The no-underage characters rule

Duskford

Duskford

CHYOA Guru
First of all, I'd like to say I know and fully understand why the rule is in place and that I'm not looking to start a revolution, a fight or anything of the sort, just want to know if someone ever found themselves in the same situation as I did while writing their stories. As someone who likes to write his stories with teen characters in their senior year of high school, I often find myself having to create a lot of excuses to go around this rule when the characters are siblings, like having a bunch of twins running around the same place or having a character having an accident earlier in life that made him/her lose a year of school so he/she could be in the same year as his/her younger sibling, or at the very least, having those sibling characters having their birthdays far apart from each other. I definitely wouldn't agree if someone wanted to lift this rule completely, but I think that allowing, let's say, fictional 16 or 17-year-olds to participate in sex scenes might not be such a bad thing, they already do in real life very often anyways.

Has anyone ever found themselves in a similar situation, with this rule kind of hindering your storytelling?
 
No.

All the "NO".

This rule is in place for not only legal reasons, but for good and sufficient social ones as well.

Yes, in real life the average age to lose ones virginity is 15, but that average is pulled down a ton by child molestation.

Simply put, before a person is 18 years old they cannot be expected to actually know their own mind, and as such they should not be engaged in anything as potentially permanent as sex.
 
I agree with you, I stated this more than once in my post, I know the facts and problems about underage sex in real life. I was talking about our stories on the site, I just asked if authors ever wanted to write something in their stories and weren't able to because of the rule, just curiosity from my part.
 
I agree with you that it is hard sometimes to justify a character being naive at 18. It's especially weird because so many TV shows have characters who are under 18, although the actors playing them are of age, having sex. That being said while I know authors such as yourself would handle the topic in a responsible way I fear others would use it as an excuse for pedo erotica.
 
Yeah, you have a point. Let it be said that I'm not advocating for the rule to be lifted, I just wanted to share some of the work arounds I had to do in order to comply with the rule and debate it a little, I guess. I'm aware it would get abused, even if we just lowered the mininum age for characters in sex scenes to 16 or 17 and kept it forbidden for the rest. Even if the mindset of a 17-year-old and the one of a 18-year-old is basically the same, I know we have to draw a line somewhere.
 
Given my own preferences we would draw the line at 21, freely stated consent, and fourth cousins or further: but since that won't happen I think the present rules should be adhered to not only in letter but also in spirit.
 
Yes, strict 18+ ages makes storytelling in high school settings that involve more than a couple characters (or where siblings are both story characters) difficult to avoid being artificial.
 
To branch this conversation slightly, is it ok to have characters below 18 that do not participate in sexual activity? Or do younger siblings of an 18 year old character not exist?
 
Loeman said:
Yes, strict 18+ ages makes storytelling in high school settings that involve more than a couple characters (or where siblings are both story characters) difficult to avoid being artificial.
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This really does mean that some stories are best used by going changing things until they make sense. Twins or step-siblings if it's important to have siblings who are all just barely 18. Or maybe have incest stories happen during a holiday when the older siblings are visiting or something like that.
 
This is why I usually avoid giving exact ages. "This happened when the character was old enough, that happened while the character was still underage"; "This character is an adult, that character is still underage", etc. Let the readers/players/whatever imagine the exact ages or how it makes sense within the time frame of the story.

It should be fine to mention characters that are still underage. It also should be fine to mention sex with such characters, as long as you don't go too far. It's one thing to mention how a character had sex with his underaged niece while drunk and regrets it to this day, it's another thing to mention how that same encounter was the greatest sex the character ever had and he gets hard every time he remembers it (this will likely make most people uncomfortable at the very least), and it's a third thing to describe in detail what happened (this is just asking for trouble).
 
bbc4lwg said:
To branch this conversation slightly, is it ok to have characters below 18 that do not participate in sexual activity? Or do younger siblings of an 18 year old character not exist?
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I think it's okay to have underage characters who don't participate in the sex scenes. In one of my stories I had one character have a younger sister who was only going to be in sex scenes during an eventual sequel.

Otherwise, I think you can mention that an underage character had sex, but you can't show the scene explicitly.
 
Nemo of Utopia said:
Simply put, before a person is 18 years old they cannot be expected to actually know their own mind, and as such they should not be engaged in anything as potentially permanent as sex.
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you do realize that the Age of Consent....That is the age at which a person is considered to be legally competent to engage in sexual acts in most places is not 18. In fact, the only places in North America and Europe where the Age of Consent is 18 is Turkey, Estonia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama. Along with California, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida in the United States. In most of the rest of the world, the Age of consent is lower. Usually 16...although there are some States in the United States and Ireland where it's 17. There's even plenty of places in Europe where the Age of Consent is even lower. Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Macedonia, Portugal, Serbia all have an age of consent of 14. Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Romania, Sweden all have an age of consent of 15.

You may disagree, that's fine. You are allowed to have your own opinion, but legally most of the rest of the world disagrees with you.

With that said, Pornography showing anybody under the age of 18 is still illegal and it's pretty absolute. I don't see the 18+ rule changing anytime soon.
 
merkros said:
With that said, Pornography showing anybody under the age of 18 is still illegal and it's pretty absolute. I don't see the 18+ rule changing anytime soon.
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Showing yes, but is really depicting fictional underage sex in written form illegal in the US? Not if I understand the Supreme Court correctly.

But I guess you have to draw the line somewhere and I can see the merits of not opening that door.
 
LWeibull2 said:
Showing yes, but is really depicting fictional underage sex in written form illegal in the US? Not if I understand the Supreme Court correctly.
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You're 100% correct, writing a purely fictional account of underage sex is protected in the United States by the First Amendment. Literotica, the creator of the original CHYOO, predates Ashcroft v. Free Speech, so they originally set their rules in accordance with the earlier form of The Child Pornography Prevention Act in which even fictitious written pornography had to abide the "18 years or older" rule. After the court case broke, I can only begin to speculate as to why they kept the old rules; my vote is for laziness since the whole site still seems to function as if it's in 1998.

However, the US also has to deal with The PROTECT Act of 2003, which makes photographic and animated depictions illegal unless it meets certain arbitrary criteria or an arbitrarily defined amount of effort is exerted to rectify the problem. This is the main argument we could make in favor of keeping the age restriction in place. The site is programmed to easily host images in threads and encourages cover pics and avatar pics. Breaking the age restriction would invite a dangerous game with those images, especially since we don't have the community watch we should have; technically we're playing it now, but we're granted much more leeway in cases of ephebophilic images attached to stories of adults. I'm normally fighting against the uptight, but without proper definitions of CHYOA's legal protection in the event of nepiophilic, pedophilic, or hebephilic images, I'd rather not start that battle.
 
Just a silly thought I had while I was writing. I have a character celebrating her birthday but say she was born on that day but at around 9:45 pm at night. Do she still count as 18 in the morning since it is her birthday or is she 17 and 364 days old until 9:45 PM. It could get even more complicated with twins who are born before and after midnight so their birthdays or on separate days. Like I said silly thought.
 
merkros said:
you do realize that the Age of Consent....That is the age at which a person is considered to be legally competent to engage in sexual acts in most places is not 18. In fact, the only places in North America and Europe where the Age of Consent is 18 is Turkey, Estonia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama. Along with California, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida in the United States. In most of the rest of the world, the Age of consent is lower. Usually 16...although there are some States in the United States and Ireland where it's 17. There's even plenty of places in Europe where the Age of Consent is even lower. Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Macedonia, Portugal, Serbia all have an age of consent of 14. Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Romania, Sweden all have an age of consent of 15.

You may disagree, that's fine. You are allowed to have your own opinion, but legally most of the rest of the world disagrees with you.

With that said, Pornography showing anybody under the age of 18 is still illegal and it's pretty absolute. I don't see the 18+ rule changing anytime soon.
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I'd like to throw out that in South Carolina it is 16. For a while, there was a group wanting to lower the age of consent to 12, but that was shot down.

Now to be quite fair, the whole thing about 18+ seems to be a fairly new thing. In ancient times, the daughter of at least noble families were married off anywhere between the ages of 10 and 16, with some giving birth to their first child at the age of 14. A woman in here twenties was almost considered too old to be married off.

Now to be clear, I'm not saying that it was a good practice, just that it has been around a long time.

RicoLouis said:
Just a silly thought I had while I was writing. I have a character celebrating her birthday but say she was born on that day but at around 9:45 pm at night. Do she still count as 18 in the morning since it is her birthday or is she 17 and 364 days old until 9:45 PM. It could get even more complicated with twins who are born before and after midnight so their birthdays or on separate days. Like I said silly thought.
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Most places go by the day, not the second of birth. I don't even know what time of day I was born, and I'm honestly skeptical when people I know tell me that "I'm not really (Insert age here) until ten after six tonight." We celebrate a birth DAY not a birth moment.
 
Hey there,

First of all i would like to say that i am a reader, not a writer. I just enjoy the works that all of you make. Second, i'm not trying to start a fight or a revolution, i'm just expressing an opinion.

Personally, i believe that the age limit for characters involved in sex acts could be lowered to 16, because: a) at 18 you're not really smart and wise, you are just interested in drinking, going to parties and having sex; b) like merkros pointed out there are few places in the world where the age of consent is 18; c) moderators like Friedman and the rest of them (are there any other moderator?) can deny to post a story or they can take it down if the content is to abnormal; d) i find it a bit weird that the age limit can't be lower that 18, considering that there are stories that feature incest, non-consent and/or mind control (that takes away free will or influences a character to do things that they might not want to do).

Like i said, i'm just expressing an opinion and understand and respect the arguments on both sides.
 
DarkFriday1408 said:
d) i find it a bit weird that the age limit can't be lower that 18, considering that there are stories that feature incest, non-consent and/or mind control (that takes away free will or influences a character to do things that they might not want to do).
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Well, some people (not me, though) think all those things you listed should be forbidden. As far as I'm concerned, I would be ok with an age limit set at 16, but I'm pretty sure if we allow it some people will ask to have it set lower, and lower again until there's no age limit anymore. Whatever the age limit, there will be people to think it's too high and maybe even people to think it's too low, and I don't think removing it entirely would be a solution.
By the way, I know it's not exactly in topic, but I always wondered why bestiality was forbidden but not necrophilia.
 
Khan said:
By the way, I know it's not exactly in topic, but I always wondered why bestiality was forbidden but not necrophilia.
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Bestiality is forbidden, but authors found a way around that. I've already seen here at Chyoa humans turned into dogs, dog-shaped demons, and fantasy stories with minotaurs fucking women.
 
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