😛

Okay, let’s dial it back a bit then. If a 28 year old model puts a nametag on that says “I’m 8 years old”, does it suddenly become pedophilia? It might be a bit “what are you doing that for” but she doesn’t become a child.

If an adult couple, with full consent, engage in Teacher-Student roleplay, does that implicate them in a crime because a real student and real teacher situation is fucked up and unethical?

If I wrote a book where a character’s age was not revealed, and then at the end of the book it suddenly became clear that this character had been a child the whole time, perhaps I’m a shitty author, but it doesn’t suddenly mean every reader goes straight to jail.

All I’m saying is that if you’re going into the works because you know there’s child content, and that’s what you’re into, then that’s bad. But it’s bad that you’re into that anyway.

And if a work is trying to attract attention from those people, then they’re probably not good works for other people.

But if you’re not interested in children, and a character says they’re a teenager, but they don’t remind you of any teenagers you’ve ever met in your real life, it’s easy to go “okay sure whatever” and continue to not connect the idea of this character with real “teenageness”. In the same way that shows can have dragons or laser eyes or flying cars, I can go “okay this person is a Fantasy Teenager, who is for all intents and purposes an adult. Got it”

Now, that’s not to say I’ve never seen something and gone “hmm, this isn’t for me”. That’s totally a thing! There can still be taste, and there can still be plotlines that are cringe, or just plotlines I don’t enjoy in general. And I think it’s fair to think “huh… the author could have picked any age… why did they pick this age”, and maybe that’s enough to take someone out of enjoying a work entirely. Nothing wrong with that.