fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6118 ]

07. [WARNING for discussion of underage ships/etc]
https://i.imgur.com/9tu29Nq.png

I mean. Obviously??????????

I get what you're saying here, but this reaction always pisses me off. It's good to question "common sense", to be able to put what you take for granted as true into words and argue for it. To consider WHY you believe what you believe - refusing to do that is how we get "casual bigotry" and conspiracies and ignorance. I get that not everyone finds it fun, that it can feel like a drag, but rolling your eyes at the people who engage in it is so anti-intellectual. Are you gonna roll your eyes at Socrates??

Philosophy isn't useless just because it bores you, lol. You personally don't have to engage in it, but a lot of the stuff you take for granted is considered common knowledge BECAUSE of the work of philosophers who examined and interrogated and argued for it.

OP - it's a super legit point and you put it into super cool words, nice job :)

I think this is the majority opinion of everyone not an anti-shipper.

srsly. I have written explicit fic including teenagers doing things with each other that I did when I was their age. This is normal actually?

I don't think anyone reads a crime novel and thinks the author wants to kill people so this way of thinking about "problematic" sex/romance is just extra weird.

I mean I can think of several authors who did horrible shit up to and including stuff that got some convicted, ditto directors, actors, visual artists etc, but I don't think "tackles problematic subject matter" automatically = "monster."

There's plenty of creeps who've never created a work of art in their lives and still hurt and killed people. Some people do serious harm to other people, and the harm they do doesn't necessarily correlate with their day job or hobbies or whatever.

Sure, but there's many more authors who write horrific shit that are perfectly nice human beings. And authors who write "nice" stuff who are horrible. There's rarely a correlation, and when there is it's often because they were perfectly open about being horrible people and got encouraged by their fans who think they're cool and edge (see: Russell Brand).

Absolutely. Every adult used to be a teen, and remembers what it feels like to be a teen. It's wild that some people in fandom treat it as "suspicious" that sometimes adults want to write about teens having sex or being in relationships. Like ??? Okay, sure, an adult COULD use that to groom people, but for the vast majority of people in fandom who aren't predators, it's just about writing interesting stories about interesting characters, and that's the normal case. Having sex is a part of human experience, and how a character experiences sex is part of exploring their characterization.

I hope you find a way to feel less guilty about it. People who think adults writing underage is suspicious just don't understand how fiction, teenagers, or sexuality work, and I want to spend as little of my life worrying about them as possible.

Thanks. I guess I was worried I come off too defensive but I've known some people both online and irl who sometimes had these opinions and I always felt extremely unsafe around them bc they often shared a belief that a lot of things are justifiable if they decide the target is horrible or deserves it enough .
Those friendships also left me with destructive toxic feelings about myself sometimes for years after and I fell into old self harm habits and briefly cut myself off from old friends because I feared them hating me.

I've gotten better now but looking back it just started with them having reasonable enough sounding takes at first and slowly growing into something toxic. I'm still recovering from some things but ...well . That's why this gets to me

I definitely know these feelings. I also feel extremely unsafe around people like this. I guess it makes sense if someone thinks they can tell who is a literal pedophile and predator based solely on the fiction they write and not how they treat actual real people, it's not surprising those people go from nice to nasty in one second flat... No wonder I really don't feel safe around those people!

And yep, having been branded as one of the "bad people" in a fandom of antis and getting people warning other people off of me has made me feel like I'm toxic and no one should be friends with me lest their reputation also tank, even though I know I have done nothing wrong. (Well, I mean, everyone makes mistakes, obviously, so I'm not saying I'm a perfect human being. But nothing I've done is anywhere near the point where it makes sense to have half the fandom shunning me, and certainly none of the mistakes I've made that actually matter lie within the fiction I've written...)

And yeah, nowadays I really don't open up to anyone in fandom unless they've demonstrated sufficiently proship opinions.

I'm sorry that happened to you, OP. You didn't deserve any of it and I'm 100% behind your secret. Please be kind to yourself. You deserve to explore everything you want to. It's gd fiction!

On a side note: jeez, I had so much underage sex with other teens and it was perfectly natural way to learn my body and what I liked--and a way to earn total confidence so I was later very able to defend myself against people who wanted to take advantage. I knew what I should expect as far as boundaries and reciprocity went. If a 14 year old could offer them, why not an adult??? lol.

I wrote a fic for Wednesday that had kissing and nothing further and got someone commenting that I was too old to write fic about kids and I was a "weirdo." Maybe my fault for linking it on my tumblr where people can see my age but it's not like I want to keep my age a secret and there were a lot of Wednesday fans there. I deleted the comment since it had nothing to do with the fic. I thought about taking the fic down but decided not to but now I don't want to write anything about teens again.

❤️

"you're too old to write fic about kids"

More like they're a little too immature to be engaging in fandom, though that goes without saying.

This logic makes no sense at all since I feel like the majority of YA writers are full on adults...

I also feel like younger Gen Z/Gen A have become way more puritanical than we ever were. I saw someone (in passing on Twitter) get kicked out of contributing to a 'zine because they happened to write incest fic for a pairing that had nothing to do with the zine nor what they were contributing to it. Like, holy shit.

I personally don't get the appeal of writing or consuming content about teenagers or kids, they're so far removed from where I am in life and I just don't connect with teen characters at all(don't think I ever really did much), but I wouldn't think someone else was a creep for writing that kind of content. It not appealing to me doesn't mean it won't appeal to others, and given how much media there is that's focused on kids it's clearly a popular genre/subject.

Also it's very weird to levy any kind of accustation at people writing about teens when, well who do people think is writing about teens in the media in general? It's certainly not kids themselves. xD

Not sure about fic, but with my experience with YA, they are often written 'older' than their supposed ages which sort of skews it a bit. Like, I just finished a book and I think the MC's age gets mentioned once (it's sixteen) and had it not been mentioned, I would not have guess that was their age!

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(Anonymous) - 2023-10-06 22:06 (UTC) - Expand

I personally don't get the appeal of writing or consuming content about teenagers or kids

... because even though you're an adult, you WERE a teenager and a kid at one point, and surely you remember what those times were like?

This is literally such a bizarre take to me. I haven't been a teenager for years, but you better believe that I still remember what it was like to be one, and so I can identify with teenage and kid characters when I think back to what I was like at that age. That's just normal?

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(Anonymous) - 2023-10-07 12:28 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-10-07 14:50 (UTC) - Expand

My backstory is that I was developmentally delayed in maturity in my teens and between that and trauma in my twenties I never really feel like I experienced the kind of thing I saw a lot of other teens experiencing at that age.

I write things often some things I keep to my own fucking self ofc bc I am curious about what it's like .

But guess what. In real life I have no attraction , almost negative attraction to anyone I know to be even under 20. The thought sincerely icks me in any real life context regarding real people. I can write as someone 15 being attracted to someone under 15 bc I sorta do an acting class technique and use my memories of being attracted to someone to write about what it's like to feel in love or just attracted.

Doesn't mean I'm attracted to the fictional character I'm writing another character attracted to.

Characters are different from people to me . They're like ..a concept or an idea . They're very different from a person I see standing across the street.

I feel like people can get kinda shifty about matters like this and treat it differently than writing other things.

Do we side eye all crime writers or people who write a character murdering someone ?

Overall, rarely .

Having a barrier between characters and people just feels automatic to me . It's a given . I don't understand the people who assume I would treat a real person in a certain way bc of what I write or read in s book.

Yeah, I think this is the experience of being asexual (or somewhere on that spectrum -- demi/grey ace, etc. I don't actually identify as ace myself but I frequently vibe with the things that ace/grey ace people say about their experiences). I've had so many moments in fandom where I'm like "Y'all are literally attracted to the people you write having sex?! WTF?!" Like you said, I'm not attracted to characters because they're a fictional concept? I do tend to write only about characters who I find interesting, which can resemble attraction, but if so it's attraction to their personality and their story arcs. Not all sex scenes are necessarily sexy, but the ones I do find sexy, it's the whole situation and setup I find sexy, not any particular character.

For a lot of people, there's a very close mapping between enjoying things on a fictional level and enjoying them on a real level. Like, multiple times, I've seen people say they don't enjoy scenario X in fiction because it disturbs them in real life and so it forms like a hurdle between them and enjoying stories like that. And I get that because our feelings about real things often impinge on our feelings about the same things when they crop up in fiction.

But then those people will immediately jump from that to the assumption that anyone who DOES enjoy scenario X in fiction must be able to do so because it doesn't bother them in real life, and I'm like WTF? There's all sorts of reasons why that is a messed up assumption to make: (1) Fiction operates on a different level than reality so there are all sorts of mechanisms like suspension of disbelief, fictional stakes, nonliteralism, etc. that makes it so that the way someone reacts to fictional scenarios is not necessarily the same way they react to the real-life equivalent. (2) Sometimes people like to read about unpleasant things to have a fictional, safe/contained experience of emotions like angst or catharsis. (3) Sometimes the thing is cool for other reasons (it's hot, exciting, fun, thrilling, etc.) that counteract any icky feelings and makes the thing enjoyable overall. None of that means I am incapable of understanding why it's wrong in real life...

Anyway, your attitude toward fiction is normal, OP. The very close mapping between reality and fiction might also be normal/common/typical too (IDK, it feels very strange to me personally and like people don't really understand the concept of fiction but *shrug* That's just my perspective). But the fact that those people can't even IMAGINE what's it like to have a sharper fiction/reality distinction disturbs me and isn't normal, or shouldn't be normalized, in my opinion. There are more things in life than are dreamt of in their philosophy, I guess...

I can relate to a lot of what was written here. Thank you for sharing OP.

I was robbed of a decent upbringing and unfortunately it comes with a lot of SA. I'm still figuring out my Ace-ness due to a fear of sexual deviance.

Writing fics allowed me to explore and express sexual curiosity without fear of hurting others or myself.

My depictions of teen sexuality are of teens similar in age and it allows me to feel like at least here in my fic I can express sexual curiosity and experiences as a teen in ways I NEVER felt was allowed of me to experience or to even express.

To ask about sex and talk about it without fear of shame, retaliation or harm was not afforded to me. It was so severe that while I was a teen trying to express it, it felt wrong/impossible with my own friends and peers.
But the curiosity was there and it never went away.

It doesn't mean I want to act it out because I am aware where my damage comes from.

To get really honest and real here, my dad crossed a lot of boundaries for as long as I can remember because he's a sexually deviant person. I was exposed to sex at too young of an age. And the exposure was sort of routine.
My mom was a teen mom forced to marry a guy she didn't know well and so she carried a lot of shame regarding her sex life/marriage and it was projected pretty severely onto her kids.
She often called me a slut or whore, even before I went through puberty. It seems minor but that carried a lot of damage inside of me and my views of myself as a person.

Because of that...it was a really difficult world to grow up in.

To be clear, for me, if I find anyone young attractive, I understand it's through the lens of an immature underdeveloped shadow of myself. It's my desire to be able to express myself freely as a teen wanting to come to life because she was forced to never come out when it was her time.

When I found the actor who plays Five in The Umbrella Academy cute, I knew to keep it in fanfics and that it's the teen girl inside of me being like, "Oh my gosh! 14yo me would have loved Five!"
I don't have any strong feelings (even on a parasocial level) toward the actor IRL.

IRL I'm in my late 30s and I'm starting to believe that I'm Aroace with a sex drive, but the sex drive is more related to hormones (pre-period horniness is so real) and energy-related body functioning.

TL; DR - a lot of people got damages and we should probably recognize that media is not consumed or perceived in the same ways

DA

(Anonymous) - 2023-10-07 10:36 (UTC) - Expand

I have periods of age regression as a coping mechanism due to some really fucked up shit I went through as a child. And sometimes I seek out stories around some of the things that happened to me. Sometimes I make through the whole story, sometimes I make it about halfway through and close it. I put myself through it because sometimes it helps. Sometimes it's some sort of vicious satisfaction to see someone else (fictional) go through what I did so I don't feel so alone, sometimes when I can't make it through I know I can stop the story at any time and close it and it goes away and ends and it's over (unlike real life), sometimes I'll find a story where it's (relatively) consensual and it ends on a positive note and it makes me happy to see that SOMEONE got a happy ending. It really depends on my mood. I only really do it maybe once every three months or so, and usually when I'm super stressed out over something. But afterwards I purge my Kindle and wipe it and delete all trace and history of it. Sometimes I feel like trash for doing this, but seeing how some people react to what is clearly fictional content is just... worrisome. I have absolutely no sexual drive towards anyone and I certainly would never put my hands on anything. But I'm automatically labeled as a pedo. It sucks.

I'm sorry that happened to you, both the fucked up shit as a child and also being labeled as a pedo for liking age regression stories. Age regression is a niche kink/story trope that not many people enjoy / which many people find uncomfortable/creepy or uninteresting, but it's entirely harmless. And if it helps you cope with stress, then it's actually doing good in the world. I hope you enjoy your stories.

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(Anonymous) - 2023-10-07 08:15 (UTC) - Expand

Yeah, I had a rough upbringing and I always felt stunted and embarrassed that fiction I indulge in writing in my 20s and a good chunk still in my 30s are about teenagers living their lives, exploring their sexuality, living their lives.

Not until more recent years did I come to accept that what I'm doing isn't hurting anyone, and it does help me process my feelings, that I don't feel as bad to consume this sort of media, specifically my own fiction writing.

I do struggle with the ways people and pop culture at large tend to use media like Euphoria to exploit kids/young adults in one way or another. Or they apply bad faith interpretation to things they don't like.

[ SECRET POST #6118 ]

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