#idk my sexuality is too nuanced for me to explain it properly or for me to explain it the same way each time

[toyherb]

long rambling stream of consiousnes post

remember when someone was called our for making porn of their oc but aged up and the anon was like "but you have portrayed them as a kid too" and everyone was like. people age dude. they don't exist as a child to (author) etc etc

anyway I think the way we think if this kind of discourse has messed with our minds and how we think of fictional characters. thankfully I am not engaged in any sort of shipping discourse in any fandom. and I always stay silent on my opinions on this but I just wanted to like... sort my thoughts ig

please read the footnotes this was so stream of consciousness djhavavkda

I hate proshippers and how they behave they are so annoying and act like people who disagree with them are all stupid dumb dumb babies. I have more thoughts but this isn't really about them.

having said that I'm not an anti by any means... anti culture does not attract me, and I would rather spend my time having fun with media I like and avoiding what I dislike.

there is no room for people with a moderate opinion in this discourse. people in the middle seem to pick a side and then try hard to fit in or explain weird logic to make what they feel okay to them (if they are an anti who wants to ship or make porn something tabboo, they by certain logic it is okay) or ignore things that make them upset (on the proshipper side). unless I'm just so far removed I don't even see these people (since potentially they also just don't engage with the discussion, or do so privately)

I think, on the topic of aging up characters it depends on SO many factors whether it feels "morally okay" or not. like in the first example, the character experiences time and is portrayed at different life stages and porn of them as an adult, made by the author, exists. all of that is extremely normal and healthy. my thoughts on this extend to characters who are not adults in popular media. I don't think people who do this are attracted to teenagers , but rather the idea of that character as an adult and their partner (if this is about sex or shipping or whatever) who is the same or similar age as them.*(1)

even if the characters do not "belong" to them, to me this is like playing with barbies and thinking of stories on your own. especially with anything illustrated or drawn which really lends itself to imagination and different interpretations of characters.

having said that. I do not really feel comfortable with the idea of actually elementary age children being aged up for porn if they have never been portrayed as an adult or older teen. it's weird? it doesn't make sense to me. like. with a teenage character you have a better idea of who that character will be as an adult (even if obviously we change a lot between being teens vs adults) but with a young kid? like, when you see them you are still picturing the child even if the art is them grown up. there is not context to imagine them as a whole adult if it's just porn. this was messy but idk how to phrase this properly.

(I am specifically thinking of Pearl from Ace Attorney when I write this. which differs in the next example in that Pearl is a kid surrounded by adults and engages with the world and the writing as a child and has little agency over herself. in a way i think people who have childhood trauma can see this and a portrayal of [adult] pearl having agency, even in a pornographic way, is safe and theraputic. i think thats kind of poetic tbh but it still makes me sad and upset to think of pearl sexually)*(2)

it's gets more confusing and hard to form feelings on this kind of thing because of how nuanced every situation can be. like when Rugrats All Grown Up was a thing, I'm sure people who grew up with the show thought the adult versions were attractive and proceeded how you can imagine. It.... doesn't feel THAT weird to me I guess? The characters were portrayed whith whole personalities, from their perspectives, and how they are treated by the original show (at least in my faint memory), it kind of makes sense. You don't think of them as just babies but as whole people.

(this is similar to how if you are a kid reading something like A Series of Unfortunate events, you might love reading about the kids facing adversity and escaping danger, but an adult reader would probably be distressed and worried for the them. I read the books as a kid and that's what my teacher said she felt. watching the TV show as an adult I understand her.)

Another example is Harry Potter. I have no real idea how people decided to write fic for it back in the early 00s, if they decided to age characters up, before the later books, but I know people were writing porn for it. (but also like. not sure why adults were such big hp fans. maybe they were just around the books for whatever reason like as a librarian or teacher or whatever). in a situation like that I think its easy to picture in your mind older characters but personally I'm still like. they were middle schoolers, bro... its very nearly absurd to me to imagine writing porn of Harry Potter characters before any depiction of them as adults existed. I GUESS you can age them up? it's still weird to me. which is weird bc the previous example we started with literal babies. hp just feels more specific with its characters and rugrats feels more loose, and I could say that's because rugrats is a kids show that primarily exists in our memory, but I also never even read harry potter

I think this ultimately has to do with how we think of characters in more personal ways. Like... in Fire Emblem Awakening, I married Chrom and Lucina was our daughter. But if you play as a boy you can marry Lucina because she comes from the future as an adult (or however old she is). I know people who think of Lucina as m!Robin's canon partner, are attracted to her, and that's fucked up to me. I just can't think of her as an adult woman, even if she is one. Like. I actually get mad thinking about it. but this is because of my personal feelings about Lucina.

(but like literally I think marrying any of 2nd gen in that game is weird so maybe i just know some weirdos)

so anyway my conclusion is that fandom is personal and what feels okay and what feels like pedophilia depends on how we engage with it and that nuance makes it difficult and even impossible to distinguish if someone is a freak or not without knowing and understanding their relationship with the media yaaaayyyyy

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1*This only really feels normal if you are college age or you started liking the thing when you were younger and then got older. Unless you're galaxy brained and make those characters 30 and in an office setting I guess. How weird this whole idea is depends on on how the characters exist in their canon world, not just their age but like.... narratively(?). Like their agency, what they do, personality etc. I do not mean to imply that if you are a teenager those kinds of things make YOU more attractive to adults (on the contrary, abusers will prey on qualities that isolate you from any support), but, because fictional characters are fictional and like barbie dolls, we can change the context we want them to exist in. ie oh they're in college and not high school or whatever. Again, how you personally interact with the media also contributes, and how you initially get to know these characters also forms how you will ultimately conceive of them.

(that said the stronger it is established the characters are in high school the less I am able to reimagine them I college without having to completely imagine them changing into new people over time. the only other option really is to imagine a full on au... but even then i feel like you have to change them quite a bit.) (not to mention the more it's established they're high schoolers the less i am attracted to them... 🤢 i wouldnt change them just so i can like them. i would just not like them anymore...)

(even when i was just beginning college I was really into an Ouran high school host club character which I liked in high school, but now I'm not interested in him at all... aging out of that attraction is such a weird feeling.)

2*I want to add to this artistic, dark angle that I skim over here. As someone with fandoms which ARE dark, violent, and indeed contain abusive relationships, I think there is artistic value in certain things like this. It's not that I like to see pedophilia or incest portrayed, but that dark and fucked up stuff which is meant to wrench your gut has a right to exist. even when it's pornographic! pornographic art CAN have things to say! and even when it doesn't necessarily say much, I think that gut wrenching type stuff has value for being that way.

(although how I feel about that kind of thing is not the same as how I feel about like. porn depicting siblings that is just porn. I mean, I know that porn on its own has artistic value no matter how base we believe it to be. I'm just saying porn depicting abuse and playing into that feeling of disgust and shame is not the same as porn that's just "teehee my step sister is a whore." although I think the difference between these two is probably the perspective and position of control the reader and protagonist have. even comparing say lolita to stepsister or stepdaughter porn. the control the protagonist has over the situation, the way it makes us feel... it all contributes to that nuance I was talking about.)

(also I know I just said porn has artistic value no matter how base it is but I fucking hate that stepsibling shit. it's so popular bc its a fantasy to live with someone you like but it gets me so mad.)

[atlantis-scribe]

idk the bit about Rodney being misogynistic bc he got taken advantage of by an older woman feels kinda uncomfy. like it veers too close to a justification for his misogyny. (ik in a real person this wouldn't like excuse his actions but since he's a fictional character it's like kinda trying to paint his worse actions in a more positive light, yk?) and like in real life people don't become misogynist/etc for like. a particular reason like that. seems kinda iffy idk

don't mean that as an attack on you or op or anything, sorry if I came off to harsh or anything! just kinda made me a lil uncomfortable (bc like I have seen similar things with other characters in the past and it always seems a lil sketchy to me)

first of all, you don't have to apologize. I get harsh anons sometimes, and they don't often feel the need to explain themselves lmao. also, I love getting asks like this; they make me all thinky :)

and you're absolutely entitled to your feelings of discomfort! while we're talking about fictional characters (which are vehicles for all the nasty or complicated thoughts & feelings that would get us shunned in polite society), discourse surrounding them still reflect a lot of things outside fandom (i.e. in the 'real' world). there is still that responsibility to be careful with the beliefs and ideas we promote.

having said all that, Rodney McKay is definitely the epitome of a 'problematic fave'. while he is a protagonist in the narrative sense, some of his more obvious flaws can make him a difficult character to like (or in my case, to justify liking heh).

as for the whole backstory headcanon, I can understand why it wouldn't sit well with many people. it does seem a bit shoe-horned and, having seen the same kind of justification for other Favorite White Male Characters' terrible behavior in other fandoms, I can definitely see where you're coming from.

(btw, I can't speak for OP but I'm glad you sent this ask, so at least I'm afforded the opportunity to reclaim my honor explain myself haha)

any kind of abuse should never justify horrible actions or behavior that one has been given a chance to change or rectify. in this case, if Rodney had been a victim of an older, female sexual predator in his youth, then that still doesn't excuse his misogynistic tendencies (and outright sexist comments & actions). it can certainly explain it, though, which is what I find so compelling about the idea.

the thing about Rodney ( & Stargate + all its characters) is that he's very much a product of his time. while today's media still exhibit a lot of backward tropes and tasteless stereotyping, we've started to find more and more artists & creators who are willing to apply nuance and care to their writing / art. though I'm sure pioneer Stargate fans have made their metas and criticism of Rodney already, his flaws as a character are even more easily brought into sharp relief now because he is not the kind of character that ages well.

if you've been following me for quite some time now, you probably have an idea why I like him. it's not the easiest thing to be, a Rodney fan, but I always make it a point to not excuse any of his bad traits. however, it's also no fun if all I do is bend over backwards to justify why I enjoy his character so much, which is why (since his writing is so inconsistent and there are so many gaps to his backstory) fans like OP and I, whenever we're given the opportunity, try to come up with bits of headcanon to tie a few loose ends together.

I certainly won't fight anyone about it, and I'm very much welcome to arguments that would debunk these ideas, but I'm acknowledging it to be a pretty neat concept. do I think real people (or even fictional characters) who are as terrible with women as Rodney is must have been abused by women when they were younger? hell no. does the headcanon make some kind of sense for why he is the way he is (which, again, is more a product of bad writing than any deliberate characterization)? I think it does.

so it's really more, 'if Rodney had been sexually abused by an older woman when he was younger, then that contributed to his misogyny,' and less, "if Rodney is misogynistic, then he must have been sexually abused by an older woman when he was younger'. there's an important difference that (I'm not even gonna euphemize this because it is rampant) so many fans defending their faves often miss.

I love Rodney for all the bits that I love about him, and I try to appropriately handle all the rest that I don't. what I wouldn't give for Rodney to have had better and consistent writing (one that, while not necessarily erased, at least properly addressed his flaws). that's why I like Trinity a lot even though he messed up so much in that episode. it had been an opportunity for growth.

[ tl;dr check second to the last paragraph lol ]

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for reference: this is the post anon's talking about.

also tagging @frankthesnek in case she has something to say :)

[dear-wormwoods]

Someone truly in the reddie tag saying Myra was not abusive and that she wasn’t like Sonia. Even saying Bev and Eddie don’t have similar arcs bc their abusive situations were entirely different and that people just reach to bend arguments in order to prove reddie. Biggest bs I have read in a while ahdhd

I’m assuming you are new to my blog, because uhh, I’m sorry to burst your bubble anon, but I am also someone who doesn’t consider Myra abusive. Idk what post you’re talking about specifically but I’d sure like to know what ‘proving reddie’ has to do with it, lol. But anyway, I have said before that I consider Eddie’s marriage to be toxic, but not abusive. These two people should not be married. And not just because Eddie is gay and doesn’t love her. Beyond that, they are definitely bad for each other. The entire marriage is a conduit for misery and deception. It’s a codependent circus of projection and enabling. It’s unhealthy as hell! But it isn’t abusive. And here’s why I think that: 

Stephen King wasn’t trying to make a point that Sonia and Myra are exactly the same. He was, however, making a point that when people enter into adulthood and adult relationships while carrying a bunch of baggage from trauma they never properly dealt with, the cycle will continue in one way or another (this is why Eddie and Bev are ‘parallel’ characters, not the surface-level abuse interpretation). Eddie suffered from emotional abuse for most of his life; Sonia was very calculating and intentional about it and made sure that she always held sway in Eddie’s life to suit her own needs. The result is that Eddie is a very inexperienced and sheltered adult who believes in all of the lies his mother told him. He tried to move out three times and failed each time. Sonia controlled him until the day she died. It’s all Eddie knows. So in his mid-thirties, alone in the world for the first time, he doesn’t know how to take care of himself and, more importantly, believes he can’t learn. Because of his history of abuse and control, Eddie can’t fathom taking the reins in his own life and instead seeks out someone who will take care of him the way he’s become accustomed to. 

So, Eddie meets Myra and latches onto her because she’s inexperienced and malleable, like him. She physically reminds him of his mother, so it’s easy for him to project onto her all of the abuse Sonia inflicted on him. And because that life was all he knew, it was also what made him feel comfortable, so he nudged Myra into the role he wanted her to fill - a replacement mom. He did this subconsciously at first, but he was able to recognize it before they got married… and then he decided to go through with it anyway. 

Eddie brought a lot of baggage into that relationship, baggage that Myra was most likely completely unaware of. Obviously he’s a repressed gay man, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Eddie doesn’t love Myra, but it’s not just because he’s gay, it’s also because he has created a maternal figure in her and, since he (rightfully) resents his mother, he also resents Myra. She conforms to that caretaker role and enables everything he’s learned from a life with Sonia, and he in turn enables her bad habits too. Enabling is toxic behavior, but it isn’t inherently abusive. 

But then, when he leaves to go back to Derry, it all comes to a head. She freaks out because as far as she knows, he’s very sick, and he’s leaving her without an explanation, this man who she is married to and financially dependent on. She has no idea how to communicate, so she resorts to panicky, emotionally manipulative attempts to get him to talk to her and stay. On the flipside, Eddie has no idea how to communicate with her either, so he withholds information, deflects, and snaps at her in moments of frustration. They both have irrational thoughts about hurting each other and they both do and say things that make the situation worse. They are both VERY bad at communication. Because they’re both grown adults with almost no relationship experience outside of each other and are therefore emotionally stunted. 

That whole chapter reads, to me, like “bad breakups 101″ - one person can’t articulate how they feel so they’re deflecting and coming off as cold, and the other person is so over the top emotional that they end up making no sense and coming off as hysterical. And it’s no wonder! If you make it to your late 30′s without ever having much of a social circle or relationship experience, you’re not going to know how to act in a situation like this. And this applies to both of them. If what Eddie says about her is true, this is probably the first time Myra has ever been left by a partner, and it’s happening suddenly and with no explanation. So, she’s hysterical and resorts to manipulation - not out of habit, but out of desperation (Eddie makes the distinction that this isn’t typical behavior for her!!). For Eddie’s part, this is the first major decision he’s made in probably his whole life, and he doesn’t know how to explain himself, so he just… decides not to. And because he does not love Myra, he is completely emotionally detached from her. Their individual reactions to the situation just make it worse for them both - Eddie shutting down makes Myra more hysterical, and her hysterics cause him to shut down more.

People like to cite a couple of damning quotes about Myra as proof that she’s exactly like Sonia, but making that argument requires you to actively ignore the damning quotes about Eddie. There are also quite a few quotes that highlight the differences between her and Sonia, things Eddie himself acknowledges, as well as quotes about the guilt he feels for knowingly projecting his own baggage onto this woman. (Note: see the posts linked at the end of this for a breakdown of all those quotes) The text makes it clear that this was never a happy marriage. Neither of them are better for being in each other’s lives. They don’t help each other become healthier people. Rather, they both actively enable each other’s toxic habits. The marriage is, in a lot of ways, a form of self-harm for Eddie, and he knows it - upon Sonia’s death, he exited the cage his mother built for him and then built a new cage for himself and threw the key at Myra’s feet. For her part, I believe Myra began as an unwitting enabler but ultimately realized that she gained a “purpose” from the relationship (being a caretaker, being “needed”) and subsequently turned a blind eye to all the ways it wasn’t actually a healthy marriage. 

This is such a long post already but I want to make it very clear that Eddie’s cycle of abuse continuing does not actually require Myra herself to be abusive - rather, it is Eddie’s projection onto her that exacerbates the toxic environment. It’s the ghost of Sonia that haunts him in that chapter and throughout the rest of the novel. Myra is not a villain in Eddie’s life - he hardly even thinks about her after he leaves. This is one of the main points that make Eddie and Bev’s parallel arcs different - Bev very clearly has a secondary villain in her life, Tom, and she gets the closure of him dying in the end. But Eddie doesn’t need closure about his marriage, because Myra is just an extension of what Sonia did to him. 

The one time he does think of her unprompted is during his walking tour, and it’s such a great example of what his marriage actually means for him: when faced with the leper offering him a blowjob and other IT manifestations, he wishes he was home with Myra. He doesn’t think of her badly - he’s not afraid of her in any way. But she represents his comfort zone. IT is forcing him to confront things like his repressed sexuality, and he decidedly does not want to do that. That’s the only moment he “misses” Myra. But he doesn’t actually miss Myra. He misses the way her enabling allowed him to escape from having to face himself. And that’s really what it comes down to - Eddie’s marriage is toxic because it’s an escape, a way for him to avoid having to grow as a person and face the hard realities of who he is and what his mother has done to him. Myra isn’t evil, she’s not a calculating abuser like Sonia was, but she is toxic because her very presence prevents Eddie from reaching his full potential and being happy. 

Sonia’s abuse permeates Eddie’s entire life, even well after her death. Her actions dictate how he sees himself, as well as how he acts in relationships. Sonia is the reason Eddie’s marriage is the way it is. Hell, Sonia is the reason Eddie’s marriage exists in the first place. It is Sonia’s ghost that continues to manipulate him throughout the book and it is Sonia’s voice he needs to overcome in the end. If Myra were truly abusive, she would matter more in the overarching narrative of Eddie’s trip to Derry. But she doesn’t matter and because of that, she’s never really given a personality or motivations. She’s truly a blank canvas for Eddie to project his issues onto, and then he simultaneously berates himself for projecting and resents her for existing within his projections. Through all of this, everything always comes back to Sonia. Due to the vast disparity between their respective levels of influence, placing Myra on equal footing with Sonia is, in my opinion, a form of downplaying how bad Sonia truly was. 

Finally, and it’s wild that this even needs to be said, people need to recognize that saying ‘Myra isn’t abusive’ is NOT the same thing as saying she did nothing wrong. Myra was an enabler and that’s not okay, whether she meant to be or not. She also had moments of manipulation, terrible communication skills and poor emotional regulation. She was a toxic presence in Eddie’s life. Saying she isn’t abusive doesn’t mean I’m excusing her actions. But it’s also important to recognize that the chapter in which she appears has a lot more nuance to it than some people realize, and it’s necessary to hold Eddie accountable for his part in making that night so difficult. On that note, holding Eddie accountable and recognizing his harmful moments is not the same as calling him abusive either (fsr that’s become some kind of urban legend, but literally no one ever said he was! ever!!). There does not always have to be an abuser and a victim - sometimes bad relationships are just… bad.

Eddie is obviously a lot more sympathetic than Myra because we know about his past and get his POV. We know that he’s a good person. We also know that Sonia is the root of all of his issues. But the fact is, he has some shitty moments in that chapter, just as Myra does! His past experiences are not an excuse for that, they’re just an explanation. And, because I know there are people out there who equate accountability with victim blaming, being able to recognize where Eddie went wrong and why he entered into this marriage to begin with is NOT the same as saying he deserved any of his misery. There’s a huge, huge difference between accountability and blame. Holding people, even fictional characters, accountable is a good thing. In the end, Eddie is a very damaged person - an inherently good person, to be sure, but sometimes damaged people who are inherently good can, and often do, create, foster, and contribute to unhealthy relationships. It can’t all be unquestioningly pinned on Myra. 

Anyway, if after all of that you’re still confused as to why some people choose not to use the abuse label, here’s some additional reading:

An amazing breakdown of the entire chapter, using quotes, by @tossertozier

A more recent & shorter breakdown using quotes by @richietozierhateblog 

[janiedean]

Hi! I'm the Plato anon for before. First of, thank you so much for your offer, but I think I managed on me own. Second, could you elaborate on the "analysing as YA" vs "analysing as an adult" approach? I assumed that "discourse people" on this website generally don't go beyond "antagonist is bad because they are against the hero!" out of ignorance/lack of interest except to score Internet Fame Points, not that it was due a specific mindest. I also don't really read YA (except Tiffany Aching)

TIFFANY ACHING!! T_T ANON LET ME HUG YOU it’s like the only YA I actually liked in my entire life apart from nick hornby’s one book but that wasn’t typical lmao

THAT SAID, well your discourse people point is pretty much part of it but since I’m here and I can rant have the entire thing I was too tired to hash yesterday ;) so, in order:

first thing, we need to establish that ya books and **adult** books generally have different target audiences which is fine and good because obviously if you want to write a thing you’ll do that for An Audience That You Have In Mind; this doesn’t mean that adults can’t read ya or that teenagers can’t read **adult books** because everyone can read what they want (and personally for one I never cared for ya in my entire life not even when I was the target audience), but it simply means that some books are meant to be liked by one category first and eventual others later and they need to be talked about in that specific context first and everything else later - then there might be books that are aimed for kids/young readers or sold like that or that can be read on more than one level which can be appreciated for different things later in time (for example I read huck finn at sixteen and I absolutely loved it but it was a book that here is seen as good reading material also for eight year olds, and at eight I wouldn’t have liked it for the reasons I did at sixteen, and if I read it now I would still like it, while a bunch of the books for kids I read when I was seven is stuff I enjoyed then but forgot now and probably was good for that age but didn’t stick with me);

second thing, that means that when I discuss a young adult book aimed at teenagers I will never hold it to the standards I would hold a book aimed at a general adult audience, especially if it’s the kind of ya like dunno as stated the vampire diaries aimed at teenage girls which is obviously the kind where you have the fantasy world with the hot dark guy who swoons the high schooler protagonist off her feet etc because that stuff is basic teenage girl fantasy 101 and like... I’ll expect a bunch of romance tropes, the usual push and pull, the guy eventually being into her, the protagonist being someone a fourteen year-old can see herself in, probably a few sexual elements thrown here and there and so on, because that’s the shit marketed at fourteen year-olds who want to read that and like... it’s really not that deep. I can’t ask the vampire diaries to be moby dick because it’s not meant to be. or, if I read percy j/ackson - which is another thing I have zero interest in but I know about because I see tweets from the author - I expect to have a bunch of teens coming into their own coming from different backgrounds because the author wants to represent properly a lot of categories so most of his readers can have someone they can see themselves in and like if a thirteen year-old who suspects being lgbt or whatever sees themselves in the gay kid from per/cy jackson guess what that’s what that book is for, so I won’t judge it on like... being a faithful representation of greek myths or how good the style is or whatever, because even if to me it’s not top notch writing or has a plot idc about it has to be for teenagers and pre-teens, not for me, a thirty year old who again didn’t even like pre-teen aimed literature when she was a pre-teen;

third, I can extra clarify it using the damned hp discourse, as in: when I say I’m tired of people not reading anything else or reading everything like hp, it means that they read it when they were growing up/were teens and it was aimed at them which is fine, but then twenty fucking years later when the people in question are way beyond their twenties (guys I’m almost 32 and I remember when the first one came out come on) when talking about any single piece of media in existence (movies, comics, other books) use hp characters/situations as the terms of paragon - like guys I had to read sn/ape comparisons with theon and ky/lo ren on the basis that THEY’RE GREY CHARACTERS as if sn/ape is the only grey character that ever existed, people keep on talking about vold/emort as the only bad guy that ever existed and so on, and like... you can’t talk about, idk, asoiaf or any book aimed at an adult audience like you’d talk about hp, because at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if I read comparisons between sn/ape and ivan karamazov and I think I don’t need to specify how completely nonsensical that would be;

now, with all of this explained, what I mean is: ya in general - which is not a fault per se of the genre since it’s aimed at teens and pre-teens - tends to have... very fixed narrative schemes depending on which teens it’s addressing - like, stuff like tvd or twilight is obviously the romance teenage girl fantasy where you have the girl fighting to be with the dark beautiful supernatural creature in question, per/cy jackson is more like I’ll give you a bunch of relatable characters having cool adventures against bad guys with the occasional redemption so we can see that people are redeemable but you still have right vs wrong, hp is sort of like that in the sense you get relatable-ish protagonist with relatable friends growing up throughout the entire thing and fighting on the good side vs the evil side including the usual death of the mentor plus people who seemed bad actually not being bad™ except that PJ has more povs and better rep from what I gather but that’s not the point so it’s basically the growing up journey for the young protagonist(s) the kid sees themselves in, then there’s stuff like hunger games where you actually have the dystopian worldbuilding just written to be enjoyable by younger people who don’t want to get too depressed (and ngl I haven’t read the books but I’ve seen the first two movies and guys the way everyone ignores the classist commentary in thg to discuss the love triangle is... a staple of the problem tbh) but still try to introduce deeper themes and have more nuanced characters and at the same time are still written to be enjoyed maybe by the more adult side of the target, and at the same time I can’t say that thg is the same as 1984 when it comes to target audience because 1984 doesn’t make the ugly dystopian themes more accessible using the love story/teenage protagonist etc;

at this point the problem is: if you only ever read ya and nothing else in your life (which is what a lot of people here do - guys again when I got here in 2011 if people didn’t discuss hp they discussed john gr/een, the only *adult*-aimed book I see discussed on tumblr is asoiaf... because of got X°DDD) then you end up seeing every other piece of literature expecting what you do out of a young adult and then you expect adult literature out of young adults/ya to approach certain implications the way an adult novel would, which is... frankly ridiculous;

specific examples: I see blogs which are principally about like ya fantasy books ie acotar or shadow/hunters or whatever shitting on grrm because AAAAH HE’S PROBLEMATIC/MISOGYNIST/HE HAS VIOLENCE AND RAPE IN THE BOOKS BLAH BLAH and like... spoilers: if I wrote a fantasy series aimed at fourteen year-olds who want their fantasy romance with the hot dark guy who is maybe a tiny bit problematic but turns their leaf for them I would hold back on blood and violence, if I wrote a fantasy for adults where I want to be realistic about misogyny I will not, and the fact that grrm gets judged on what happens and not how he writes it (and again, saying that a guy who has 1/3rd of his pov characters female except that it’s actually 50/50 because there are no throwaway povs except for mel while guys have a lot more of them and all the female povs have narrative weight [and mel has it before she gets one] and all of them have a different personality and he also has the same trope [brienne and arya] in two people with wildly different personalities and needs which is basically a goddamned miracle is a misogynist because there’s misogyny in his fantasy world is ridiculous imvho) which is.... exactly expecting of asoiaf what you’d expect out of acotar, when grrm and acotar’s writer write for wildly different audiences. now, if I had read acotar at 15 and asoiaf at 15 I’d have had no doubt re asoiaf being more my thing because again the subgenre acotar goes for is not my thing because I never related to that fantasy while brienne is my rep, but in general a 14yo girl who likes the acotar-like stuff will not care for grrm.... which is normal because grrm writes for adults of both genders, not teenage girls (I mean teenage boys also have their own subgenres for which the same rules are valid), and someone who likes percy jackson (aimed at both genders but like... pre-teens early teens) who doesn’t gaf for grrm won’t because it’s not aimed at them unless they like grrm for other reasons ie idk they realize that they relate to jon snow idk but you see my point, so like tldr that’s what I mean with if you only read ya you’ll expect adult writers to handle their themes like ya writers would and like... sorry but if I write stuff for adults I won’t feel the need to specify that the bad guy is B A D with neon lights because an adult should grasp that from the narrative, I don’t need to make sure it’s obvious bc it’s aimed at kids;

reverse: when I see people saying ‘the vampire diaries is problematic because it’s about people who are a hundred years old preying on teenage girls so we need to stop teenage girls from reading that kind of thing because it makes them think it’s okay to go with someone that much older than them’, we’re at the opposite problem in the sense that you’re asking a young adult novel what you would ask of AN ADULT NOVEL when there’s no point in it. like, a teenage girl knows perfectly that damon salvatore doesn’t exist and vampires don’t exist and werewolves don’t exist - the entire point of tvd is that she gets to fawn over the hot supernatural dude who changes for the better thanks to the female protagonist she most likely sees herself in and she gets to have a few nice fantasies about that which is like... normal for people who are developing their sexualities, most people wouldn’t actually want damon salvatore the way he’s exactly in canon irl because they know it’s a fantasy and so it should stay. like, sorry but as someone who watched the show because ian somerhalder is hot in her twenties and tried the first book and gave it up at page 30 because I couldn’t do it, I can 100% assure anyone that the biggest issues with tvd books are that the writing is really fucking bad (for my standards at least), with the tvd show that from S4 the writing spiraled downwards and no one wanted the magical vampire pregnancy witch twins ridiculousness, but none of the content actually was shit that anyone would take seriously like that and I wouldn’t expect tvd to approach that subject realistically. if I read a vampire book aimed at adults who actually wants to write such a relationship as creepy WELL YES OF COURSE I’D EXPECT IT TO BE OBVIOUS ABOUT IT BEING CREEPY, but if it’s aimed at freaking teenagers... it’s a fantasy and not really that deep, take it for what it is and let teenage girls enjoy thinking about smooching damon salvatore (or stefan or whoever) without assuming they need to be protected from Horrible Vampire Fiction™, same as no one goes bitching about unrealistic sex scenes in serialized romance books because people read them because they’re unrealistic and escapism, not because they expect nobel prize worthy exploration of themes from them;

now, ^^^^^^ would not happen if people actually read variedly and studied some decent lit analysis in school - but like, after I had to read I think at some point that of mice and men is ableist... THAT’S the damned point - with ya you can take a lot of the plot at face value, with adult lit you can’t and you have to see motivation beyond the action of the characters and you can’t do that if you only read books aimed at pre-teens/teenagers where obviously that’s... more spelled out than it would be in a book aimed at an adult audience;

that by the way also means wildly missing actual adult themes discussion in ya, because again, I haven’t read thg but from the two movies I’ve seen it’s fucking obvious that the whole thing is an anti us-classism commentary from how the districts are built to how the games are rigged to pretty much everything in the worldbuilding, but all the discourse I see on tumblr is about either the love triangle or katniss being miscast or president snow being a jerk and whatever else, but I never once saw anyone saying ‘heeeeey the people in katniss’ district are an in your face metaphor of poor people in the us of a belonging to certain categories while the first few districts are absolutely the 1% and the entire point of it is that she wants to tell you A CLASSIST SOCIETY IS BAD AND WILL LEAD TO REVOLUTIONS’, which to me was... like, glaring, it was literally what 90% of the entire thing was about and no one ever discusses it in a fandom-wide sense (I mean... I saw a bunch of hg posts back when the movies came out, I never saw this brought out), which... is a problem because it means that the moment people are put in front of a ya product that actually tackles that kind of issue.... they go and worry about the love triangle (which seemed to me the excuse to draw the people in the story) not about the social commentary, and like, maybe a twelve year-old won’t catch on the social commentary, a twenty-year old especially from the us should, and I don’t see that happening;

and sorry but that is because if you only engage with content aimed at a younger audience than your target first you assume that every piece of literature should be consumable/readable/enjoyable by a younger audience (and sorry but no, some of us don’t want to write stuff making sure teenagers like it) and then ask of actual ya media to cater to their *adult* needs and not to the needs of the target audience because wow obviously if you’re 25 you won’t want out of literature what you wanted at fourteen;

and this also is valid for children’s media because again, I’m cutting it short, but adults watching st/even universe and sending people death threats because they don’t agree with their opinion of a cartoon aimed at an audience that’s at moooostttt eight years old is a thing that shouldn’t even fucking exist, and if you think steven/universe is that important at an adult age you need to re-assess your priorities;

tldr: adults should not expect media aimed at kids/teens to cater to their interests and shouldn’t analyze it the way they’d analyze a piece of media aimed at an adult audience and should not presume that every piece of media should have the scope/schemes of medias aimed at kids/teens because some of us don’t want to read that.

now, I’ll leave you with a nice short anecdote which hopefully will further clarify what I mean and add to another point which would be, kids and teens don’t give a fuck about what you, an adult, do: when everyone was in a frenzy about my little pony back in 2013 or so I had to see a ton of posts like ‘AAAAAH MEN/BOYS WHO ARE INTO MLP ARE STEALING THE SHOW FROM YOUNG GIRLS HOW DARE THEY ENJOY IT WE NEED TO KICK THEM OUT’ with added people saying that a ten year old male kid who tried to kill himself bc his friends bullied him bc he liked mlp deserved it and the likes, my only thought was that... when I was 8-10 in elementary school and was actually the target for cartoons and stuff, sailor moon was the rage between all girls my age me included, we’d spend recess playing pretend (and I’d get stuck playing sailor mars bc no one wanted her, sad) and our hugest first world problem in existence was that we needed technically a mamoru and of course no self-respecting boy in elementary school would have admitted under death threats to watching sailor moon because it was a girls’ thing (aaaaah gender roles in the early-mid 90s, how fun) so everyone despaired because ofc no one wanted to play mamoru... and the few times any guy actually showed up like HEEEEY I WANNA DO IT BUT PLEASE DON’T TELL MY FRIENDS I LIKE SAILOR MOON we’d all be like OMG YOU’RE OUR NEW FAVORITE PERSON PLEASE YOUR SECRET IS SAFE because we couldn’t believe we found the magical boy™ who wanted to do it, and if anyone had told us that the kid in question was stealing sailor moon from us we’d have laughed in their face.

like.

kids don’t ask of media what you, an adult do, and it’s unfair of you, an adult, to ask children’s/ya media to cater to your damned interests, which are amply catered to by the tons of adult literature around which also forces you to push on your views and read more challenging things and to not read/watch stuff at face value, which is why I would really appreciate it if the amount of 20yo people on here who I consider adults engaged with more adult media and let themselves be challenged instead of just going back to ya/kids’ things, which are good for teens and kids and can be enjoyed by everyone but should not be the only goddamned genre you measure all other literature against because then you get people saying that lolita is pro-pedo when it’s exactly the goddamned contrary, but if you think that pov character = protagonist = good guy (which is... staple kids/ya stuff for obvious reasons) then you decide that humbert humbert is someone you’re supposed to root for. too bad that you’re not and the author was an actual csa victim so it’s a completely ridiculous reading that wouldn’t happen if you didn’t read lolita the way you read hp.

... okay, I’m done, sorry for how long this was, I hope it cleared things for good xD

[jennyboom21]

Same Anon here about the Karlie post question. I actually ship Torlie and it's even nicer to know that they're still friends and have that close bond because they've known each other for a decade but idk why I feel bad for Toni. I mean of course we don't know everything but it looks like Toni shows more love and might even love Karlie more than Karlie does her. And by that I mean affection that can be interpreted as romantic. Of course Karlie loves Toni but one person always loves more.

Hey Anon, sorry for the late reply.  

This is one of those “Grey Gay Situations” where I really want to handle with care without censoring myself, or upsetting folks.

I’d like to get a better handle on Torlie’s break up before I drop my opinion on them, but I don’t think it’ll change much (IMG is the devil, they were too young and too obvious for the suits’ liking).  Your take on Torlie is almost like the flipside of the Swiftgron coin, in regards to dealing with exes, except Swiftgron still have their issues.

I’m a veteran of “unconventional relationships” within the gay community, where you cant really use analogies or properly describe the nuances unless it’s with someone who has that experience (hence my fairly liberal view with Taylor and her exes).  Some girls can be friends with their exes, some can’t.  It depends on the nature of their relationship, what was at stake, and why it ended.  Torlie seemingly has no Bad Blood, whilst the Swiftgron “friendship” ended abruptly.  Toni and Karlie both have new girlfriends who they are in love with, this shouldn’t erase their past loves.  Nor should there be fandom infighting over who loves who “more”, that’s not how relationships work.

“Of course Karlie loves Toni but one person always loves more.” --> I’m pretty sure I “get” what you’re trying to convey, since one of my mantras when it comes to Swiftgron is that “everyone has their person..”.  Unfortunately, unless you’ve been a closeted (or glass closeted) serial dater, or have dated “straight” women who cheat on their male partner with you, it’s a pretty complicated situation to even attempt to explain to young adults, let alone young gays.  I’d suggest that there is an intimate connection that’s hard to shake when you’ve reached sexual and gay emotional maturity, then fall in love with a girl.  I’ve been there done that, and I’d like to think I’m not the only one who’s went through the turbulence of a first love as a closeted or questioning gay.

I think “first loves” should be protected and respected, we don’t know the specifics of what was happening behind bedroom doors, but it’s clear; Taylor and Karlie’s exes had a profound affect on them, and helped with their paths towards their current partners.

Toni is with Shelby and happy!

Dianna is with Molly and happy!

Taylor is with Karlie and happy! 

Let the gals have their high/low key interactions with their exes. My ex with a bf still texts me when he fucks up, but it helps that I used to be a “fixer”, so I know my role and I stay in my lane.

[nxrbl-praise]

16) I know I shouldn't care what people think of me here but...

Its really not that I’m some kind of sexual pervert who is horny all the time. I really need something that will just…idk… make me feel wanted?.. important?…I guess help to make me feel complete. I hate that I had to explain that even though no one asked.. but I easily feel when people change how they act after I say or do something, and I get a little sad because it was going so well at first and everything just seems to degrade and turn to shxt. Ugh, too many entropic losses.

I still don’t feel like I get to properly express myself even with this medium. Idk what I need to do. Suddenly got the idea to skinny dip as I write this. That may be an idea…

I’m really looking for someone to understand me and take me for me with all my nuances. I care how people perceive me, I wanted to be acceptable. I’ve felt outcast a lot in life and it would be nice to belong and become homogeneous.