Fellow Old People! Or am I the only one?

You are talking about college, i have even passed university age! ┗( T﹏T )┛

I'm going to be 35 and I only started reading New Years' Eve. Nobody else is allowed to feel old ^_^

Lol. I am 31...not too far behind! I am glad I am not the only 30-something here!

Finished my 7 years of university a while back, but unless I am chatting with a blatantly underage person (yes - it shows in speech/writing patterns) I feel like a 'young person' -you are only really as old as you feel - my Grandma used to say

Not ancient per se, hardly a Methuselah, but it seems there are a few more of us than there were in the beginning. I have been reading yaoi for awhile, though.

I'm not as old....but at 27 I feel ancient when I talk to some who are obviously babies lol. Only found manga like 2 years ago though

Wait isnt college before uni? Is it different wherever you live?

Oh nevermind, i read have as havent xD oops! Sorry

Being a fudanshi and fujoshi know no age but if that becomes an issue then there will be very few of us left here in Mangago.

Im 30 and been reading manga for the past 15 years haha.

OMG, yaaay! We should all do a geezer dance now!

Just kidding, lol...I do know that none of us are actually old in the grand scheme of things. There are just a lot of young ones on this site. Glad it's not just me and the kiddies on here!

I'm 40 and honestly I rather enjoy being old on this site, makes it so that I've had decades to read all the oldies and I can recommend them to new readers and help subvert their young minds! Bahahaahaaha!!

Rather than thinking that I'm old, I often wonder why there are children on here. Some of the ages people give on here are crazy, if true. I would NEVER have been allowed free enough free reign to be getting into this stuff at the young ages I see on here.

It is nice to see several other 30 somethings responding, though....

I meant to say i have even passed university after passing college!

I find that disturbing too ... even though there are other types of manga there are people from age 10-17 here reading yaoi, sometimes the hardcore stuff.

More troubled, I suppose, by their reactions to the anger, violence, casual cruelty than sex.
The thing is, when at 10 and younger, fairytales and fantasy stories were freely available, where all this sort of stuff was presented, although in a more oblique and codified fashion, and it was easy to imagine. But my first experience of actual horror was a book of survivors' accounts of Sobibor. Nothing imaginary had anything on what has been real and in this world. That had a more traumatic and lasting impact.

I agree that it's disturbing when kids are reading smutty yaoi and rape/violence erotic stuff. It's one thing to be exposed to violence and assault in media, but in the context of that violence and assault being a source of sexual arousal is disturbing enough for adults. But kids? Good God, they should enjoy being kids while they can. They have their whole lives ahead of them to be perverted, fucked up adults. If I woke up as a thirteen year old again, I would seriously do the same thing I did when I was thirteen the first time...ride my bike everywhere with my best friends, play sports, read Harry Potter, and watch Disney movies wearing pajamas.

Did you get fed the Disney pap fairy tales, or the real ones? I have read the real ones and some of them are quite disturbing, but they let kids explore the darkness in a safer venue.

Both. Although there wasn't nearly as much Disney pap back then, and there wasn't nearly as many opportunities to watch it. I mean, this was before video cassettes. A Disney animation was a special treat which we might get to watch around Christmas and Easter during Sunday specials. Now, it's just mundane, and the flaws from tarting stories up with pop cultural references and, both, modernist and accelerationist adult subtext wipe away any connection between the source material and the adaptation. Snow White was a pretty good adaptation of the original story. Same with Pinocchio. The Little Mermaid bears no resemblance whatsoever to the chthonic elemental creature that Hans Christian Anderson created and her clumsy attempts to evolve into a higher state of realization against all of nature. It isn't that I dislike Ariel. It's just that there is no comparison. They are not the same character and, for all the plot-point touchstones, it isn't the same story. Same with the Snow Queen, where even similar plot-points were removed. Imagine taking a character like Baba Yaga, the essence of the brutal elemental destructive feminine force of nature and life near the Arctic circle, and turning her into Gidget in a ballgown? It's all a bit naff. Now, it's comics which have replaced the old fairy tales.

Well, there are a few problems with trying to work around the current social paradigm, which came about as a result the most rapid, consecutive series of social changes ever faced, and we have to adapt. You can try to shelter your children (grandchildren?) and, if you are hyper-vigilant, that may succeed to some extent but, eventually, like the kids on this forum, they will probably slip past the controls and start exploring freely. Then you have lost any chance of temperance.

Or, you can have frank conversations about the nature of real (vs. imaginary) exploitation and violence, the impact on the psyche, the importance of knowing the true self, self-respect and self-control. You can also research the subconscious mind and symbolism and talk about the effects of make-belief and visualization, so that they can be aware of what they want to explore without feeling like they have to make it real.

In either case, we need to accept that children will find their own ways to assert their true selves.