#ageup — Public Fediverse posts

Media: Characters canonically grow up and become adults at the end.

Vocal minority: OMG NOO You can't sexuality them even when using their post time skip designs. They were children for the entire series, just cause they were adults in the epilogue doesn't mean they are suddenly adults now!! We've only got to know them as kids, so you're sexualizing their child selves and calling them adults!

Inhale

Look. First of all, people can create their own headcanons of characterization for the grown up characters, based on the character arcs and individual growth through the narrative. That's part of the point with epilogues, to give the fans a playground to imagine what's next. And what's next is the characters exploring adulthood.

Second, the characters we grew to know over the course of the material are not real children. And I'm not saying that just because obviously a fictional character isn't real in that they don't think or feel. I mean that in how your precious little blorbos were written by adults and reviewed by adults for the sake of your entertainment, not for realism. The characters could have intense research put into them through studies of how kids act and behave, plus memories from the creator's on childhood. But if they were truly accurate to how kids behaved, you'd be stuck watching dumb ass characters making the same insufferable mistakes over and over again, being stubborn, hardly ever learning a god damn thing because children lack the mental development of critical thinking and social awareness to make those charismatic world saving actions you see in media. But alas those fictional children are capable of those overwhelmingly mature and adult actions because they are written by adults who have already gone through those lessons. And now they have to slap a younger age onto said characters and setting to make them easier for the target audience to project onto.

And lastly, let's say in a piece of media, they manage to portray a character completely accurate as a minor without any subconscious influence as an adult writer. That there wasn't even any epilogue to show the character had grown up and became an adult. And people still choose to sexualize the character. Aged up or not. So what? That character isn't real. They can't feel pain or distress outside of scripted events an author writes them into. Consequences of actions are as permanent as the undo button. You could traumatize them over and over, write the character in a villain au where the character has killed many. Then open up a new document and imagine that same character saving a kitten and bringing it home to their wholesome found family in an everyone lives AU where no one has any sad thoughts ever. A person can create any fan content they please, and no one can suffer from it in any meaningful way due to every aspect of space, time, and chance being predetermined and ever shifting based on the whims of a single individual.

And when that individual shares their thoughts through creation to the world, their only responsibility is to give the creation the appropriate identifying labels. So that way, even if after everything, after projecting your own thoughts and scripted scenarios onto a character you don't even own, you feel so deeply connected that you feel visceral disgust when seeing someone else portray a popular character in a way that attacks your own personal view, the work at least will be appropriately labeled so you can avoid it.

You don't want to be exposed to how these people choose to portray characters who've been depicted as minors in a piece of media, so don't shove your own portrayal down their throats either.

#proship #profic #ageup #fandomdiscourse