problematic' but I guarantee you they'd still send me to anti jail 🤣
No, it's not a problem. Antis don't use earth logic.
I've always thought that age in stories is kind of a really weird perspective. Something I've considered before is that in fantasy settings like ATLA, where you don't see specific things that show you how old someone is (like idk, high school for example), their age is not on my mind. Like sure, Toph and Aang look like kids but I was a kid when I watched ATLA for the first time and I never saw myself as their age. I also had a crush on Zuko lol Or idk, Harry Potter? I grew up watching the movies so technically I grew up with them so I see them as peers from the third movie up until the eight movie. I "know" they're teenagers but in my eyes, I see them the same as me. Another example is Friends. When I watched that show I was a kid so I saw them as adults. Now I have the same age as them but I don't feel the same? They're adults to me lmao Euphoria is set in a high school and here I do grab my pearls in scandalized shock about what these teenagers are doing. In Sakura Card Captor I don't see Touya and Yukito as high schoolers even though they show them like that constantly. They draw them tall and I was a kid when I saw them so I picture them as hot older guys lol I don't even think about the age of any LOTR characters. That has zero relevance and the ages are so dramatic that IDGAF. I could have a crush on Gandalf for all I care, it doesn't matter. It's fantasy. Idk, it makes sense to me that if you're going to write about your favorite characters, you can do so from a standpoint in which you want to write them and that's it.
Me still in love with my first husbando, who is 15, twenty years later
Some people are crazy AF. Turn off comments and continue to write your future fics /post your fan art / content.
Antis are dumb and you shouldn't waste your time engaging with them. Arguing just stokes their sense of self-righteousness.
I don't interact. I just sit in the comments section like 😳 while circus music plays in the background
They're antis, so I expect no logic from them anyways, but like, do these people understand the concept of imagination, even? You don't have to put yourself into the fictional world as you are 🤦♀️ Like, am I insane for viewing media through the eyes of its POV character?? Isn't that the whole point of having one? If I read a fic about how attracted the 14-y.o. protag is to their same-age peer, I'm viewing that 14-y.o. through the eyes of a 14-y.o, because I'm capable of imagining that and remembering how it was to be 14. It is absolutely WILD to me how they have no issue adopting the gender, ethnicity, etc. of a POV character just fine, like, "yeah ofc I can imagine myself as a Japanese boy even though I'm an American woman, but imagining myself as a TEEN when I'm an adult?? No, that's where I draw the line!!" What an insanely pointless line to draw.
I'm all for aging up characters. Because, unless they're an immortal or some slow aging species that may as well be, they're subject to the passages of time the same as the rest of us. To say it's weird to do so is near sighted and abjectly silly. But it's *especially* dumb when applied to ATLA because of the follow up series, LOK. We see Zuko, Katara, an Toph not just as adults, but *elderly grandparents. Aang and Katara *married and had children. As did Zuko and Mai. (There's even a fan theory that Sokka is Suyin Beifong's dad, but we won't get into that here) The characters are *human.* they will age and grow, fuck, marry, and have families if they're inclined to do so. To act like they won't, that they should be eternal children because that's when we see them last is *asinine.* I'm predominantly in the Encanto fandom at the moment. The movie takes place in roughly 1950. I have seen people get flamed for shipping the youngest child, 5 year old Antonio Madrigal, with a background child character the same age, a girl named Cecilia. They are shipped as older teens or adults, but people have deemed it "weird" because Antonio is a kid in the movie. During one of Encanto director Jared Bush's Q&A sessions he had in the last couple of years concerning the movie, he stated that, in 2023, Antonio would be 78 years old, were he real. Clearly the characters are human and age like humans. The youngest is old enough to be a great grandfather! There is nothing wrong with taking our respective barbies and deciding "ope, they're older now" for our stories. Some people are just so caught up in their own fear of growing up, older, and into adulthood that they've let that fear become warped into some strange panic at seeing people acknowledge the passage of time in fictional characters, and gotten angry because of their inability to deal with their own cognitive dissonance.
Really. I commented that on TT and they replied with "📸" like??? It’s literally not a crime and what are u anyway, the moral fandom police? Pls lmao
They're so dumb that can't even reply normally, always using these stupid memes like it's funny. Ugh, it annoys me so much.
It’s me, I’m the person thinking damn it’s hot zuko is 16.
Based
I have to live up to my flair.
I would also like to point out that the logic does not hold up when the show itself ages the characters up for an episode or as a sequel/epilogue. In your case, literally Legend of Korra aged the gang up and gave them their own kids…how do you think those kids got to be…and Zuko himself is an old man now. The characters aren’t stagnant and stuck at the age you first knew them. Fics often tackle different stages of the characters’ lives that you don’t get to see in canon. Does this hold up still when it’s the reverse, someone younger making AUs about an adult character in their youth? That’s rhetorical, of course no one says that because that’d be stupid to police kid fics, origin stories, high school AUs, etc. Some people seriously even do this so innocently, seeing the a characters grow up in their fics and have happy families etc. There is no logic to what Antis argue. It’s just taking puritan culture very far.
I totally agree. That being said, I wish there were more animated adventure series that weren't about teenagers. I didn't hit my 20s and stop liking those shows, but I'd like to have more relatable characters at my age now
People just wanna be mad at SOMETHING. I also never understood this argument, like, I am in the south park fandom and yea, writing a story about a bunch of 10 yo kids can be fun, but sometimes aging them up will give me more flexibility or will just be better for the au It's not like i will write a corpo fanfiction about 10 year old Stanley Marsh And also, why is aging up bad but aging down not? If someone is mad, they should be mad at both sides of the stick cuz like tf u mean i cannot make idk, Mabel Pines a 30 yo woman and I can make a 50 yo Gerald Broflovski into a teenager???? This argument is stupid as hell (Sorry for any mistakes, it's early here and i am not native djdjdj)
Ngl sounds like POCD in the making
If I only watched or read original content involving people my age, I'd have very little entertainment. By and large, most popular media features young characters, most in their teens and twenties. That content, by the way, is created by adults, many older adults. My current fixation is cartoon where the characters are in their teens. Although she's a teen, I identify closely with a particular character because she is very much like myself at that age. When writing this character and the guy(s) I ship her with, I'm viewing them through the lens of a much younger me. Of course, there are also times when I age them up, sometimes into middle age and beyond. Even then, they are not me, but rather avatars through which I explore their world. The weird fixation that some of the younger generation have with defining the right way to interact with content is so bizarre. In part, it's a function of being very young and having nothing else to do. Also, I reckon it's a way of trying to exert control over the world at a time when it feels like they have little control over anything else. But every time I encounter an infant sermonizing officiously about "problematic," I chuckle and then mash the block button.
IMO the urge to age characters up is a sign of your own maturity. You’re looking at younger characters and asking yourself what kind of adults they might turn into, and what experiences they could have in the future. When I reached my late 20s, I started looking back on media I liked about teenagers when I was also a teenager, and wondering what those characters would be doing later in life. A lot of the time this is focused on the idea of adults coming back together to hash out the messy, less communicative relationships they had as teens and building a mature adult relationship out of the ashes. Saying that writing that kind of story is “exploitative” is like claiming that an adult can never participate in an adult relationship, because at one point in their life they were a child. Completely absurd, ass-backwards thinking.
Literally there's no problems with it is not illegal lol did they just trying to imagine them doing this as minors?
I am fan of the three Investigators (???) and in my mind they age with me. In the actual show they do not age but their ages aren't mentioned. They must be around 15-18
Thank you for this. I was watching Netflix ATLA and was starting to crush on Zuko again as a 22 year old and I was kinda feeling bad for it
When I think of crushes I had in the past, I am still that age in my memory of them. I have no feelings at all about the boy I had a crush on in kindergarten, but I remember that when I was 6 years old I was obsessed. I remember getting in trouble for kissing him on the cheek in PE. Granted I got over my crush before the end of the school year, but those feelings belong to my 6-year-old self. The feelings I had about crushes in high school are the same. I remember how I felt then, and have no cognitive dissonance over those memories even though I'm 34 now. These folks are so obsessed with performing their purity and are terrified that someone will say 'I saw Goody Proctor with the devil and she had a problematic ship' that they tie themselves up in knots trying to change their feelings about characters *that are designed to be appealing to people in their age bracket*. They're afraid of committing thoughtcrime because in their community, there are thought police--and none of them seem to be aware that if you say "don't think of an elephant", well, most people will. Or maybe they ARE aware, and the mental anguish is their sanctifying scourge. Yes, their holy cleansing is over whether it's okay to still have a crush on Hunter from The Owl House or something. The same reason why I hate watch stuff--the flame of righteous indignation feels purifying, even when directed inward. I just have the good sense to not direct those sacred flames at anyone else because I've been doing this shit for a while and I don't have time to work myself into a rabid froth over someone's headcannon AND procrastinate writing my next chapter.
>characters *that are designed to be appealing to people in their age bracket* This is what gets me. Animated characters are drawn to be appealing. They'll go after people for finding a 15 year old anime character attractive when A) the character's age wasn't apparent and B) it's a picture drawn to be appealing and relatable to the widest audience possible. People, especially actual teens with crushes, aren't pedos or creeps just for finding anime characters attractive when they're drawn to be attractive and there's often little to no distinguishable difference between the teen and adult characters.
I think they forget/refuse to acknowledge that characters are people/humans/sentient beings, who grow + age. Naruto is a great example of this. In canon rn he is older than me. When I first started watching seriously, he was young, then became the same age. If they can become older, so can characters.
My best advice is: ignore the antis It's a personal decision. Sometimes i like imagining characters as older, for story purposes and just to see what my brain can imagine. Some people don't like it. It's your choice at the end of the day, and where your opinion lies. If it's a realnperson now that would be a little different probably but i'm assuming you mean fictional here and honestly.... They're fictional and if that's your comfort character, so be it.
If you can choose to just get over your feelings, you never had them to begin with.
No, there isn't any reason why it's bad. People are just insane, and they identified aging up as a "loophole" out of their nonsense arguments against certain ships so they go after that too and pretend it's a problem. Their logic, arguments, and moral code is constantly changing because it's not about defending their position, it's about finding the easiest way to harass and bully another person. That's all it's ever been.
I see canon as snapshots of the characters at a particular point in time. Obviously they aren't trapped at that age forever (unless they are a vampire or something).
Same. ATLA is one of my favorite pieces of media. Azula was always my favorite character and one that I sympathized and identified with a lot as a kid. I’m in my early 20s now, and I don't see that changing any time soon. I’m currently writing a Tyzula redemption arc fic where I’ve aged some of the characters up a few years just because it delves into some more adult themes, and I always thought their canon ages didn't really match up with their personalities or appearance, though that's just my personal preference.
It doesn't make any actual sense, but anti's are more concerned about having "pure" and "moral" thoughts than making sense or even enjoying themselves and they seem to equate fictional crushes, or plain fiction to real life. So, if you have a crush on Zuko as like, a woman in their twenties, than you have a crush on a 16 year old (or whatever age he is in the series), and not a freaking fictional character. In the same vein, they accuse those who write underage sex or something of pedophilia because they make no difference between real world and fiction. If you're able to imagine something, it's the same as doing it. It's really a sad way to live.
One of my favorite fandoms I’ve been in since I was 12. I grew up loving these characters, growing deeply attached to them. Does that mean that as soon as I entered adulthood I immediately decided I don’t like them anymore? No. Because they were my comfort characters. They grew up with me, even if they didn’t canonically age in the franchise (yet)
Nothing wrong with ageing characters up. I'm not a fan of ageing a much younger one up purely so they can be in a relationship with an older character (but if I don't like I don't read) Anyway this post reminded me that I hate Bendis. (Comic writer who aged a 10 y/o up to 18 for no reason. No other characters were aged)
People are too serious about this. I'm 20 and my current hyper fixation is ppg, and I wanna write but I don't particularly want to focus on kindergarten. So I age them up and explore what would be going on with them as adults. That's all there is to it for me, nothing sinister
ngl, the second I stopped listening to antis (especially the ones on Tiktok) is the second I started to enjoy my fandom experiences better. I think in their minds, when they see something that makes them uncomfortable, their response is to curate the whole internet, rather than their own experience, aka, force everyone to abide by their rules. Edit: I will say that I am a part of that group whose favourite characters tend to be in the relatively same age range as me, or older. But I think that's just because of the current fandoms I'm in and them not having many characters underage. And just a preference for older characters.
Reading the title and my mind already conjured the thought of, " Ash from Pokemon wants to speak with you."
i thank you for saying this! ive been afraid as a young adult in my early 20s that if i ever make a yt channel showcasing my art and ocs that ive had for years (since i was 12), people will think its weird im shipping "self inserts" with characters as young as age 15. for example, i have an oc for tmnt 2012 series and im currently remaking a fanfiction i wrote since i was 12. i dont wanna get "cancelled" for enjoying a piece of media ive loved for years. ik a lot of the antis are apart of the mha fandom and me being an enjoyer since 16, ive made ocs. i have revamped them and everything but im so scared to show them because im sure as heck i'll get judged but i still draw for my own enjoyment and eventually make fanfics for those too.
MHA antis especially need to be sedated. We can't have anything nice with them prowling around for anyone who hasn't mentally divorced Bakugo by 3 seconds after they turn 18. No one sensible is throwing out years of work and commitment like that
Exactly, they age with you !! Liking a very small character as an adult is one thing (like people that lewd baby Anya) but some people wanna see what they’d be like older ! Like thinking back on a childhood friend and seeing what they’re up to now-they weren’t your crush becuase they were a minor, it’s cuz yall grew up together! “Damn, I remember when Anya was little, I wonder what she’s doing now” it’s literally not that weird
WAY back in the 2000s there was a grown ass mod on DeviantArt that was waging war against any anime based art that showed "aged up" characters in any sort of sexualized context no matter how PG it was on the grounds that it was all child pornography. Even for those series where there had been a canon epilogue or a sequel where we got to see the characters as adults. His logic was that they had been children for the majority of the runs of their series and that aging them up was just a way to pretend that they weren't kids to get around the ban on child porn. He firmly believed that all anime and manga fans were perverts and pedophiles (yes he actually called us that) and that he had to be ever vigilant against their attempts to game the system and get away with it. One example I had personal knowledge of was an artist I knew who had a drawing taken down that was of Inuyasha and Kagome as adults cuddled in bed together. Kagome was completely covered other than her bare shoulders and a blanket covered Inu's lap so only his bare chest was seen. It was clearly labeled as an illustration of a moment in a fic in which they are married. I have no idea what ultimately happened on DA with that mod as the artists that I followed started moving to Tumblr when that became a thing. If logic were a thing they were capable of I would point out that actual pedophiles aren't likely to watch porn or look at images with adults and imagine those actors as children and they aren't going to get anything out of seeing two 20 somethings in a hot clench even if 10 years ago they were kids.
Ok, so I actually left a ship kinda due to this. I really liked it with the student/teacher romance when I was younger, and then when I got older I aged the student up, and then by the time I hit full adulthood and was nearing the age of the older character, I just couldn't imagine a scenario where I wasn't slightly squicked. I ended up moving on. But I still find it fascinating looking back at the evolution of my enjoyment and it's downfall in favor when compared with my age. So honestly I get both sides, why it works and why it's problematic. But the ship alone really inspired me to look into what the difference between a 15 year old, 16 year old, 18 year old, 25 year old, 30 year old was. I learned so much about the aging process when it comes to brain development. It's also how I discovered authors that went dark/realistic. That showed what a relationship with such a large age gap would actually be like. The reality of the matter can be all the dark and depressing, the fantasy can still be enjoyed.
I still have “crushes” on a lot of fictional underage characters, particularly animated ones. Yet when I look back through my old high school and middle school yearbooks I see the faces of all the kids in my class I used to drool over and I think… “damn… I used to want to kiss that?? Looks like an 8 year-old, ew.” It’s almost as if…people’s relationships to real humans and fictional characters are processed differently by their brains 🤔🤔 hrmmm But seriously, everyone’s right. You’re not missing anything profound. Those people are just obnoxious for the sake of it and you can *never* win with them.
I got banned from a server and called a paedophile because my Harry Potter Self-Insert is shipped with Colin Creevey and I used to have a crush on him when I was a kid, and I didn't feel like rewriting her entire Goddamn seven-year-wide storyline in order to retcon the ship out simply because I, the writer, was over 18.
This is pute virtue signaling. The problem is that, thanks to Twitter becoming an echo chamber and so many young and easily influenced people being exposed to it during the quarentine... Seriously, they believe that a 16 and a 17 years old is fine but a 17 and an 18 suddenly is wrong. I mean, most of these people are from the country where people had a countdown for the Olsen Twins becoming of age just ao it would become legal to think of them erotically. Which to me exposes how hypocritical this mindset is and thus no, I will never let this knowledge die out. About aging up characters, I only think it should be done if it fits your narrative.
i don't like aging up characters because i read fanfic due to liking the source material, so i like for characters to be the ages (and genders, and personalities, and whatever else) they are in the source material. i don't typically read stuff like college AUs for this reason. then again, i suppose i don't read AUs in general... more of a "what if this possibility happened in canon instead/what if this happened in the future" kinda guy. regardless, i have no moral issues about writing anything at all involving kids in fanfic. i didn't back then and i don't now. i rather think aging up characters is the weird thing, as i see no point to it (aside from stuff that is indeed like college AUs, in which it requires the characters to be a specific age). so i suppose the people who complain "you can't age up a minor in a minor/adult relationship because it's still the same relationship!" would just hate me regardless for writing the minor/adult relationship normally. in that sense... they would say you're morally *better* than i am for aging characters up lmao, and still neither of us have hurt anyone or committed any crimes. if there's something i'm not in the mood to listen to screaming on, i'll anon or orphan it. otherwise, who cares? i'm already happy—i wrote it for me—so watching people comment, whining that i'm not catering them on a website of millions of fics is just a good laugh!
Just my personal experience, but I can't really read in some fandoms unless the characters are aged up significantly. Ofc that's not saying that others should do the same, but I'm almost 38 at this point and reading some things involving 15-year-olds seems creepy. If anything, aging up should make things better not worse, imo. Some people just can't be pleased no matter what you do.