#anyone who's skeeved out by one HL ship to the point of harassing people but gives the other one a free pass

[angels-heap]

My parents have a 11 year age gap and they're doing just fine! I've never really seen it as a problem. If people are portraying the ship as unhealthy when the relationship itself isn't unhealthy then that's an issue with the people drawing out the ship and not the ship

If it ain't your cup of tea just blacklist it and ignore it (given that it's not an inherently harmful ship). This just goes for any ship really

I've never understood shipping discourse when people are allowed to like what they wanna like (again, given that the ship in question isn't harmful)

Good for your parents! And thanks for sharing your perspective on this.

What’s really funny about ship discourse in the HL fandom in particular is that (a) the whole stasis situation means that shipping Gordon with anyone will entail some kind of technical and/or literal age gap, and (b) people who create fanworks of any ships involving Gordon tend to depict them in a very healthy, nuanced, self-aware way. Hell, exploring the consequences of the stasis/temporal displacement thing is arguably half the appeal of both popular ships. 

I know a lot of the folks who are suddenly freaked out about age gaps between adult HL characters are traumatized kids who have experienced and/or witnessed problematic relationship dynamics on- or offline, and I feel for them, but attacking fan content creators is not a productive way to process that trauma, nor is it helping victims of abuse find peace. If we’re really going to take this so seriously, we ought to remember that age gaps become exponentially less problematic the older you get, age gaps are not inherently problematic when everyone’s an adult, and even unhealthy relationships with age gaps are not necessarily unhealthy because of those age gaps (though that certainly doesn’t help).

Plenty of real-life couples have perfectly healthy relationships despite 10+ year age gaps. Zero real-life couples are dealing with that age gap because one of them was in sci-fi stasis for two decades. Shipping adult HL characters is not going to cause real-world harm, especially given how well most fan content creators handle the issue.