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As clarification as to why I, personally, object to this story...

I get it. Forbidden love storylines have a certain appeal to them. However, there is an issue with the message you're trying to convey.

If a 20 year old were to be in a relationship with say, a 10 year old, that would be 10 years of difference between them. That 10 year old is a child. The 20 year old is an adult. That is considered pedophilia and that is inethical.

Even if it's a highschool student and his or her teacher, it's still... not right. A teacher has a moral and legal responsibility to act ethically and properly around their students. Most highschool teachers are at the very least in their thirties, and highschool students are usually anywhere from 14 to 18 or even 19. So when you have a teacher-student romance, that is at least a ten year gap between them, and as the student is still legally a minor until they graduate highschool, that's still pedophilia.

Edit: I'm saying this because I have dealt with actual pedophiles before. Because it's an actual problem in the world.

To be fair, Endmaster has posted way worse than what the OP most likely has in mind, and ... no, student status is irrelevant to being considered a minor. You can be an adult and be in high school. I've seen multiple 18 and 19 year old students. (The age of consent in Missouri is 17, though, IIRC?)

And if this is a high school story, then no. It's not pedophilia, it's Ephebophilia. However, if it's a college story, both parties consent, and no favors are given out as a result, that's not really an issue. (People hooking up with their college professors is actually considered rather common. Once everyone involved is old enough to consent, really, who cares? They're adults, let 'em date who they wanna date.)

Alright, well thank you for being more specific. At least where I live, if you're still a student, within school grounds you are a minor.

But in a story where the age difference is indirectly the focus (by saying age differences do not matter) it's still a little squicky.

If it's college, that's fine. But as someone who had to deal with someone who was interested in underaged folks when I was twelve, this definitely struck me as very uncomfortable.

And the OP's profile says they're 12.

... But that doesn't make sense. By definition, a minor is someone under age. Scholastic status is irrelevant. Where do you live that they have that kind of law, if you don't mind me asking?

*shrug* Again, as long as everyone involved is legal ... though I realize some people can't deal with age gaps even between adults, so eh. 

Yes, pedophiles are a problem. I have also encountered more than one myself, but the OP does not list the ages, so I wouldn't get worked up without knowing what you're responding to, heh.

... So? The writer is, doesn't mean their characters will be.

We live in Florida, one of the worst school districts in the country.

Florida. Florida's pretty dumb.

And I don't mind adult age gaps so much as teenager/child and adult age gaps. I guess maybe I got a little overreactive. /Shrug.

I just hope the writer keeps in mind legality and ethics.

I can picture Keno saying WTF!?

Seeing as we have games that include extensive drug use, pedophilia and other horrible things, legality is less of an issue on the site. 

I know, I was just trying to say why I was withdrawing my offer to help with the project.

Again, some of the stories on here are ... quite intentionally messed up. It may just be that you'll need to pass on reading it. But I looked into it somewhat. Some states do have that law and some states do not. *shrug* (I am aware it could be a recipe for disaster, but I also respect people making their own decisions after a certain point. I have known couples like that--with a small gap, granted.)

"I know, I was just trying to say why I was withdrawing my offer to help with the project."

And then it blew up. So.

 

Fair enough. 

See what you started Keno? Well I hope that is some advice.

Just adding to Kiel's point.

Different states have different laws regarding age of consent in the U.S. In Pennsylvania for example, 16 is a key age.

16 year old and a 50 year old? Perfectly legal in Pennsylvania as long as both parties consent.
15 year old and a 50 year old? Statutory Sexual Assault. (Child under 16 and defendant at least 4 years older.)
Thus...
14 year old and 17 year old? Should be good, provided both parties consent.
15 year old and 18 year old? Should be good, provided both parties consent.

Less than 13 gets into rape of a child laws.

Of course, teachers would fall under the realm of institutional sexual assault if they had sex with their students. And that's bad news bears.

Professors are just violating ethics and possibly school code and employment stipulations.

So in context with the intended story plot here, it's perfectly plausible that there may not be any statutory sexual assault/rape going on (pending on the state), but the teacher would be in huge trouble if it's a high school setting since I'm pretty sure all states have institutional sexual assault laws prohibiting such conduct.

Still, I don't see why that would be an unacceptable topic for the site. The rules ban outright gore for gore's sake and straight up porn for serving no purpose but being porn. If you can justify something with the plot, it's probably passable.

Although I would say that although this would not be against the site rules, as it seems the author is trying to portray this relationship as romantic would be creepy to most.

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

A lot of people would agree, but that didn't stop the same theme from generating several movies and a novel that lays claim to a place in canon literature.

Besides, he could always throw it in the horror section.

In the midst of reading that at the moment ^^ A very interesting read, and definitely what I was thinking of when I saw this thread.

As long as it forwards the plot in a meaningful way, there's really nothing wrong with it. I think the keyword here would definitely be "maturity". If you can pull it off, go for it. If not, refrain from getting too detailed.

You're reading Lolita right now? XD  Read any other Nabokov?

Anyway, my two cents on that:

Lolita is definitively not a story about how love overcomes age difference.  Humbert & Lolita don't even love each other. 

Actually, not all states prohibit sex between teachers and students. Apparently if you were legal in Texas a few years back, it was fine, (I'd whine about no one telling me, but I used to be homeschooled and I graduated early anyway :P) and I saw that in a debate about another state and whether or not it should be a thing there, too. Mind you, there's always the risk of being fired... laws or no, schools have their policies. 

I would like to just point out that the OP has only replied to me. XD

Eh, you put a bunch of writers in a thread, throw out a topic that's juuuust controversial enough and we're bound to talk our heads off.

If nothing else, he has plenty of material and ideas from which he can springboard the dynamics of the relationship and the plot.

Huh, I learned something new today. It would be Texas.

But yeah, it's still probably a great way to get shown the door. Schools in Pennsylvania can still paddle kids, but I haven't heard of such a thing in decades. It's against most, if not all, school board policies now. There would be so much squawking from parents...

Hey! >_> Don't go bad mouthing my home state now... (xD the paddle thing, I just don't want to think about, really)

Anyway, I'm not sure where all it would still be legal. Cali seems to be one of the places. And I found a 2012 article: "three years ago the Georgia Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that it was legal for teachers to have sexual contact with students so long as they are of the age of consent. What’s the age of consent in Georgia, you ask? 16 years old" 

I feel as though this is pretty much a required requisite for this thread.

Opened the video, checked the title, started laughing. xD

A college professor and students aren't equals. If a professor propositions their student, the student is going to be worried about a penalty if they say no, regardless of whether the professor would penalize them. It puts pressure on the student, which is why it's considered to be unethical and unprofessional. 

I don't know what started this, but it's not unethical in fiction. Touchy things like that deserve to be explored freely, and in fiction they can. And even then, occasionally people bitch about it. I wouldn't even mind if it were condoned, as long it's clearly by a character in the fictional work, and not by the author itself.

Nobody cared when that one guy in the Victorian era made a whole bunch of books about 30-somethings "romancing" barely double-digit-agers...

Hold up. Who, made this a seperate thread? This issue has been resolved already.

It's not an issue, but people are still talking because it became a discussion about laws and such. It has nothing to do with getting that writer a co-author now. xD Besides, even resolved derailments are derailments.

Where did this start? What happened? Why the fuck doesn't Jimmy respond to the OP for once in his goddamn life for shit's sake!? I wanna know! My brain is angry!

*pats your brain* It's all gonna be okay. 

BLARGH! No it won't! And don't touch that, that's the seizure part, I think!

Wait, I don't remember... Sees what you done to I, kyle!?

Muwahah...

@Jimmysutton, why don't you reply to the original post?

I do! Like I always say and I will say it again t just gets sent to the bottom!

See! I just replied to the op!

"Man, 112, marries 17-year-old bride

In what is thought to be the biggest age difference in the world a Somali man married his teenage bride despite a 95 YEAR gap.

Ahmed Muhamed Dore, who already had 13 children by five wives, married Safia Abdulleh, when she was just 17-years-old.

The wedding in October 2009 sparked mixed reactions from locals as the man's bride was young enough to be his great granddaughter."

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/meet-somali-man-aged-112-3880617

 

Pretty sure if an age gap of 95 f****** years is allowed (the guy would be a great grandfather when the girl is born) then an age gap of 10 years isn't much. My parents have an age gap of 13 years. (I'm looking at this conversation completely out of context - only looking at the OP, and I assume it was detached from a different thread from some mod by the way it starts out. Excuse me if I missed the point completely)

It mostly stemmed from a student - teacher, sexual relationship, set in a middle or high school age environment in modern America.

EDIT: To add in a historical layer, young women sometimes wed soon after they hit puberty in the middle ages and in centuries prior. Though, people obtained higher mental maturity back then much earlier in life than in modern society. This largely stems from societal and cultural functions. Those young men and women had to develop those skills sooner, whereas in modern society, they don't. A fifteen year old girl in the 12th century would probably be more mentally mature than many modern women in their mid 20s.

Can I get a source on that? It sounds like bullshit. 

Lol. I like how you edited your previous polite version of the question to the more direct version we've all come to expect.

I shouldn't have used the term, "mental maturity." It's a technical term, and we don't have enough time machines lying around to grab a few 14 year old wench test subjects and analyze them firsthand. So it's not like I can provide you with brain wave schematics or in depth observational studies.

Still, I stand by the claim that societal and cultural functions forced children to attain a level of adulthood maturity at earlier ages.

It's well documented that children in the medieval ages had high levels of responsibility thrust upon them at early ages. This did not always end well. However, seeing as humanity still exists, the bulk of children managed to adapt to these intense roles. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that carrying the arduous burden of adult caliber responsibilities will work to morph young children into adult-like ways of thinking. In nature, when a creature is thrust into a new and difficult scenario or set of circumstances, it either learns to adapt, or it dies.

In modern society, you may not have to enter into full adult responsibilities until your early or mid 20s. Of course, it's a fair argument that this does not mean these folks aren't necessarily prepared for that level of responsibility beforehand. Like any creature, we adapt out of necessity, and modern society simply doesn't demand the early maturation in regards to many legal and work responsibilities that the medieval period required.

I haven't sifted through this entire article yet, but from what I have, it's quite interesting. The onus of responsibility on medieval youth is younger than I would have expected in some cases. It also enhances my sentiment from Cliche Adventures, "peasantry blows."

---

If you're interested, here are legal ages and marriage ages for the medieval time period.

I would consider these more general numbers than hard ones. We're talking about a wide time frame and geographical land mass, so I would have to assume different nations had different values that may have changed over the centuries.

I just read the autobiography of a baseball player who's in his eighties now.

Most interesting part was when he talked about his wife.  He met her when he was 17 & she was 14.  and he didn't talk about it like it was a big deal at all- just mentioned in the background to his story about them meeting at the movies. 

They got married when she was 15, he left for training camp, & she moved out to Chicago to get their apartment set up. 

It wasn't even that long ago that a 15 year old was an adult. 

(Course nowadays there's plenty of ppl in their mid 20s who are still dependent on their parents.)

My grandmother was married at fourteen.  It was an arranged marriage and my grandparents had to learn to love each other.  Oh, and my grandfather was twenty-one, if I remember correctly.  But those were different times...

Weelll, in other countries, 23 year olds walk into villages and can walk out married to a 12 year old. It's legal there, but that doesn't make it not creepy.

Of course it's creepy, but it's not because of the gap, it's because children have no business getting married or "getting it on" due to their unfinished physical and mental development. (Lowest age of consent in other countries: 9. Eww.)

So fucked up.

Yeah... I didn't want the discussion to dominate Keno's WW thread. 

Isn't the teacher/student romance pretty much the plot of every other Manga series?

Just make the student at least 18 if you don't want a shitstorm.

If you want to push the "boundaries" a little further, no lower than 16.

My dad was actually a uni professor and my mum was a student. However, she wasn't his student because she took a separate course. He's 8 years older than her. To me, if both people understand and consent to be in a relationship together then it's fine. The problem arises when the authority figure takes advantage of the student's lack of maturity/innocence/naivety/vulnerability in order to manipulate them into a relationship.
This topic's over I think(?) but hey, my two cents on this is that, age gaps are actually quite common in real life, and therefore, it should be fine to have them in storygames. Even the immoral unhealthy student-teacher relationship has its place if the author intentionally places it there for a purpose (as long as it isn't to condone them because don't do thaaaat).