freedom-of-fanfic:

allura-an-anti:

I don’t ship sha//ladin because I’m in the same age as the young paladins and knowing that some people who are adults sexualize the idea of someone their age (shiro) being with someone my age (keith)

I’m very uncomfortable with this fact because I SHOULDN’T be comfortable

And I don’t want to give up my stance because I don’t want to normalize pedophilia

things to consider:

1) adults shipping keith with shiro may not see him as a teenager. in fact, anyone shipping keith with shiro may not see keith as a teenager. or they may see shiro and keith both as teenagers. or they may see keith as a teenager and shiro as an adult and not see a problem with shipping a young adult with someone in their late teens, because that’s the age spread in college and that’s not actually that weird.

the main thing is that the ages are up for interpretation, so shipping keith and shiro is not automatically shipping a teenager and an adult. you may see it that way, but please allow for others to not see it that way.

2) adults shipping teenaged characters with adult characters probably don’t ‘ship’ real teenagers with real adults (except in narrow age ranges like 16-18, or 18-22, etc). that’s because most people can separate their fictional interests from their real interests, and know that what’s okay in fiction may not be okay in reality.

a corollary: adults who ship fictional teenagers aren’t actually shipping you. they don’t even know you. why would they care about shipping adults with you? that’s a very strange comparison to draw.

3) shipping shiro and keith isn’t ‘normalizing pedophilia’ because even at the widest age gap according to the SDCC video – Keith is 16, Shiro is 25+ – Keith is still post-pubescent. Keith presumably has knowledge of himself as a sexual being who has (or doesn’t have) sexual urges. Keith cannot safely be compared to a 10-year-old in terms of his sexual development, and adult/teen attraction to a 10-year-old is what ‘pedophilia’ refers to.

like many antis, you’ve fallen into the trap of misusing a word for shock value so that anyone who tries to argue with you appears to be protecting mouthbreathing creepers who own cp and harm real children. it’s … kind of unfair to compare people who ship fictional ships with real life child molesters. don’t you think that’s a little bit extreme?