You know, when I was a teenager it absolutely pissed me off when people over the age of 18 referred to me as a child. My friends & I wanted to be taken seriously in communities so we never pulled the "just a child" excuse whenever shit went down. Now it seems that anyone a month under the age of 18 is like "uwu im just an innocent minor dont call me out or ill accuse you of being a pedo & child abuser." It's just so weird to me cuz my generation was the opposite. I wonder why it changed.
It changed because of the leverage of perceived victimhood, and the ability of social media to bring together the social outcasts of society that view themselves as such. When brought together, these people become a co-dependent group of enablers. Rather than going through the natural cycle of emotional maturity, they reinforce each other’s flaws, assuring each other that they don’t need to change. They don’t take the time to self-reflect, and miss out on valuable psychological growth
Eventually. when you have enough people like this, they feel emboldened to take their resentment out on others, particularly those that resemble the people who have mocked or rejected them in the past (hence the trend of blaming majority groups for their own social ineptitude). If they didn’t feel as though they had people to support and praise them for this, they wouldn’t do it. They also wouldn’t do it face-to-face: The internet allows them to take this passive-aggressive stance without real-world consequences.
They then discovered that certain issues in life can be used as an invulnerable shield, because there are taboos that elicit knee-jerk responses that people are afraid to question, lest they appear to support them. Thus continues the leverage of victimhood, except now it’s dragging serious topics down into the mud with it. In the process, these people can pretend to be “heroes” and receive praise for doing absolutely nothing. It’s a game of “Look at how good of a person I want you to think I am!”. Once they realized they could use this ploy to achieve the kind of popularity online that they never could in real life, all bets were off.
The full-scale attack on adulthood is likely due to being corrected by adults on their behavior, or others trying to hold them accountable for it. They don’t want that–they want to be childish and petty, because it makes them feel better about themselves to put down others. Adulthood in general terrifies them, because it means there will no longer be anyone to spoil them, or make excuses for them.
It’s like that one episode of “Chowder” where everyone pretended to be babies to get out of having to work. Except it backfires in that you will then be treated like a baby in everything else. It’s an incredibly unhealthy mindset that is, frankly, holding these people back socially, emotionally, and psychologically.
A large number of “innocent children” on Tumblr are 22 and in the process of graduating from college. There’s every reason to fear being an adult then. (Not that that excuses ridiculous bullying and trying to redefine 20-somethings as children.)
There are plenty of teenagers around who feel like we all did back in the day. We just don’t notice them because they’re busy pretending to be adults.
The biggest change I’ve seen from my teenage years till now is that back in the 90′s, you had to pretend to be 18 and you had to befriend people to find the good fic, especially the slash, because that was locked down tight. Then, like now, a lot of the good shit was by “old” people who had been writing longer. Now, you can read all of the old people’s fic on AO3 while screaming on tumblr that you hate anyone over [your age + 5]. Your favorite author isn’t going to notice that you’re an asshole who hates them, and they couldn’t block your ass on AO3 even if they did. In the 90′s, they’d just have kicked you off of their mailing list and changed the password on their archive.
There was plenty of bullying and nonsense back then too, but some of the specifically ageist behavior wasn’t seen because you had to be an adult to access fandom at all–or at least that was the assumption.