Tropes I Hate pt. 2

Hello and welcome to another segment of The Rant Café, where I rant about books and fanfic tropes, movies, series and basically anything I’ve been consuming for years. And today i’m going to be ranting about the Age Gap trope.

Specifically, the ones involving a freshly turned legal adult aged 18-19 years with an older person roughly in their mid-20s to 30s.

And this brings me to my question: what the fuck does someone in their mid-20s to 30s have in common with an 18-19 year old, and why would they want to date someone that young?

Age gap defenders: but they're legal adults.

So? Just coz these kids are legal don't mean that they're full-fledged adults. They JUST started transitioning into adulthood and are JUST experiencing life. I doubt if an 18-19-year-old knows how to budget unless they were smart enough to do it when they were kids. Being an adult is not always determined by age. It's determined by experience.

Age gap defenders: Well, they can make their own choices. If they want to date someone older, that's their choice.

Me: Yes, but that doesn't mean that they're making the right choices. I'm 26 years old and I've made some choices from when I was 18 until now, which I thought were good at the time, but without thinking about how they were going to affect me in the long run. So no, you can't use the "they can make their own choices" to justify making bad decisions and choices.

Age gap defenders: but they're consenting adults.

Me: Yes. But even consenting adults can be manipulated and exploited. I was 22-23 years old and was coerced into doing things I didn't want, believing that I was consenting to them. I've been lied to, used and manipulated by at 22-23 years old. And you have to consider that power dynamics are a thing that can muddy a person's consent, even if they can consent.

The thing that I hate about Age gap tropes is how they write the 18-19-year-old (especially the women) as these innocent, submissive, infantilised women and objectify them and don't give them agency and to me, that's honestly icky and degrading. And a lot of the time, the love interests treat them like objects and possessions they want to ruin and corrupt. Worse if they establish the male lead cheating on their established partner/second lead (who's usually around the same age range as the male lead) with the FMC, and often villainise the second lead to suit the narrative, and a good example of this is Hades from Lore Olympus.

I'll be honest, I used to ship and root for Hades and Persephone as a couple back in the day, and I used to HATE Minthe's guts. It took me watching reviews and criticisms of Lore Olympus to actually see how the author did Minthe dirty with the slutshaming and villainising her, infantilising Persephone, and how predatory the relationship between Hades and Persephone was, since Persephone was 19 years old at the start, and Hades was over 20,000-30,000 years old.

Like real shit, there an Age Gap story on Wattpad called the Mathematician where basically our 19 year old MC is hired and paid to seduce and sleep with a 30 some mathematician and get herself pregnant 💀.

I don't care what you say and think: age gap tropes done badly are predator propaganda in pastel packaging, and people defending it simply because the mcs amd yns are legal adults are predator apologists and defenders.