#anti ship hate
i can’t believe “adults writing fanfiction about teenage characters is kinda creepy even if it’s g-rated” is a take that i have had to read with my own eyes on more than one occasion.
like…buddy. where do you think the source material came from? exactly how old do you think the original creators of your blorbos are? i am begging you to think about this for ten seconds.
Oh boy, it’s this bullshit again. I’m sorry this stupid fucking “debate” is still happening, OP. I’m never going to stop being fed up of it, either.
Even when the fanfiction isn’t G-rated - in fact, especially when the fanfiction isn’t G-rated - do you really, truly want all of the fic about teen characters to be written exclusively by teens? Teens who have no life experience? Is that what you want? Do you really want teens to be getting their cues about relationships and sex from other clueless teens? Even if they’re technically excellent writers, that lack of life experience means that anything they write is going to be bullshit! I’m sorry! There’s no nice way to say it! It is going to be bullshit! A truly alarming number of teens still think stalking is romantic, for christ’s sake! You don’t want teens learning how sex works from other teens and you don’t want to be stuck reading fic written by teens yourself!
And that’s before you even talk about an adult’s reasons for writing fic that involves teen characters, relationships and sex. As a society we’re primed to imagine that everything adults do must have a sexual motive and that adults only ever do things for sexual gratification. If you’ve ever heard, for example, the saying that “men and women can never just be friends,” this is the logic behind it, that (straight) men and women could potentially have sex and therefore that must be the only goal they could have in getting to know each other. Those of us who live in the real world know that this obviously isn’t true, but this idea that adults do things purely for sexual gratification is pervasive and persistent, especially with the weirdly puritanical attitudes that seem to exist in a lot of fandom spaces more recently. So I certainly understand how some misguided folks can assume that there’s no reason for adults to read or write about teen characters unless they’re doing it for Sex Reasons™! However! Some other, far more likely reasons for an adult to write fic about teen characters include:
- They remember being a teen themselves and they’re recalling their own experiences when they write
- It’s the story they could have done with reading when they were a teen themselves and they want to make sure someone else who might need it today has it available to them
- They know, having been a teen in the past, that teens have sex and that it’s a thing that happens sometimes and there’s no reason for them to pretend that it doesn’t
- They find the dynamics of the characters and the way their relationships might pan out interesting and want to explore it
- They want to make sure there’s something for folks to read that was written by someone with enough writing experience that it’s good to read and enough life experience that teens who read it don’t come away thinking that toothpaste can be used as lube
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, and note that none of them are “THEY MIGHT BE A CSA SURVIVOR AND THEY COULD BE WRITING TO COPE!!!”. It is not your business as to why an adult may be writing anything, and you don’t have the right to quiz them about it to make sure their reasons are good enough to satisfy you!
tl;dr - Sorry to append this wall of text to your post, OP! This is just a pet hate of mine as an adult who has spent years not just improving as a writer but as a human being as well, and who remembers what it was like to be a teenager. I’m very tired, lmao.
And if “they’re a survivor” is the reason they’re writing it, it’s ESPECIALLY not a stranger’s business! No one should have to bare the worst moments of their life to be left in peace to write.
