//reads the fine print first
//looks up at the thread title
............ I think you're safe here. :laugh:
But see they weren't talking about underaged PWP. They were talking about all fanfic. Even fics of characters that were all adults, even family-related fics, even totally innocent fluff fics. Their argument was that fandom should be a place for children only. That adults have no place in it at all (which...I wonder if that includes the people who originally made the series cuz, like you said, adults write all that stuff) and that any adult who insisted upon writing it were...well, you get the idea.
..... They... I don't think they realize that fandom exists as long as people exist that are fans of something. Sports fans are majority grown adults that want their team to win. That's a fandom, even if fans of it aren't writing fics about Tom Brady or whoever, or making "aesthetic" "moodboards" about it on Tumblr. That can't be "kids-only". Who do they think takes the kids to the games to watch their favorite players?
There's a decently sized area where people can admit that certain topics don't belong in a work without a mass ban of 18+ people from the community. Will I roll my eyes if a work geared toward children has a contingent of adults looking to make it needlessly dark? Of course. I don't think anyone that still enjoys Sonic the Hedgehog unironically would be served with a fic of "Tails suddenly goes insane and uses a gun to shoot Sonic" or "Cream gets violated by Dr. Robotnik/Dr. Eggman/whatever his name is". Some concepts are simply incompatible with a work, and fans of those topics could be better served by going to another work and putting their fic in there where stuff is in-character. It's like if Game of Thrones fansites were clogged with people wishing that the setting was more futuristic and had less dragons in it, or wanting X-Men but "without all the mutants, that's just unrealistic". Where do they think they are?
But maybe I should stop rolling my eyes so much. Anyway,
I'm sort of standing on the opposite side of the field. I used to be in the "Let people write what they want" crowd, then too many people showed that they A) can't write worth a damn and B) can't stand being told that, because they seem unaware that "fic writer" is not a "get out of trouble free" card and that things they write can be criticized without it constituting a personal attack on their character. It's like they never lived through having their character called a Mary Sue and getting copy-pasted flames in their reviews. But I could take up a whole nother post about the irony of people who write about "serious subjects" being incredibly thin-skinned and expecting nothing less than sugarcoating.
But no one's gonna question your motives and qualifications if you write about dragons or giant robot cats or adventures in new worlds. And it's not really fair to judge the many who have innocent reasoning, or those who have never touched writing a delicate subject in their life, based on the few writers who are just sucky people.
Part of that is because the things you mentioned don't exist in reality. They don't have "official characteristics", just "popular ones", and aren't beholden to real life in order to not break the immersion of the reader. It just has to "sound plausible" and keep consistency within the work. Real life subjects that affect real people, well, affect real people and can be referenced when judging the quality of the writing, and for good reason. It's the Information Age. If anyone wants to write about a subject that actually happens in life and they don't have any real world experience on it, they can Google or YouTube how that topic works instead of churning some nonsense out. They'll get caught out by someone with experience and they'll only fool people as dumb on the topic as they are. Not even a virgin would be caught dead writing a smut fic where it's obvious they don't know what parts go where or what lube is, unless they were going for troll fic.
So yeah. Not many fans of fantasy get their undies in a knot about the "proper way" to write dragons, because dragons don't actually exist and their details can be altered from story to story. Example: Monster Hunter World has sold enough copies that it's safe to say no one gives a flying duck that "Elder dragons" look less like dragons and more like lions, unicorns, snakes, or possibly a carnivorous pickle. If people are upset at Twilight because "vampires are written wrong", there's likely a vampire fan even more hardcore than they are, and that fan is upset that
Bram Stoker "bastardized" the "real lore" on vampires because vampires written in the
1600s weren't even supposed to look like humans and were actually extradimensional demons and Bram's version is wildly inaccurate in comparison, or something like that.
So authors can go on about dragons, elves, orcs, vampires, unicorns, whatever, as long as they keep it to fantasy. But if they want to do fic about a character being a hardcore heroin addict or something actually based in reality, they're gonna have to know how drug addiction works to not break the immersion, or risk getting called an absolute exploitative hack. Example: Stephenie Meyer trying to "scientifically" explain werewolves via "extra chromosomes" when people know extra chromosomes cause birth defects, not lycanthropy. She could've just said "magic did it" and gotten less flak. Fact is there are plenty of other subjects to tackle or ways to explain them that are both "less work to write" and "more enjoyable to read".
Anyway, adults not being in fandoms about adult characters or G-rated works? Weird. It only makes sense on the subject of time: the most dedicated adult fans have to
make time to produce content when they're not dealing with responsibilities, and kids generally have more time and less responsibilities to write on the weekends anytime they don't have homework and/or during summer vacation or any vacation. ......... I shouldn't have to put a disclaimer here that it doesn't apply to 100% of all kids ever. But still. Okay. This would make even
more sense if minors in fandom didn't emulate or consult adults on anything for whatever reason, but that's impossible. Since adults have produced a lot of the original content that kids consume (videogames, books, shows, most entertainment), the tropes in them are likely adult-invented, so when it's time for kids to create content in fandom, they're just going to regurgitate what an adult did or any twists on adult-created tropes are based off another thing which inevitably is tied to something an adult made, on and on. And for young authors that want to be taken seriously and write well because they actually strive to be an author someday, they need to talk to someone who knows, which is.... an adult. The only way to avoid that is to have had them grow up with 0 entertainment at all that's been touched by an adult, which would leave too few works.
