#and bart is typically intended to be this adult in fanfics

[transhoverfish]

I FOUND IT

Like I get where this person is comming from but when Ryley landed on 4546B Bart would be 29

I think that the game made it very clear that the Degasi crashed a decade before Aurora and Bart was 19 at that time.. which means (in combination of Subnautica lore and math) that IF Bart survived the 10 long years he would obviously age up

Maybe reading the PDAs is something that should be done even if you wouldn't get addicted to the game... just saying🤷🏻‍♀️

[I just remembered that I saw someone on Instagram ranting about how shipping Ryley and Bart is weird (or 'fucked up', I don't remember exactly what they said) because Ryley is like 25-30 or something like that and Bart is 19 and I was like "do your math pls" So yeah... I ended up laughing for like 5 minutes (Too bad I didn't take a screenshot)]

yeah ok i get the concern here but like yeah as you said!! this isnt like one of those "taking a 15yo and aging them up to 18 to make them legal", bart's already 19, and he's 19 a DECADE before the events of the game, including any possibility of meeting ryley.

assuming ryley is 25-30 - which his age is never mentioned either, so for all we know, ryley could be 19 himself!! - but we're gonna assume he's 22-30 based on his job, general appearance and maturity in a high stress situation. in the ten years that pass between bart and ryley EVER crossing paths, bart would be 26-31, give or take a few years for that mentioned decade to be possibly rounded.

bart could be OLDER than ryley for all we know. worse case, these guys can't have more than like, maybe a 6 year age gap. and that's entirely dependent on someone's personal reading of ryley. his age is NEVER mentioned or hinted at. the youngest he could be is 18. oldest maybe 40. but who's to say?? it's never brought up!

taking the decade jump into account though,, yeah ryley and bart are like the same age. they're probably within 5 years of each other, both in their late twenties by the events of sub1. its just the time skip between the degasi and aurora that creates this weird "Bart's 19, Ryley's 26" mentality.

like an example off the top of my head would be like, saying you cant ship nathan drake with chloe because they show nate as a kid a couple of times. kind of arbitrary.

but on the other hand, yeah, i guess this ship is founded on bart's 19 year old personality. which is weird at face value now that im thinking about it. but even then, ryley doesn't have a personality to begin with, outside survival knowledge. and bart clearly isn't some super naive child; he goes through some massive maturing character development just over the span of the months the degasi were all alive. bart can clearly take care of himself and speak up on problems, and we don't know if he had another birthday after the crash or not. we don't know exactly how long the degasi were there! or how long they had been in space prior! bart could have been 20 when he died, he was definitely an adult by that point. young, but cmon.

if anybody is shipping bart in degasi era, where he's like explicitly 19, ie shipping him with marg, then YEAH thats obviously a problem. but ryley/bart is, in my experience, almost always written in a bart lives story where he spends 10 more years maturing before being introduced to ryley.

they're,,,, they're the same age. almost always, if theres some odd story out there making it not always, expressly written where bart is nearly 30, making him typically older than ryley. the central idea with this person's take is that bart is not, and should not, be written as his Recent Post-Crash self. bart is Post Reaper Incident, and gets added several more years on top of that. i think it's a misconstruction on the lore/fandom ideas of ages, but otherwise not a horrible thing to point out ig??

(some of the bart ships DEFINITELY NEED TO BE LOOKED INTO. ryley is like, the most tame option, and thankfully why its likely the most popular!)