#though i feel like many of us are older and understand this
so i sort of wrote meet death sitting partly based on my moderate annoyance about how fandom handles the concept of a character not being Nebulously In His Mid-Twenties, so it’s not like I haven’t ranted about this before, but I just saw somebody’s exhaustive headcanon post about yet another character, whose age isn’t specified anywhere in canon, and who is sort of (waves vaguely) Not Young, and they had bent themselves in absolute knots including setting some of his early life events at improbably young ages just to make sure he was no older than 33 in the present day of their storyline, because, and this is as close to an exact quote as I can come, “I want his dick to work good”, and like
….
*drags hands down face* I just want all of you children out there in fandom to understand that you don’t suddenly Become An Old Person when you tick over from 34 to 35. Right? Like, Age doesn’t Suddenly Descend Upon You. (And when Age Hath Descended Upon Thee you’re not immediately Barred From All Fun.) It’s a gradual process. Some things that are usually considered age-related are actually health-related. Certain things happen at wildly different stages in one’s life than in others’ lives. Some people go gray early, some late. Some people’s dicks work differently when they start having heart problems or something, it varies widely. You don’t suddenly wake up unfuckable. Your joints don’t totally fall apart all at once. None of it is linear. [And honestly for like…. a lot of people (of my acquaintance, so, anecdata, but, data) your thirties are a time when due to experience and some hormonal shifts and usually, I think, finally just self-acceptance, for many of us, your sex life is going to be fantastic and you can finally actually really enjoy shit you spent your twenties nervously thinking you were missing the point of. (You were. It’s okay. Don’t sweat it. It’ll make sense as you get older. I promise it’s nice, surviving your youth. It really is. I swear to fuck that’s not just me being condescending even if it sounds like it is.) Or even finally just accepting yourself enough to try stuff you were too self-conscious to ask for before, that can be huge. But– I have digressed.]
There’s a stunning amount of diversity in the human experience. I understand that it is difficult to write something you have not yourself experienced. There’s a terrible fear of getting obvious things wrong and getting ridiculed or, worse, accused of malice in your Incorrectness. The easiest way to conceptualize non-firsthand experiences, and therefore write them into your own works, is to read accounts by other writers. But this does tend to echo-chamber some things. It’s why, for example, sex between two people with penises can be so formulaic, in fic, because it’s often written by inexperienced writers who do not themselves have those kinds of bodies, and so have no idea how penises really work beyond the basics, have no idea how prostates work at all, and no easy way to find out for themselves, relying on accounts by other writers who similarly don’t have bodies like that and are relying on accounts by others etcetera. And it’s definitely why older characters are so often very rigidly defined into occasionally-wildly-inappropriate behaviors or tendencies, or why many writers are reluctant to write them at all– for fear of getting it wrong, the writer avoids unfamiliar territory. And then everyone writes precisely the same story, for fear of Getting It Wrong.
Fair. So I am here to tell you, babes, from the right (as in, I have survived it) side of forty, that it’s okay. Getting older isn’t that bad. It happens very slowly.
