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bettsfic · 6 years

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Hey so like...how do u justify romanticising a minor/adult relationship bc as a minor it kinda makes me uncomfortable. You’re an amazing writer, I just don’t quite get why you chose the age gap

before i address your question directly, and i will, i want to point out a few things that confuse me about this ask.

first, the admission of being a minor with the implication you’ve read my work, and now outright interacting with me. i’ve written maybe half a dozen g- and t-rated fics, and none of them are particularly popular, which i’m guessing means you’ve read my explicit fics, which means you’ve clicked past Ao3′s polite “18+ only” warning. my apologies if this assumption is incorrect – maybe you really have only read my three or four gen/teen-rated fics. that just seems very unlikely to me because all of my more popular fics are mature and explicit.

now, while admitting you are a minor made uncomfortable by minor/adult relationships, you have directly approached me, a 29 year old woman, to ask me why i’ve made the choices i’ve made. granted, by going on anon, you’ve ensured that this is a public forum, but if you’d PM’d me, i wouldn’t have responded, because i am not here to interact with minors.

which brings me to my conclusion of this portion of the ask, which is: i am not writing for minors and i do not want to interact with minors. i can’t control what you read or don’t read and it’s absolutely not my responsibility to cater to you in any way, especially if you knowingly and voluntarily click past the 18+ warning. but i can control my personal interactions, and i urge you not to reach out to me again.

next i’m going to nitpick the word “romanticize” which is a word heavy in the current moral rhetoric. literally speaking, you are right. i am making an age gap romance romantic. rhetorically speaking, to “romanticize” something means to flatten or gloss over it, sweep potential consequences under the rug. to romanticize abuse, for example, is to make it beautiful, to ignore all the trauma and pain that comes along with it. (i think it is a worthy artistic endeavor to attempt to romanticize abuse in fiction, if for only the ability to highlight how fucked up abusive relationships can feel in the moment, but that’s a rant for another time).

since you haven’t read training wheels, i can tell you outright i am not romanticizing a minor/adult relationship. there are certainly unrealistic/porny moments, but i’m not shying away from the actual emotional consequences of being a 17yo* girl dating a 25yo man. i’m doing my best to depict this relationship the way these relationships are actually felt, because they do happen, and i have been in them. they can be very romantic, but that doesn’t mean i’m romanticizing them. though we’re not in his pov, bellamy is acutely aware of the greater context of their relationship. and clarke, who has no context, is doing her best to navigate the difficulty of her situation, semi-aware that it’s something that will be haunting her for a long, long time.

i am not beautifying the ugliness of their relationship; i am not fetishizing (another word i take issue with) the minor body. being in clarke’s pov means that bellamy is object of desire, and meanwhile we get, through clarke’s thoughts, the sometimes awkward and confusing realization of what it means to be wanted, loved, used, seen, broken, trespassed, and all the other things teenage girls sometimes have to navigate.

and i have one more thing to say before i answer your actual question: you are allowed to be uncomfortable reading fiction. in fact, i think you should be uncomfortable reading fiction. all art should make us uncomfortable, because in discomfort lies broader awareness. by consuming things which push at the boundaries of our narrow reality, we are capable of widening that reality, and that’s what it means to learn and grow and become the people we want to be. you cannot become a better, stronger, wiser person without facing and overcoming that which makes you uncomfortable.

i also resent a bit the implication that i, a fanfic writer, a queer woman, am beholden to appeasing your comfort when straight white male writers are not. i assume you’re not sending jroth letters about how murphy’s sex slavery arc in s3 made you uncomfortable. or that the entire premise of the show revolves around putting a hundred minors in a ship and dropping them onto a potentially lethal planet. or raven, a teenager, sleeping with bellamy, an adult, in s1. and that’s not even mentioning the violence perpetuated against minors in the show. they die! and they bleed! like, a lot!! charlotte, a 12yo girl, dies a gruesome death in s1. they are minors forced to kill or be killed in exceedingly violent ways, and you’re in my inbox asking why i’m writing a fic that depicts a loving and consensual relationship between a 17yo (clarke’s canonical age in s1) and a 25yo.

now i’ll answer your actual ask.

you use the word “justify” as if i had to do some kind of logistical puzzle to make this fic morally okay in my eyes. i can tell you now, i did not, because the story exists to navigate that logistical puzzle on its own. the conflict poses the question: is this okay? is this wrong? what about it is wrong? for what reasons is it wrong? and i also attempt (in a clunky way because it’s a bit rough, plot-wise) to navigate what “informed consent” really means to a 17yo who has no information to go off of. for me it’s an experiment in what consent really is. clarke wants bellamy, but she doesn’t have a full awareness of the consequences of that want, so is it truly consensual? what does bellamy have to do to fully inform her of those consequences? is it even his responsibility, or should clarke take more agency over her experiences? and lastly, the most interesting question of them all to me – what happens to the minors in consensual age gap relationships? how do they cope with that experience years later? in what ways does it change them?

though it’s not my responsibility to indulge my personal ties to this conflict in order to further “justify” it, i can assure you, i am writing this from clarke’s pov having been the younger party in many age gap relationships, at times a minor. at times coerced. at times completely uninformed. but each time, consensual. i sought out the men i dated. i took the lead. i propositioned them. and i consider: how has that affected me and the way i love now?

my mom at 20, married my dad, 32. my older sister at 16, met her (now ex) husband, her then-boss, at 23 (they waited until she was 18 to start dating). i dated an 18yo and then a 19yo when i was 14. a 21yo when i was 16. a 32yo when i was 19. a 47yo when i was 22. but i also had a long-term relationship with someone who was just three months younger than me. age gap is not the only way i know how to love, but it is certainly a way to love, and one i find, in lieu of seeking it out in reality, narratively compelling. so i write about those experiences in order to better understand them now that i’m older. in order to take them apart and piece them back together. in order to, in some cases, relive them, because i enjoyed so much about them.

i don’t pursue older men anymore because i no longer seek male validation. i don’t meet a handsome middle-aged man and need him to love me to feel like my existence in the world is warranted. but that doesn’t mitigate all the old habits and drive and potentially genetic disposition that led me to relentlessly pursuing them in the first place. so now i sublimate that into fiction and offer my experience and understanding to others who might be predisposed in the same way, or people who are not and curious about what that experience is like. and that’s what fiction does.

lastly, i’ve sort of saturated myself in age gap stories. i’ve watched every age gap movie i can get my hands on, read every book. i dive through google and ao3 looking for age gap recs, seeking out the one story or fic or movie that not only gets the relationship right, but figures out how to make it work. that’s all i want – a realistic, plausible solution to this very delicate and complicated kind of relationship. and i can’t find that story, so i’ve decided to write it myself.

training wheels is an uncomfortable story about a romantic minor/adult relationship and the realistic psychological consequences of it, both in the immediate present and long-term, and you are supposed to be made uncomfortable by it, regardless of your age. it makes romantic but does not romanticize age gap relationships. i do not take the morality of this story lightly, nor its meaning or intentions. whether i succeed in this is up to interpretation, and i can’t control that interpretation, but i can tell you with certainty what my intentions have been going into this story, and exactly why i’ve made the decisions i’ve made regarding it.

*the age of consent in ohio, where training wheels is set, is 16. i recognize the current rhetoric around this is “legality is not morality” or whatever, but again – the purpose of training wheels is in part to directly address this conflict

#training wheels #crybaby verse #discourse #tsatp #Anonymous

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