this is a personal take, but i feel like the underage tag is sort of misused. i feel like the intention was very much for “extreme underage,” and that’s how it used to be tagged. But i’ll often see people tag a fic about two 17yos having consensual sex “underage,” which i feel waters the tag down and makes it harder to filter out what i actually don’t want to see
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“The intention” is not for it to apply to ONLY ‘extreme underage’. This is literally what the site itself defines as Underage (see the question mark on ‘Archive Warnings’ when you are posting a new work):
This is for descriptions or depictions of sexual activity by characters under the age of eighteen. (This doesn’t include dating activity like kissing or vague references with no actual description or depiction.) This warning generally applies to humans; if you are creating a pornographic work about space aliens who only live for a month or thousand-year-old vampires with twelve-year-old bodies, please just use your best judgment. You are always free to specify characters’ ages or to use “Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings”.
It says “characters under the age of eighteen”. Not “characters who are/look prebubescent”. If I’m not mistaken, I’ve seen @/olderthannetfic say this warning was made like this exactly because of countries where porn of fictional minors is illegal (such as Australia) and so users from those countries can be sure of what risk they are taking when going into specific works.
If you want to avoid stuff like loli/shota or other ‘extreme underage’ stuff… You are gonna have to filter out the ‘extreme uderage’, ‘shotacon’ and ‘lolicon’ tags. And probably pay extra attention to the other additional tags. Plus rely on your own knowledge of canon. (As an example: if an explicit Black Butler fic involving Ciel DOESN’T have an “aged-up character(s)” tag, it’s probably safe to assume it is shotacon.)
But no, the ‘Underage’ warning is not being ‘watered down’. This is exactly what it is meant to warn for.
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