Does the fact that you ship underage characters ever feel odd to you?

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Cybersai

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Obviously for people who ship the older characters like Brock, Team Rocket, or the various Gym leaders/Elite 4 members this does not apply to, but for everyone else who supports the "kids" of the show.

Does it ever feel odd that you're shipping 10 year olds in romantic relationships? In real life most 10 year olds do not care about romance or dating...this doesn't start for most people until the teen years.

So when you ship the main girls, or even the rivals or a kid like Max, does it feel slightly odd to you? Don't ask me why I'm asking this, I just thought of it for no reason. I think its mainly the fact that we think of pairings for young cartoon characters where we sure as hell wouldn't go pairing up 10 year old kids in real life with other kids. What do you think?
 
I still think that's why a lot of Ash fangirls try to push him as being sixteen or anything older than ten.

My guess is that the show doesn't bring the topic of age up much, and it has these guys going out traveling across regions, mountains, oceans, etc and doing things kiddos their age would never do and come off as being older.

Personally, I don't ship the younger characters. Was just throwing my two cents worth in.
 
Well, for me, regardless of the fact that they are ten (or possibly 12 for Ash--I heard that somehwere) I still don't really think of them as being ''kids'' when I ship them. And besides, I don't think they look like little kids. None of the main girls have ever looked 10, and Ash definitely looks like he could be 15 (but I know he isn't). But so, no, it doesn't feel odd to me because I never really think much about their ages, as they all look at least a few years older than their supposed ages.
 
Hmmmm. Sometimes it feels a bit weird. But on the other hand, any time you watch a show you're kind of being asked to empathise with the main characters, and think yourself into their mindset. So if the characters who act as your portal into the fictional world are all about ten years old, then you're not thinking of them as 'children', because you're putting yourself on their level... if that makes sense.

Besides, ten year olds have crushes and so on. It's an innocent form of romance, but it does exist. All the main characters in Pokemon have expressed an interest in somebody, at some point.
 
Would like to add that I think shipping underage characters in a sexual sense is a bit squickier. Pervy jokes are all right IMO because they're just a bit of fun, but it would creep me out if we were constantly having serious discussions about the sex lives of pre-teens.
 
What JoJo and Kasumi said.

And Pokeships can't bug me cause I shipped Rugrats when I watched it. Chuckie and Suzie 4eva! X)
 
when shipping Ash and Shinji, I just dont think about their ages. And with penguinShipping, it's just about jokes, like the kind you see at the Pokemopolis dodgy picture thread
 
It depends. As an Advanceshipper I tend to write fanfics that occur years later and they are old enough. In their present mindsets (especially Ash) romantic feelings are not really comprehensible. At that age (10) they're only starting to get over the idea that boys/girls are gross.
When I write the fics, its usually when they are old enough to begin having those sorts of feelings. An example would be that Ash remembers May fondly as a friend. However, if they reunited at say, age 15, May will have blossomed into a beautiful young woman. Ash will still have these memories of a good friend he traveled with at age 10, however these newer feelings of attraction are beginning to surface. He is beginning to see May in a new light.
That's just an example and the same can be true for May as well, seeing Ash in a new light, and a conflict between her current feelings of newfound attraction and memories of Ash being a young boy and a close friend.
It makes for some very interesting plot devices to say the very least, i.e. awkward moments, new discoveries about each other in their years apart, etc.
As for lemons and other such things, I usually keep them at acceptable ages where those sorts of things actually happen in real life, 10 is way too young to be writing that sort of thing in my opinion. If I am going to ship them at age 10, I am going to try to keep it realistic and from the point of view of 10 year olds. Otherwise it can get too OOC and seem very wrong. It'll lose impact if it goes too OOC sometimes.
 
elite4james said:
However, if they reunited at say, age 15, May will have blossomed into a beautiful young woman.
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I hate to sound like a pervert, but I think it's more that it's hard not to notice that:

poetry05.jpg


May definitely can pass as a fifteen year old already (the WB logo is in the way but you can still see why she'll give Prima a run for her money by the time she's just fifteen).

Eh, maybe that's another problem. May didn't look her age much, but it'd be hard to ignore how she acts, and she acted very much her age.
 
One thing I found funny about this show is that when they do show filler girls who are around 10 years old, they actually *look* 10. Casey from Johto looked like a real 10 year old. Several fillers girls we met looked like that as well.

Its only the main girls who look older than they should be, which is done for obvious reasons, but its interesting to see every other girl on the show who is a younger trainer actually looks their age.

I think the only main character who ever looked his age was Max, and that's because most people picture him being around 7 or 8.
 
I generally don't ship them any more than just crushes. I did a JamesxMisty fic once, but I purposely made the characters older because it would have been damn creepy otherwise.
 
I don't really have an issue with it. Partially because I generally just don't care, and partially because Satoshi and company are just ten-years old to match in with the game canon. The reality is they more or less resemble the thirteen to fifteen year old demographic. While the game doesn't need to worry about what age means, it's more difficult to deal with in the anime. Using Nanako as a baseline, it'd be rather difficult to effectively use the ten-year old mentality for the main characters of Pokemon, but calling them that old and giving them an older mentality works instead. So really, I just look at them as being mature enough to handle it because they are.
 
It's shippings, there is no rules. Thus no age limmit. Kinda creepy at times.
 
^ That would certainly make nightclubbing a bizarre experience.
 
Blackjack Palazzo said:
Didn't one of the writers say that legal age in that world is ten? Ergo, very few characters would be under legal age.
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I would imagine he meant legal age to be a trainer, not legal age to do what 18-21 year olds are legally able to do in real-life.

We've never seen anyone but Giovanni and TR drinking alcohol or wine bottles, correct? We've also never heard what the legal age for sexual relationships in the Pokemon world is.

Sure, the 10 year olds in Pokemon travel around the world without parents and do things real life kids would never do, but I'm not sure it implies for everything.
 
Scott85 said:
I would imagine he meant legal age to be a trainer, not legal age to do what 18-21 year olds are legally able to do in real-life.

We've never seen anyone but Giovanni and TR drinking alcohol or wine bottles, correct? We've also never heard what the legal age for sexual relationships in the Pokemon world is.

Sure, the 10 year olds in Pokemon travel around the world without parents and do things real life kids would never do, but I'm not sure it implies for everything.
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By being legally able to leave home and travel around the world, that's the equivelent of being emancipated in their world. The vast majority of trainers are young like that and obviously managing to survive. While the writers never talk about earning money, it's obvious that the young trainers do somehow and many of which, like Satoshi, have begun to make a career out of it. Or they take on alternate career paths, like Shigeru does, but are still, in essence, treated like adults. Really, they are essentially acting like adults and probably have all the legal rights of such. Since Pokemon is a kids show, they aren't going to show them consuming alcohol or having sex or smoking or such, but I do believe they have the freedom to.
 
Shipping is big in tv shows, movies and manga etc... that main focus isn't on romance. Such as Harry Potter focus on magic. Pokemon is a kids cartoon that focus on pokemon but we focus on the romance of the charatcers I guess we like how it isn't as obvious since there no facts just hints on romance between characters.

I personally think we like how innocence young characters are. And see true love in it because they are so young and pure compared to older characters who tend to look at love as sex and adultery.
 
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Heck no, none of it bothers me. As some one said before 10 year olds gain crushes too. Ask for shipping older ones with younger ones, no that doesn't bother me. I mean its just animation, not like real life LOL.
 
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