Suggestion: Age Restricting Characters

i don’t know, i guess i’m just really passionate about this subject?? and i just keep going back to say more? i understand where you’re coming from, thinking about the legal parts of things and moral standpoints, but in the point of view of someone who’s going to behind these barriers for a long time, i just really can’t stand being treated like this. i just feel like i can’t be treated as a human. and it’s not just because of the iffy themes, sometimes people just refuse to interact with us at all... and that kinda hurts. people just refusing to talk to you because of something you can’t control. it already isn’t fun to click on a thread on the front page of the forums only for it to say invalid thread selected, espically when nothing in the title mentions 18+ content. i know that people are going to end up abusing this function to age restrict perfectly sfw characters. that’s just gonna make this divide even worse.

another thing that i need to get off my chest; you aren’t the only ones with characters with darker themes? i don’t have any sexual characters, but i do have gorey characters. i don’t want them to just end up becoming unable to interact with others because the characters who’d be comfortable with them are restricted from me. and before anyone says that i’m too young to properly understand these themes, i have the ability to think about things more than before, and go on the computer and research them. i’m not stupid. you don’t need to worry about my fragile mind getting tampered with, not everything is sunshine and rainbows for me either.

and as for legal parts of this; if someone under 18 views a page/favorites a character with nsfw themes, how much trouble could that actually get you in? is someone gonna come knocking at your door saying you’re arrested because a 17 year old looked at your page about a sexual character? all you need to do to avoid legal problems is to refuse that character interact with them if they ask. legal problems will only arise if you go so far as for the person who’s under 18 to acknowledge that it’s creepy.

sorry if this sounded patronizing or anything, i didn’t mean it to be like that. i just needed to go on a rant because i’m just tired of all these walls being built and people acting like we’re 5 years old.

@Tak0yama

I know it's a rough situation. I know that when you're 14, 4 years is a long time. It's honestly not a long time to me, anymore, but for you right now it is.

Every adult that says that they're uncomfortable talking to minors was a minor once. They remember what they knew, what they thought, how they felt. They didn't forget. When I was fourteen - intelligent, research-heavy, eager to interact and upset about the way I was being treated because of the arbitrary factor of my age - I certainly did feel the same as you. I do remember it. I do remember the frustration. And I do genuinely believe you do your reasearch and read things and know a lot more than people think you do.

But I feel lit should be telling in the least that I, someone who remembers that and how it felt, am more than willing to keep things that way for minors today. And that others, who also remember feeling that way, are as well. It's hard to explain - and I know you hear that a lot, but it's earnestly hard to explain. It's one of those things where until you go through it you don't really get it, and you dont' know how to tell anyone else, either. I don't think you're dull, nobody does. I don't think you're innocent and fragile.

But listen there are a lot of things I learned between 14 and 24 that I wish I hadn't, and that I absolutely could not have expected or been prepared for - by any of my own reasearch - until after I'd already learned it.

As for the legal factor, there legitimately used to be a television show about people breaking down doors and the like. And sure that show was about actual predators, and I'm not and I doubt other people concerned about this/on this thread are either, but in the 1% chance that anyone were to investigate anybody (you, me, anyone else on here) for something as small as someone else looking at a photo (which could snowball to someone else talking to me, someone else lying about their age, someone else maybe even becoming a friend based on those lies and talking to me regularly), and marks were to show up on someone's record for it, it would absolutely never go away. There is no way to make that kind of thing go away.

It's earnestly nothing against you personally. And I know it feels that way, or even if it doesn't feel that way it doesn't feel great. But it wouldn't be something that so many people who've already gone through would be pushing for if it weren't also legitimately important, even if it doesn't seem like that now.

@Tak0yama I would have felt this way when I was your age. Some of the darker themes that I'm talking about my characters delve into and play around with do not necessarily contain content which I would consider either sexual or suitable for an audience under 18 and aren't things which would have crossed my mind years back - many things. I'm not trying to talk down or gatekeep, as you seem to see this suggestion as, because this is something I think anyone who has been in this situation you're in can relate to very very heavily.

This is also not saying that your characters don't have darker themes. Nobody here thinks minors are fragile/completely innocent - obviously we have all BEEN minors at one point and understand this. This is simply saying that there are distinct differences and that the differences are what merits the locks.

I think one of the big concerns here is the inability to feel comfortble posting content to the site. While things like art can be easily tagged, for instance, I can't feel fully comfortbly knowing the writing on my character itself is tagged as a writer and thus I tend to leave it completely off due to disconcern about no tags being associated with it at all - the tagging system itself for toyhouse is quite arbitrary. Thus I tend to completely leave these characters blank and empty.

Anything legal, I think people forget that things do tend to snowball. It's not something that happens with incredible frequency and it is not something that is personal against any individual (I know a lot of minors get upset when people who are 18+ won't interact with them and treat it pretty much like this) but as lantern-k1ng said there have been situations which have sorta rockslid in very strange ways. Someone simply favouriting a picture might not get an individual in a 'lot of trouble' but based upon the reaction of an individual - there can be ramifications for the entire site if there aren't certain measures in place along and if there are things happening such as forum games, heavy nsfw themes & elsewhere

Motherbeast I had a VERy similar situation with someone who was a minor lie to me about their age until mid roleplay and then, in an ooc aside, tell me that they were I think it was 16 (with me in my early 20's). It was one of the most uncomfortable I've ever been in my life because this person had explicitly told me beforehand when I had asked them if they were that they were an adult. They never used an age but had said terms like adult/mature/etc.and I hadn't pushed. It's not something I had a lot of experience with, or considered something someone would lie about I guess - and regret it a lot. I didn't think to and suddenly they just sprung it on me like it didn't matter and was perfectly fine. I stopped things IMMEDIATELY and felt basically sick to my stomach.

At this point, I won't even RP with anyone under 18 and make a point to ask them their age excessively beforehand. So when people under 18 act like I'm being kind of weird, I also know other people who have dealt with similar situations. It's incredibly uncomfortable and it almost caused me to completely pull away from Roleplaying and character stuff for awhile altogether. I've heard of other people having really similar situations where younger people don't seem to understand what they are doing is wrong because 'they're old enough' and don't seem to be aware of how they could get other people in trouble.

The big thing here is, the other person I don't think ever saw it as a problem. They just laughed it off when talking to me and tried to get ahold of me after the fact. It's not obviously the same situation but it rings similar bells.I really don't think that a lot of younger people are aware of the implications of what these types of things or behavious could do to adults.

[EDIT] I am sorry if this is sort of an aside to this conversation but the statement made by Motherbeast just...hit really too close to home it was a situation that has really really deeply impacted me and how I've interacted with people online for a long time now.

lantern-k1ng Milesian Motherbeast

ah, i really do see what you guys mean. thanks for keeping this civil, i was really worried that what i said would end up turning into a big issue!

I like the idea of profiles being like the pictures, where you at least get a warning for what lies ahead. Like, don't get me wrong, I like that kiddos like my bois, but these guys have some heavily dark themes. And I remember well what it was like to be in the younger half of high school. You see these dark themes and instantly think "I WANT TO TRY THAT" and you end up offending so many people. It's not fun, and you're going to look back on that and c r i n g e. So ye, I'm all for this.

+1 for age-restricted settings. A simple "I solemnly swear I am 18+ years old" agreement when using Toyhou.se would be good.

+1

I'd love this. I also really like the idea of a warning that's possible to bypass, like we have for NSFW images. (Both would be ideal!) I'm an adult but sometimes I don't really want to see gory or NSFW characters. 

Bump because we really need this.