#the idea of Uncle Barney can be interesting if you are not illiterate actually

[angels-heap]

Not tacking this onto my last reblog out of respect for OP and their notifications, but their excellent post (and my own recent visit with a "family friend" uncle) helped me put my finger on my specific issue with 95% of “Uncle Barney” headcanons.

Like, I am guilty of Uncle Barney crimes. To this day, I am continuing to perpetrate Uncle Barney crimes. I don’t hate the idea of Barney and Alyx having been close for much of her life. To be clear, there is zero canon evidence suggesting that this is the case, but I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this headcanon. What I don’t like, though, is the way so many people who aggressively headcanon this relationship also conceptualize Alyx as some sort of naive forever-child, trapped in a state of arrested development where she still relates to Barney (and/or Dr. Kleiner, her canonical pseudo-uncle) like she would have at age 12. I am begging y'all to please stop infantilizing this poor woman.

A lot of the appeal of Uncle Barney (to me) is the opportunity to explore the ways Alyx’s relationship with an adult family friend would change over the course of her life. What was it like for her to come of age as one of the youngest people on Earth and slowly become peers with people she used to see as authority figures? What can she learn about herself, the people around her, and the situation they’re in when the older generation finally stops censoring themselves around her? How many of her childhood experiences might be suddenly re-contextualized by new information from her older friends? In a pre-HLA timeline, how does the untimely death of her father, her last living biological relative, affect her relationships with other "family" members?

I would love to see more people explore these kinds of questions in fanworks, instead of just having Alyx around to squeal “eew! gross!” when the male characters make out, act like they are her dads when she is canonically very close to her actual literal dad, or ask them questions about things that any reasonably intelligent 24-year-old could figure out on her own.

C'mon, folks. We can do better than this.