not to make posts that are going to get me anon hate, but I am fucking begging people to stop calling fictional characters “minors.” can we please go back to talking about fictional characters as children or teenagers. please.
first of all, “minor” is a word that has a meaning and that meaning isn’t necessarily “children in the general sense.” it is in fact a really specific legal term. it is a status that grants a group of vulnerable people protection by the law. so, as fake people who don’t exist and therefore have zero protections by law, a fictional character cannot be a minor. a fictional character is fictional.
Also, in the sense of those real-world protection laws, sure, it makes sense to group together newborns through 18-year-olds. but doing so is genuinely completely fucking useless when talking about a narrative. “This is a story where the main character is a minor!!!!” you could be talking about Bluey you could be talking about The Catcher In The Rye you could be talking about Yellow Jackets. I don’t know how else to express that story about a 7-year-old, a story about a 12-year-old, and a story about a 17-year-old are are, structurally, completely different things despite all being about “minors,” and how grouping them together makes no sense. it’s reductive at best and destructive at worse. Imagining sitting down and being like “oh yeah, let’s look for a story about minors to recommend to minors” and you hand children’s picture book No, David! to a high school senior.
what bullshit scare tactic language. “yikes, you’re shipping minors” and the ship is two 17-year-olds who the narrative treats as active parts of the story who make their own decisions and have their own desires. when did we all agree to start talking like this and can we stop. just fucking tell me if a character is a child or a teenager.