#fictional age discourse

[xanderscollection]

"Growing up is realising a (random ship) you loved is actually weird and bad"

Yeah? Is it? Great, I love it even more. The worse it is the Better.

[fabled-lady-twilla]

How it feels being a ShigaDeku shipper in this fandom. Why is everyone so mean? 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[steamedlotusroot]

as a native chinese, i feel like some of yall are taking the gods in lego monkie kid a bit too seriously. i understand why it feels iffy to ship / make silly content of deities that people worship irl (eg. nezha, sun wukong) but it’s a phenomenon on chinese social media too. c-netizens ship the fictionalized versions of these gods, which the gods of lego monkie kid are. they aren’t the actual gods people worship; they’re slightly tweaked versions of the book characters, just like any other chinese adaptation or retelling of jttw (and such stories like fsyy) also, no, nezha isn’t a child, in lmk or jttw or sometimes irl. just because he’s often depicted in child form doesn’t make him an immortal child. eros / cupid is often depicted as a winged baby, and he has a wife and kids. it’s basically the same thing here. nothing in lmk suggests that nezha is a child (his voice, his appearance, his personality etc. all imply he is an adult), and while he’s described as youthful in jttw, he’s already 1700+ years old by then and gods can shapeshift. people only think he’s an immortal baby because that’s a popular depiction of him, since one of his prominent myths is set during his childhood. but as long as you’re talking about the god nezha (fictionalized or the religious figure) and not the human child nezha, then that’s an adult [edit: the last sentence couldve been worded better. i would summarize it as “immortal youth nezha is a valid depiction and is popularized by mythology, but adult god nezha exists too and they are NOT mutually exclusive”]

[420technoblazeit]

i keep seeing people make the argument that hobie's WAY older than gwen and pavitr despite the fact that they're all really close friends in the movie. and i get that there's no canon established age for him in atsv yet but let's be honest. it's because he's black and miles is 'less threatening' than him isn't it

[vilsoo]

my mutuals (majority that had bigger blogs) have all been dropping like dead flies because of a toxic, pathetic writer on this app that drove all them off. rip to munsonsins, getoswhore, kazushawty, literally everyone. and those that have heen affected yet still continue to stay on this app, i hope you’re all doing fine. but these ppl were driven off all because of jealousy reasons, false plagiarism accusations, death threats, cyberbullying, you fucking name it. we lose so much good works and genuine people on here that created their own platforms for the purposes of consuming fanfiction/writing fanfiction 😐 but since they were being dragged into discourse with a certain someone on this app, it’s crazy how their followers dickride the shit out of that thing and send hate/death threats to them through anon like wowww. 😹

[watcher0033]

Great take on the Hobbie Age discourse!!!

Honestly it should be like this instead of some moral posturing that strip off the agency and personalities of the characters and casually throwing out heavy-loaded words like a huge stick picked out from the ground and waving it around as if it couldn’t poke somebody’s eye out and be an all around kill joy about it.

Ugh.

Not to mention there’s multiple sources who have said Hobie’s 15 (Phil Lord), 19-20 (some of the animation crew), and his canonical comic age is 16-17. And apparently PunkFlower already has a cult following SINCE their comic era so there’s that too.

On the other hand, I can’t help but laugh at the meta-comedic aspect of it all that of everyone, even his own creators, trying to put a label on a character who has claimed his dislike for said labels and doesn’t believe in consistency.

Da Powarh, Ser.

Cannot be contained, refuses to be contained. 🫡

Meta-humor aside, I completely agree with your essay there. I think the age discourse happened not just because of shipping reasons but also for the fact that he looked ambiguously older but still have more prominent bonds with the teenage-Spiders that the Adults— which should already be telling, c’mon.

But there’s also the fact that harsh experiences ages a person. Grief, stress, and depression affects people physically and not just mentally. Like, just look at Miles-42 with his harsher facial lines and overall “mature” look compared to our Miles. Look at the world he’s living in, the grief that he’s surely carrying about his father’s death.

We describe him as a darker version of Miles but we did not uniformly conclude that he’s older than him, or that he’s a more troubled adult version of himself now, did we?

Apply that same logic to Hobie with his surely troubled background of young teen vigilantism and political activism and the effects it had on him over the years, and that’s the chai honestly.

Thing is Hobie's age could add to the tragedy of his story because every spiderman story where the spiderhero is a teenager and has to risk their life to keep thousands or millions of people safe because of an incompetent safety system and capitalist greed is tragic. Why should a high schooler bear the responsibility of what hundreds of grown adults should be doing, and why does a high schooler need to be the one to clean up their messes and mistakes? And then that high schooler will have grown adults trying to kill them, entire police forces trying to arrest them, news media smearing their name, strangers always trying to take pictures or expose their identity, and always always always the uncertainty of family acceptance at the end of it all.

So with Hobie (bear in mind i don't know much about him) if he's really 16-17 in Across the Spiderverse, that means he's already been through a lot of the same shit that nearly every other spidey had to go through but at a younger age probably (and that Gwen was able to avoid and that Miles is trying to prevent). I didn't get the sense that he'd just come from a massive tragedy when we saw him in the movie. If he's had a police chief close to him die or be killed (by him maybe, idk) that's a lot for a kid to go through. Every other spidey offering advice to Miles was an adult. I'm not saying their Uncle Bens or Police Chief Scenarios weren't as bad, but they don't have the same freshness with it, you know? It's been years, maybe even decades.

Versus if he's on the older side, like 19 to 20, there's been more time to process, i think. More hindsight, more growth, which might give Hobie the best idea out of all of them of what Miles is about to go through because it hasn't been too long, but it's still fresh enough on his mind that he's got a semi-healed rawness that others might not (plus him being anti establishment/the "fuck canon" character would also make him want to help miles).

[anaphoraholic]

instagram antis r a different breed 💀 first of all the "you cant just change a character to accommodate to your liking" thing is so sad to me.. have u no imagination?? no whimsy or joy?? allow urself to partake in fiction..

second, why do they want other people to be pedos so bad???? this whole comment section was talking ab how still having a crush on a younger cartoon character as an adult is the same thing as pedophilia....which...it is not 😭 saying that someone still giggling over their old childhood cartoon crush as an adult is the same as being attracted to ACTUAL children is a CRAZY take

one thing ab cartoons is that they don't resemble real people? they are very obviously stylized and unrealistic 2-dimensional drawings, and they usually don't look to be any particular age (a 15 and 30 yr old could look the same age depending on the style; in some cases, the 30 yr old may even look more youthful). anyways. my point is that being attracted to a 2d cartoon with cat ears, inhuman proportions and gigantic purple eyes (which typically don't even resemble a realistic human eye) is not the same as being attracted to a real, 3-dimensional human child.

[rafyki]

I really can't understand why, but there's so much useless discourse in the pjo fandom - about ships, about interpretation of characters, about headcanons, and all stuff like that. Like, are most people in this fandom unable to have fun?

I mean, I've been in the fandom for ten years now, and (maybe it was bc back in the day I was in the Italian fandom) but back then there wasn't this much discourse???

Please, just learn to have fun, that's literally what fandoms are made for

[sekaithemystic]

as veilguard approaches and the dragon age fandom finally wakes up after years of slumbering, discourses have been going around as well and this is my state of mind while i navigate through the minefield of this fandom

[maedelin]

Just wondering, folks. Have you ever considered, with all the lives and thoughts in Rogue's head, she's lived centuries more than him? I mean, since that seems to be an extremely large part of the argument I'm seeing. I just don't understand. No one argues about this with pretty much every other character set out there. Thor/Quite a few of the Terrans he's loved, Steve/Anyone that is from the Silent Generation (Pre-1928) and on, RoLo, Mystique/Maybe anyone and everyone at this point, IDK how old she is. Or...

[bitchy-peachy]

I really wish that antis stopped using real life sa victims in their shit especially since they tell real life sa victims that we deserved our assaults cos we all handle our trauma differently.

[heroes-never-discourse]

How to immediately lose me in your critique of a fantasy story involving a monster x human romance: Bringing up a 100+ age gap as a legitimate problem within the relationship.

Like what are we doing here, why are we talking about impossible age gaps as if it's a genuine concern. Who are we trying to protect. Get a grip please.

[54prowl]

more female villains?

god forbid women commit manslaughter?

you can't even handle Makima's existence what do you mean 'be gay do crime' huh??

[shrimpmandan]

ngl it's funny as fuck to me how the enjoyment of fanfiction, ships, selfships, fanart, etc. that happens to incidentally involve an underage character is always positioned by antis as a CLEAR and OBVIOUS sign of pedophilia when like 99% of the time when I see people with that kinda stuff bookmarked or publicly endorsed it's literally just bc they glanced at the tags and went "eh whatever, it's hot anyways" and stopped caring because that's what. normal people do

[yellowjckets]

people being mad nat died from an overdose like … she didn’t actually overdose that’s the tragedy of it! also … we KNOW misty kills with fentanyl she steals from her job, it’s been established multiple times! like that’s the tragedy of it all. she’d finally got clean & she was finding a purpose again … it’s exactly how it was going to happen.

[an-entity-i-think]

*sees something really annoying and stupid and Purity Culture*

*clicks on their profile*

- age: 16 -

"Ah. You are young and have time to grow. Its not your fault that you are surrounded by poison in our current media that confuses fiction with real life. I wish you well, friend."

*blocks profile and moves on with no interaction*