[ SECRET POST #6357 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6357 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 38 secrets from Secret Submission Post #909.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think anyone needs to justify their shipping preferences, but as someone who is personally uncomfortable with certain types of explicit underage content, I get you on this.

I mean, the characters in ATLA don't even look pronouncedly older than they are, but even there I find their ages extremely easy to forget, especially in the last season. Back in 2020 when my friend and I watched the show, I brought up the topic of ships, and was genuinely caught off guard when she said she wasn't comfortable with shipping any of the characters because they were all kids. It just honestly hadn't even really occurred to me to think of them that way when I'd been considering the prospect of who I'd ship with who in ATLA. I mean I guess in S1 I saw them more concretely as kids (Aang especially), but by S3 their ages just felt so ambiguous and also largely irrelevant that I genuinely didn't think to consider age as a factor.

[(Anonymous)]

Huh, I'm the same as your friend in that to me they look so much like kids that I personally don't and can't ship them. There's a mental block there for me that never got me even slightly into any of the ships in that fandom.

Not to say you're wrong or weird, just how it's curious how it's different for us all.

(It's much like how in Stranger Things you got people suuuuuper into the kid ships while I have no interest at all because well, they're kids, lol).

[(Anonymous)]

to me they look so much like kids that I personally don't and can't ship them.

I watch next to no animated media at all, so that's probably part of it. I probably parse animated media more loosely due to lack of practice. The intended age of an animated character is not one of the points my brain seems to think it salient most of the time. Or maybe it's just that my brain decides assigning age to a bundle of animation feels so innately arbitrary that it's not really important unless the narrative itself makes it a sticking point.

With ATLA specifically, it's not so much that I forgot they were young, as that I forgot to think about their ages as relevant to who they were most of the time.

The question, "Would I ship Aang and Zuko," makes me think about the Cain and Abel template, and similarities with other ships in my lexicon, and the dynamic of their interactions in canon, and what it would mean to each of them and their opposing Life's Missions to feel confusing and inconvenient things for each other. It doesn't really occur to me to think, "Aang's twelve."

(I don't actually ship anybody in ATLA, for the record. I flipped through my mental rolodex of potential pairings and none of them clicked. But age wasn't really a factor in that, one way or the other.)

[(Anonymous)]

I can see most of the ATLA characters as their ages, but in my mind Azula and her friends aren't 14, they're 18 at the youngest. Calling them 14 was a writing misstep, because it just doesn't fit in the slightest.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT - Oh man, yes, I agree so hard. With the other characters, I forget to think about their ages at all unless prompted. But with Azula and her friends, my mind actively rejects their canonical ages; it just doesn't compute.

[(Anonymous)]

Is she weirded out by actual human teenagers dating in real life too? She knows it happens, I'm sure, but is it one of those things that must never be spoken of aloud?

[(Anonymous)]

With the way some teens are so self-infantilizing nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised.

[(Anonymous)]

Is she weirded out by actual human teenagers dating in real life too?

Her discomfort is not with what teenagers do, it's with how she engages with the idea of what teenagers do. The involvement she's uncomfortable with is her own, and that's totally valid and understandable, IMO. Some people don't think about it that way and some people do; both are fine.

[(Anonymous)]

See, for me... sex isn't an inherent part of shipping at all-- when I ship younger characters, I'm not thinking about anything sexual and it baffles me to hear people express discomfort over like... basic young/first love stuff? Young people experiencing love is something that's often IN the source media-- Aang and Katara become a canon ship, so the idea that it's not okay to think that their relationship is cute is BONKERS to me.


Now, I DON'T want to see explicit content about them. I'm not interested in seeing explicit content about them as adults, either. But I think the relationship we watched develop on screen was cute.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT - I felt the same way about Mike and Eleven in S1 (only in S1). I shipped them, in a very sincere but tame kind of way.

However, for me sex is an inherent part of shipping. With a pairing like Mike/Eleven I didn't think about it, beyond, "Nope, they're too young for that." But I kind of always felt like I was holding the pairing at arm's length, in a way. They were adorable, but not in a way I could sink my teeth into. So I just kind of thought of the ship fondly for a couple of months and then moved on.

NAYRT

[(Anonymous)]

I think so many shipping arguments could be avoided if more people just understood that for some, sex is an important part of shipping and for others it isn't. So many people who care about sex in shipping assume that anyone who ships kids is being gross and lashes out at them because they assume that for everyone shipping = sex. And so many people who don't care about sex in shipping assume that nobody does, so if someone says they aren't into a ship because it isn't sexually appealing, they lash out at the person for "lying" because "shipping isn't just about sex."