Hope it’s okay to ask here, I love your blog and how you give clear, concise answers to questions without assuming bad faith so hopefully it’s ok to throw my own “warning tag” question in here, TIA for the answer!So, childhood friends-to-lovers is like one of my favourite romance tropes to write in fanfic. I’ve done a LOT of ships with that, but I’ve never actually written anything more uh…spicy, shall we say. Until after the ship were both adults. I was raised Extremely Fundie and wasn’t very sex positive for a LONG time as a result but now that I’m older & out of that environment I’ve grown a lot.So because of religious upbringing I just avoided writing smut before both characters were 18 “to be safe”. In a recent new fandom I’m in I have a character who I feel like very much WOULD have explored her sexuality before she turned 18. The partner in this context is her childhood friend so they grew up together and are probably at most like 3 years apart, if that. So my question is, would I tag that as Underage because, even tho they’re close together in age (ie. both “minors” in that sense) they ARE Underage or is the Underage tag on AO3 solely for Adult/Minor ships? (not judging writers of Adult/Minor pairings either, I’ll add. It’s just not my scene and I don’t want to give people the wrong impression in the tags, either way around, whenever I inevitably write & post their First Time fic, yk?)-🌸 (hope its okay to tag this so I can maybe find it later? I don’t wanna ask this off anon in case I get blasted by That(tm) side of fandom at large who might see my username and then come into my DMs/inbox to scream “P*do!!” at me, but I DO wanna be able to see the answer when it comes up, esp if I am not on tumblr the day that it does haha)
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Ah. You’re still thinking about that tag in a more cultural sense, but that’s not what it’s for. If you dig through the FAQs and such, the explanation is in there somewhere, but to summarize, it refers to:
On page depictions of sexual activity including at least one character under 18.
(So if they just kiss or you just say she had sex but you don’t show intercourse, oral, etc. on the actual page, it doesn’t count.)
AO3’s underage tag is actually to protect users who live in jurisdictions where <18 sexytimes are banned from art or banned unless there’s ~artistic merit~ or whatever. Around the time AO3 was starting up was when Australia was having a big upheaval over such things, so it was on people’s minds in the Anglosphere.
Whether the sex is problematique or age gap or whatever doesn’t matter. The actual age of consent or laws around sex in the real world location these characters are in, if any, does not matter. Your 17-year-old UK characters fucking still need the warning or CNTW even though that’s laughable in context. 18 tends to be the age most used in international law for… like… porn star ages and such, so 18 is what AO3 went with. Never mind that it’s not necessarily the age of majority or that age of consent laws can depend on partner age, etc. etc.
Unlike noncon/graphic violence/character death, this warning isn’t there primarily because readers find the topic squicky.
It’s a legal ass-covering thing.
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