Last year I think it was, DA made a list of criteria on how to determine character ages so that you don't break their rule of putting certain characters in certain situations. It said things such as "if a character began as a certain age and the series ends with them above a certain age, you must treat them as the younger age" and "if the character's age is ambiguous and looks like they're a certain young age, treat them as that age". Other places followed suit, but the rules set such an enormous amount of detail up for interpretation that they might as well have said "never post non-rated-E material unless the mods give you explicit permission". I had my art taken down from a site recently because I drew the characters from My Life As A Teenage Robot and someone pointed out Jenny is technically, well, they had a whole episode centered around the concept, so it's not like they hadn't thought of it too.

So in partnering with the person from the other thread, an idea was hatched (a genuine idea, not like a "I'm going to ask deep questions" one since this comes from a real dilemma artists everywhere have run into). Why not just have a thread, supervised by the admins but participated in by everyone here as well as anyone elsewhere (maybe on their behalf, which is why this one time I wouldn't put it in a journal), where people can discuss the ambiguities, technicalities, dissonances, and specifications around the ages of official characters, OC's, personas, and celebrities over time, expanding the ruling process with consideration-based rulings that people of authority can give? Because I really am tired of making characters to show off in different places only for them to be removed based on a technicality because there's no place in the world with a criteria that gets this kind of enforcement right, and a discussion board or "megathread" where this is the purpose could prevent a myriad of instances of collateral damage and can allow this kind of matter to be settled Supreme Court style (which means anyone who this could affect should tune in).

Anyone got any inquiries/stories about accidental removals?

Just to be clear and unambiguous about Side 7's stance on the topic, especially as it pertains to characters in adult-intended material:

By adult status, we mean non-minor. The characters involve cannot be a child, or child-like. By convensional terms, here in the U.S., that means a character would need to be at least 18 years of age. Anything below that potentially constitutes child pornography, which can result in Side 7 being shut down.

On the topic of aging-up or aging-down characters, Side 7 is fine with doing so provided that the sole purpose of doing so isn't to put the character into adult-content situations. For example, if you wanted to age-up Timmy Turner from Fairly OddParents to tell about his adventures as an adult, that's fine. If you wanted to age-up Timmy Turner so you can skirt the rules on consensual age so Timmy can seduce Chloe Carmichael, that's not acceptable.

As of now, this rule hasn't needed to be further defined. But, if a situation develops where a more explicit definition is required, this rule will be updated.

-- BK

Funny thing about that, something akin to this happened the other day to me.

There's a new place called Art Galaxy I've been to. Aside from them only allowing digital art (to which I ask don't we have enough of those... no offense to them, the people in charge there are pretty cool), I also didn't realize what might be considered acceptable to them.

So when I draw, I don't typically think of most things within the line of thinking here. I just think of a concept and think "ooh I should make art of that". The other day I conjured up a crossover scenario between Pucca and Mao Mao Heroes of Pure Heart. It was supposed to be one where Adorabat and Pucca switch places, nothing you would see out of a nefarious gallery or anything, just a multi-angle work.

I then provided one of the editions to Art Galaxy. They came back a day later saying "we have received a report, and although we don't want to ban you like the reporters were begging, we removed the picture for age dissonance", and I was like wut. Apparently Mao Mao is older than me. But then again, Adorabat is young enough to watch the Wiggles (and they're in the same show). And the other two are two years older than Ash Ketchum... despite the fact it's a parody of Grease that uses often-borderline-graphic ninja violence (what are they doin' over there in South Korea).

It may have been the semantics honestly (though some don't have an age except for passing remarks by the creators).

I'm not one to object to authoritative decisions, I am the guest in their abode. It was just an oddly technical surprise is all (plus they chose to not call it a done report when the fact it wasn't a digital work came up). Or so I would think, I don't know. Should I just not draw the Mao Mao characters? Who knows. I know a guy who got in trouble because he drew Scooby with another in-universe dog and Scooby is the only one in the Scooby universe (aside from Scrappy) who passes the Harkness Test, and another one who got in trouble for shipping Shadow with Orbot since Shadow is a life form cloned by Eggman's grandfather, making him technically Eggman's uncle, while Orbot was created by Eggman, making him Eggman's "son" (in the same way C3PO is technically Luke's and Leia's older brother). I can't quite picture it.

With that out of the way, I do have a question after having watched a sci-fi movie. In quantum physics, time slows down for people in motion, right? If you're on a space ship that's approaching the speed of light, it's said time slows down for you, so even though you might go on a trip on a UFO that lasts a few minutes, you might exit your spacecraft only to learn a few decades have passed. Something like this was an overshadowing point in the Buzz Lightyear movie. My question is simple, do we treat the undertoned issue according to a perspective where these physics exist or where they don't?

I left dA years ago for obvious reasons but when I saw that new rule, it pissed me off enough to complain about it in my journal months ago:

I'm sympathetic to not wanting mature/fetish art of canonically underage characters hosted (there's a debate to be had about the ethics of it, just not here), but the fact that drawing them older counts as "child exploitation" when they're

1. fictional

2. not drawn as children (emphasis on this, everyone knows the "1000 year old vampire that looks 12" trope is a cope)

3. characters being "aged up" happens in official media all the time (timeskips, sequels, reboots, etc.)

???

The artists masochistic enough to stay on here have to do extensive research and basically treat canon like the Bible (we can't use fan estimates) to not have their pixel drawings thrown out. If a character is aged-up in canon but looks the same, they will be considered underage anyway, despite canon being law in this new policy. If a character has different ages depending on release (like, idk, 20 in an English localization but 16 in Japan) they'll just pick the younger age. Huh?

I generally don't care about character ages. When it comes to transformative works like fanart, it really is a matter of context since character ages can be fuzzy in both canon and in a meta sense. Sonic the Hedgehog has been 15 for 33 years, Shadow is chronologically 50 in canon but is functionally a teenager personality/maturity-wise (also his game is 23 years old), Kirby is an ageless blob but also 32, Ash Ketchum has been 10 for 27 years, Tiki from Fire Emblem went from being a 1000 year old child in the first game to a 3000 year old adult in Awakening (canonical aging up), etc. It's literally not real, and these things are often at the whims of the creators or higher executives.

Waaaait, Kirby is older than I am?

*reads an excerpt about Kirby*

Oh, never mind. Goes to show even research is not on peoples' side. I don't have to change anything.

I know Ash Ketchum was 11 for like one season (because the anniversary of his journeys was mentioned, albeit I don't know if it was the dub being the dub or not) but then they retconned that (or maybe it was just semantically misunderstood) and he was 10 again for the rest of the series (and now with Pokémon Horizons, we don't know how old he is, if it's the same universe, or how he's related to Liko, or Dot for that matter, which makes conversations about them meeting up for more than a cup of tea awkward). And in Sonic X they had this weird arc in season three where Sonic went into a parallel universe where time passed slower and then he established contact with Chris and Helen again who by that time were college students (barely a year passed for Sonic).

It's a spectrum. That's always been the unfactored issue. So much that this whole thing kind of reminds me of the hassles of running the ScrewAttack show Death Battle (which it shouldn't do), that show that centered around characters dueling each other and with the creators trying to square the in-universe physics of both characters in each episode to help determine who should have won a match before and after giving us the battle. Of course, in classic MythBusters fashion, it was sloppy, because two franchise creators as well as two battle animators couldn't expect to belong to the same school of "physics" in such a way to make them directly transferable, resulting in things such as a messy appropriation of the physics of chaos and chi during the battle between Shadow and Vegeta when a proper analysis would reveal no consistent universe would be capable of housing them both, a pitfall which led to the rise of BatInTheSun which used a more democratic system of determining an outcome (which may be an omen to what we should be doing here... at this point, why even say it like "if you're not sure, don't do the art" in a "voting off the island" type of scheme like this). We think in terms of what is the norm and don't factor in the "what ifs" in situations involving people doing certain things. In the words of Sheldon, "some universes forget how to math". Relevantly, I pioneered a "solution" but it has faced a tough crowd in a world where people think in terms of "if it quacks like a duck".

I would say you would treat the issue from the perspective of the characters. For characters on Earth, the characters on the ship would have been gone for a long time and time has passed, for those on the ship, they're relative age hasn't changed much between the time they left and the time they returned. So... I'm not sure how else to answer as the scenario as described is a little vague.

-- BK

Seeing all this right as I just got booted from a Nintendo server for sharing a Super Smash Bros pause screenshot with the Ice Climbers and Waluigi looking questionable together by complete coincidence. Even the "activity" part is debatable.

Hey does anyone know how old Hobbes is in Calvin and Hobbes? Was going to give him a deep dive.

Isn't Hobbes supposed to be the stereotypical imaginary friend (in which case one might be asking how they might measure the age of a character's character going by the laid-out rules)?

*cue Crimson Chin title card*

Hobbes was "conjured" so-to-speak the very year the strips take place in, but his "lore" states him as ambiguously older in comparison with him.

I was very big on the Pokemon anime from age 12-17. And I can confirm that Ash was 11 at one point (can't quote an episode though, since there's so many), but then he wasn't. But I also explicitly remember later in the Hoenn seasons he acknowledges years have passed since he traveled to 3 different regions before that. But is still 10 or 11. I dropped the anime after Sinnoh and only caught Unova episodes if they featured characters I liked, but IIRC both the Unova seasons and Journeys (the last season) were soft resets at the same time.

Make it make sense!