Zee made me post this.

[schmerica]

Dear fandom, sometimes people are a) immature b) bitchy or c) wanky. Surprisingly enough, there is no direct correlation between this and being under 18. Seriously, you deal with underage people ALL THE FREAKING TIME, and you don't know it, because we don't choose to tell you. Most people CAN'T TELL, and that's FINE. If you do have the emotional maturity to deal with fandom reasonably, and you don't broadcast your age and make it into a issue for list owners and such, nobody SHOULD care.

(Less life experience CAN mean more wankiness, but you know what? That's usually if you are a person prone to it anyway. Other people just keep getting worse and worse about the longer they go on. Seriously, there's a certain type of kerfuffle-raising that's a skill; you get better at it with time.)

I have to admit, too, that when I entered fandom as a teenager (after I started college, but before I was legal for anything), one of the things I absolutely loved about it was its age-blindness. On the internet, what matters is how you present yourself and how you act that matters, not your age. At 17, it is kind of amazing to be able to strike up discussions and friendships with people anywhere from your own age to three decades older than you and have none of them automatically, without even thinking, treating you like a silly kid.

Signed with love and frustration,
Pearl-"I Was a Baby Fangirl and I Lived to Tell About It!"-o

Comments

[vee-fic.livejournal.com]

My interaction with the underage of fandom is a form of voluntary blindness: if your actions do not scream out your teenagerhood with every character you type, then I can pretend/assume you are an adult. If not, then it's just a question of whether I hold out hope for your becoming an adult someday, or whether I discover that you are, in fact, 42, and are still hung up on the mean girls in high school.

[kudra2324.livejournal.com]

or whether I discover that you are, in fact, 42, and are still hung up on the mean girls in high school.

ah, yes. i think it's those discoveries that are the most alarming.