BLM | Dev | 28 | White | Nonbinary (Ze/They/He) | Queer; Demi | INFP-T | Aquarius | US | a gay dorky butt lord, at your service c: I do commissions btw~
not to make posts that are going to get me anon hate, but I am fucking begging people to stop calling fictional characters “minors.” can we please go back to talking about fictional characters as children or teenagers. please.
first of all, “minor” is a word that has a meaning and that meaning isn’t necessarily “children in the general sense.” it is in fact a really specific legal term. it is a status that grants a group of vulnerable people protection by the law. so, as fake people who don’t exist and therefore have zero protections by law, a fictional character cannot be a minor. a fictional character is fictional.
Also, in the sense of those real-world protection laws, sure, it makes sense to group together newborns through 18-year-olds. but doing so is genuinely completely fucking useless when talking about a narrative. “This is a story where the main character is a minor!!!!” you could be talking about Bluey you could be talking about The Catcher In The Rye you could be talking about Yellow Jackets. I don’t know how else to express that story about a 7-year-old, a story about a 12-year-old, and a story about a 17-year-old are are, structurally, completely different things despite all being about “minors,” and how grouping them together makes no sense. it’s reductive at best and destructive at worse. Imagining sitting down and being like “oh yeah, let’s look for a story about minors to recommend to minors” and you hand children’s picture book No, David! to a high school senior.
what bullshit scare tactic language. “yikes, you’re shipping minors” and the ship is two 17-year-olds who the narrative treats as active parts of the story who make their own decisions and have their own desires. when did we all agree to start talking like this and can we stop. just fucking tell me if a character is a child or a teenager.
i feel like people forget that sometimes characters in fic are written like that because it’s a reflection of real life.
people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without ‘enough’ prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.
and none of this is really a fantasy. it’s all pretty normal. you can feel that it’s inappropriately normalised, and you’d probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they’d never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they’d only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)
even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don’t go too far’ is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you’re talking to has the same metric for 'too far’ that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out’ is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it’s a request that the person they’re speaking to take out the trash.
even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel’ statements.
pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they’re leaning into the vibe, or they just didn’t think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.
fiction isn’t intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible ways to live your life, and fanfic isn’t any different. it’s not a narrative flaw to let characters do things that are messy or harmful or downright stupid—it’s a reflection of what people are actually like, and not something that authors should feel they have to apologise for.
i am obsessed, in the most derogatory way possible, with the people in the notes who are reading this post and then saying, well, those stats you’re pointing at are why you have to make it clear in fiction that they’ve had a conversation about Consent And Safety. if you don’t tell people to use condoms, if you don’t tell people that it’s not ok to choke someone without prior consent, if you don’t tell people that they have to do these things Correctly, you’re part of the problem.
so i will say it again: fiction is a reflection of life, but it is not real life. fiction does not have to set a good example. fiction does not have to be safe, sane, or consensual.
fiction isn’t intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible way to live your life. if you read it looking for that, you are the problem.
I’m suprised no one posted this here yet. An interesting interview about what could have been if it was an adult show ( quote from the article):
“If it was an older show, it absolutely would have been Danny hanging on to his mortal coil for both selfish reasons and the people he loved,” Marmel continues. “But [when you’re making a] kids’ show you don’t want to go, ‘Hey kids! Good morning! Here’s mortality!’ Butch has his own backstory — it’s in the song! — and that’s canon. But in my head, it allowed me to write Danny with a little more depth than just, ‘I’m inexperienced and sometimes dumb!’ No, you’re grabbing life by the horns because you’ve already experienced what it’s like to not be a part of it.”
Just a little something to get to know your Rook. It’s Veilguard themed, but you could use it for any Dragon Age OC! Included in the download is a blank PSD and a filled out example. If you find any issues or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Enjoy! :)
