Character Ages (Patreon)

so as we have said previously in patch notes, on the server, and has been reflected in game, we went through and retconned some character ages as of e19.

originally i had intended to make a post of the changed ages for you all first, and then publicly to correct the general misconceptions out there. i am no longer going to do that. instead, i'll be walking you all through a bit of history for why the ages were what they were said to be, and why i am not posting an updated list.

that said, this-- it isn't quite spoilers but i am going to write this assuming everyone has already read what i've had to say in my secret dev room dialogue in game. again, if you haven't already read that, make sure you're in postgame and go find some vulpix but harder this time. 

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okay, everyone caught up?
great.

so, game was based on online league, and online league was me making a bunch of characters. when they were introduced in the online league in 2010, 2011 ish, i had a pretty clear idea of how old most of the characters were, especially the younger ones. heather was 10, shelly was 12, cain and charlotte were 14, fern was 15, hardy and aya were 16, luna was 18, blahblahblah.

and that's great for a static point in time.
...but this league ran on for years. all of these characters who i started with specific ages in mind for were around and interacting with people on the live server for years. some of them even celebrated birthdays with the community. the only one i still remember for sure is shelly being a valentine's baby-- anyway we counted up for a while and then we stopped counting but if we had do you know that cain would be like 26 by now??? weird.

anyway, so i made the game based on [a general summation of events that happened in the online league]. and for some characters like luna and amy, a lot of shit happened over several years and it's weird to force that into a specific ages or timeframe. this is why for most of the game's development history, i have avoided giving specific ages for characters. if there were some kind of in game profile available to display it, maybe i would have cared more and pinned down specific numbers a long time ago, but there wasn't, so i didn't. i'm pretty sure most of the information floating around out there has just come from me answering asks on tumblr where someone is like

how old is cain?

and i'm like

well idk i've usually written him imagining he's around 15 or so maybe that but the ages are really messed up

because he joined the league at 14 and left after a couple years so that's like his average age but eeeeeehhhhhh? and i assume i tried to explain that a bit in the tumblr asks at first or maybe after the eighteenth ask i just got tired and started giving the numbers i had publicly committed to in the past or something. 

anyway, then someone put that onto the wiki. and then everyone saw that "cain is 15?!?!!" assumedly by word of god, and by the way, as the god in question, i was really trying not to have words. do you think god stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he has created? i do.
note that by now i have asked that ages be disincluded from the wiki to avoid this in the future. 

(obligatory shout out that some dedicated folks are still trucking away at the wiki in the reborn-wiki-project channel on the main server and if you're bored i'm sure they can still use the help!)

...okay, let's stop dancing around the elephant in the room and just talk about cain for a bit. 

i first wrote him to be Like That when i was 19 and just a few months out of high school, and as someone not very far removed from still being a minor and a teenager at the time, his personality just seemed stock standard for a Normal Teenager to me. from my memory and experience, people were intimate as early as middle school, and it was very normal for teenagers, especially boys, to be exploring sexuality, flirting, and making perverted jokes as a default state. 

but, there has been a lot of discomfort over the years about him being a minor. i think there's a few angles to this. there are the people who liked and attached to cain a lot as a character who flirts with the protagonist. they then have to be defensive about feeling attached to him as a person stated in-game to legally be an adult. that's understandable, and i dislike having unintentionally put people into that awkward situation. 

then there are the people who look at those people from a distance and are like
"oh my,
is that ~ p r o b l e m a t i c ~ ?"
and ready their cancel-culture cannons or whatever.
most of those people are probably the same people who are looking for any excuse to write off the game for being too edgy or a fangame or whatever, and i don't really care about their takes, but there's also a subset of people there who enjoyed the game and then have to give a second though to the moral integrity of having enjoyed something that might promote something heinous, and does that make them ~ p r o b l e m a t i c ~ too? they ask, is reborn encouraging pedophilia? 😱

...all right, pause again.
someone's going to take this out of context and then i'm going to get cancelled on twitter or something,
but let's talk about pedophilia.
(exciting post, right, guys?)

i have some issues with the current hyper-aggressive internet culture around protecting minors.
please don't get me wrong-- this is not a defense of actual pedophilia, it is obviously important to keep people safe-- but it is a criticism of the lack of nuance with which people approach the issue.

the problem with pedophilia is not that an adult is having an intimate relationship with someone below the legal age limit.
the problem with pedophilia is that stark differences in agency between two people in an intimate relationship create dramatic opportunity for abuse and manipulation of the party with less agency. 

the legal age limit is an arbitrary line in the sand meant to discourage abuse, and it is an insufficient, simplistic solution to a very complicated problem. many people are used to only thinking of the letter of the law, but the problem is more complicated than that.
case study time:

• a relationship between a fairly independent 16 year old and a 19 year old university student who still lives with his parents might be legally ruled as a statutory violation, depending on where they live, or even if not then maybe socially labelled as pedophilia instead. 
• however, a relationship between a 20 year old and a 50 year old is legally acceptable, so many people do not bat an eye at the obvious imbalance of personal agency and opportunity for manipulation there. 
• and even in that case, it is just an opportunity. maybe it is somehow a very mature 20 year old and very immature 50 year old-- we don't know based on age alone.
• setting age aside, maybe two people of the exact same age are engaged, but one has very specialized intellectual needs and the other one is borderline psychopathic and takes advantage of that.

personally, i am a lot more worried about that last instance than i am about the 16 and 19 year old dating. there is not an easy way to solve for the other cases, but i do not often see the hypervigilant warriors of anti-pedophilia displaying that nuance or understanding in their online posturing. 

...so, with this in mind, let's go back to cain.
let's assume that cain is still a minor by 'word of god', and let's assume that a given player has attached to cain only to find that out later.
should they feel bad about that? well... assuming that they aren't fantasizing about a relationship based around manipulating and abusing him... i don't think so?
and like, come on. it's cain. even as a minor, he is shown to be more independent than, say, early game bennett who i originally wrote imagining him to legally be an adult.
and cain is the type to be making the first move-- this is pure conjecture on my part, but i don't imagine that most people who like cain like to imagine manipulating or abusing him.
...and i don't think the people who do like to imagine manipulating him, if they exist, would exactly be particularly concerned about arbitrary legal age limits in the first place anyway, so why would they care what i have to say about it?
(and even then studies have shown that it tends to be healthiest to let people have whatever fantasies they wish so long as the potentially dangerous ones are never acted upon in reality)

so we're like four contingencies out at this point with cain, but i hope this goes to show how this entire line of discussion is A Little Bit Silly to me. again, respect to the people who attached hard to them-- i am always grateful when people can invest emotionally in my characters, and i am not afraid to include romantic attachment in that-- but personally i haven't written him with the intention of being someone to romantically attach to. i was just writing him as he acted in the online league-- a flirty teenager openly exploring his own sexuality.  
(as a side note, i have told stories in the past about how cain would sometimes be cybering with challengers on the side of his online league matches and i had to get on his case and discourage him from that. that is still a true story. i would like to state for the court record that i was not the one playing cain at any point that that happened, and i am still not happy that it did. but to the actor-at-the-time's credit, it was in character, i guess.........)

this is all to say that if someone feels like i have been encouraging pedophilia with cain-- i would really encourage them to check their own understanding of what is abusive behavior, and their own ideas about what is going on with a fictional character. at that point, i come to the conclusion that they are perhaps engaging with the game in bad faith. 

...where were we? what was this post about?

oh, right, ages.

so people occasionally ask about ages, and cass has been prodding me to update them for a while. usually i'm like eeeeeh because of all of the wishy-washy league stuff mentioned above the dark discussion of pedophilia... but her case has mainly just been about bringing the stated ages of the younger characters more in line with their own dialogue. valid. also, picking set numbers is probably should've done years ago just for my own understanding of the timeline, but, well, i didn't. 

this kind of happened all of the sudden though because during community release, someone came onto our server and almost had the usual "cain is 15????" reaction. only, instead of expressing any kind of discomfort with that realization, they in fact expressed quite the opposite. i am not going to repeat what they said, but it was revolting and i'm not entirely sure they even understood what they were saying. know that it was deeply uncomfortable for everyone, and so we decided to immediately go through with the retcon. 

dialogue was updated, some discussions were had, a patch went out and i mentioned in the patch notes that we did the retcon. notably, we did not post the list of ages anywhere yet.
and then, within a few days, somehow word got out about this and The Community started spreading the information that we retconned cain to be 19 (editor's note: this was not even true.)
and immediately, someone came into the server with the hot take of if cain is now 19 and flirts with charlotte, doesn't that make -him- the pedophile?

in answer to that question, i would like to gesture broadly to the entire above breakdown of the concept, and also remind the person who said that charlotte's age was also updated.
but the psychic damage is already done.
this is all stupid and pointless and people are going to look for reasons to be upset (in the back of my head i wonder, why is it always cain? is it because he is one of the most apparently not-straight characters? is this dedication to branding him as problematic a symptom of homophobia?)
so, i no longer wish to post the ages.

this is my position now:

we have retconned the ages. we are not posting them publicly. everyone is free to believe whatever the hell they wish except where otherwise explicitly evidenced in-game.

i believe in death of the author (lol) as a concept and i feel like i should've just stuck to it from the beginning. if i sound tired, it's because i am. none of this really ever had to be this......... that. 

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post over, but a few unrelated updates:

we are planning to do a celebration stream for the release on sunday at 3pm MST. click for your local time zone. all the devs are invited and i have no idea who all is going to be around for it but it will probably be some of them. we will do Q&A and just chat and i will read through some posts and stuff maybe and just vibe. we'll go on twitch. 

break has been nice. it didn't really feel that different at first but maybe i'm starting to mentally see how to adjust to the notion of having time and freedom, and how i've limited myself too much otherwise. that said, hoping to do oneeeee last patch tomorrow just for the most visible cats in public.

follow up from the previous discussion about community-oriented development: it sounds like the general consensus is that, yeah, there's probably not a meaningful way to open-source game writing, but probably the rest of the development has a lot of opportunity. so that distinction is going to be interesting to learn to toe, but that's the journey. we'll embark on it soon. 

speaking of community stuff, i think an important part is going to be outreach and accessibility so i would like to get some more videos going. if there is anyone out there who wants to contribute and has video-editing experience, or has the time and wants to learn how to do editing, please message me! i am happy to teach people, it just takes time to put stuff together and someone else managing that would go a long way to both freeing me up to focus on development while also helping everyone else stay in the loop with streams, etc. 

finally, one poll for today, just another temperature check for actual game spoilers. we'll keep it simple this time-- are you still playing through and avoiding spoilers, or are you ready for them?
regardless, i'll probably have some posts that i just mark as spoiler for those who want to view them, but i'd still like to know where the balance is by now. 

thanks to everyone for hanging out with us in this transitional time, and i hope to see you on sunday!