How do I NOT make this romance squicky?

I have a character, the son of the protagonist, who is put on a tramp freighter for the purpose of an apprenticeship with the chief enginesmith and flight officer. Although a natural mechamic, he is attracted more to flight. The flight officer and enginesmith are twins but they are complete opposites. Darby, the enginesmith, is outgoing, social, but somewhat insecure, especially about her abiity to relate to er sister, Harmone, the cyernetically augmented autistic pilot of their ship. For years, as the captain and Harmone have experimented with combining the computing properties the computer and the human mind, and Darby feels more and more distant from her sister. When the kid and his father come on board, Darby and the father, Harry, are attracted to each other and begin a discreet relationship. However, Dylan, the kid, develops feelings for his brilliant but emotionally immature mentor, Harmony (the autistic twin who interfaces mostly with the ship's computer). Dylan is almost 13, and that is considered a man in his "Starfarer" culture out on the fringe of civilized worlds. So no one bats an eye at him beginning a sexual relationship with his mentor, who is in her late twenties, and developmentally delayed (no one uses the word Autism, they refer to her as a "verbal savant"). I see it as a consquence of them spending flight training time together and also because of the discord between Harmony and her sister, Harmony and Darby's insecurities, and Harmony's need to reach out to someone else, and Dylan, despite being a teenager, is the only male emotionally available (the other three men on the ship are a pair of lowlife thugs and a stand-offish mercenary). As an immature person himself he's also much closer to her emotionally.

Dylan's dad doesn't discourage this relationship because in his cultural context 13 year olds are considered to be adults who can jold a job, own a business, get married, and have kids should they choose. There's no formal schooling which is why apprenticeships at a young age are so important.

edited 16th May '14 3:14:20 AM by sophisticant

First off, I have to say the title looked more like something that would go in Writer's Block. In general, it looks like titles have some keyword related to the forum. (Maybe "... this cyborg romance...") Just keep that in mind when making future threads.

Anyway, to your question: WHY do people say 13-year-olds are adults? Can you say 15 or 16 and still get away with the "young" effect? If not, you should make reasons for why your setting thinks 13 is an adult age.

In real life, 13 is nowhere near adult. I remember when I was 13 — even as late as 18! — and I was still questioning who I was and where I was going. My body was still changing, too, and that's normal for most teenagers.

Also, as someone with Asperger's, make sure that if characters actually say "autism," you'll need to make sure it's an accurate depiction.

That's all I have for now.

Historically, 13 was considered adulthood.

Where and when? You can't simply make that sort of general sweeping assertion and expect it to stand up as a fact, Bellisarius.

I can see 16 being adulthood — kids are just coming out of puberty — but at least for a Western thought-system, 13 seems young even for medieval times.

All this takes place over 40,000 years in the future. It's not a "western" setting anymore than it's "eastern."

Belisarius is correct about this particular cultural context. Both because of its wild west like elements and close association with various criminal undergrounds, lack of formal schooling, apprecenticeships etc, 13-14 seemed about the right age. I'm not changing that becuase it has too many other bearings on other elements of the plot, including resentment that the 13 year old character has toward his dad beccause he was hidden from a war in bio-stasis so when he wakes up he's got a huge chip on his shoulder about the ten year he was "cheated of."

So the kid stays 13.

As for the Autism, I already said no ne calls it Autism anymore, it's got a million names of varying accuracy on a hundred thousand planet. I am an individual with Asperger's myself and I am taking great pains not to make Harmone any kind of stereotype, though I'm not about to write an essay about the specifics o the character right now. I need to save energy for the book. But suffice it to say I didn't want to say "Asperger's" especially because of how terms are changing in the DSM and how our concept of disease changes from generation to generation, just in deference to that. She is called a "Verbal Savant." She's very formal but has a sense of humor, an artistic side represented by murals she has painted all over the ship, is prone to severe mood swing and unfortunately works for very brilliant asshole who has a tendency to push her buttons (and this where her sisty Darby usually steps in and runs interference between her and the captain. On the other hand, Harmone and the Captain have done some things using worholes that weren't even thought possible, and intellectually they make a good team, even if they are polar opposites emotionally (she is sensitive and overemotional, he is sadistic and manipulative. It's implied the Captain saved the sisters from a life of begging for scraps on the street, but at the same the captain is an insecure megalomaniac who feels (somewhat justifiably due to his homeworld's harsh politics) totally slighted by the universe and at odds with existence

The kid is Dylan, the son of new "Executive Offiver" Harry Long Season. Dylan resent his father's use of Stasis on him during the war (for his part Harry and Dylan's mother wanted to make sure Dylan never became a conscript IE a child soldier conscript). Dylan's father is concerned that Dylan is immature for his age and has stagnated at the last place they called home, and wants to push him through an apprenticeship with both the Enginesmith and Flight Officer of the freighter to a more tangeable future.

ALSO @Sam Weston: Who said it was western? It's 40,000 years in the future, in space. It's sure as hell not western despite certain "Wild west" thematic elements

Well, actually IIRC kids as young as 8 were married off (or betrothed, which due to the restrictions of the time, was about as binding as marriage is now), if they were nobles. If you weren't then you didn't have heirship to an estate to your name, and so a boy had to wait to earn enough to plausibly support himself and his family.

Nitpicking the OP: I don't think "verbal savant" is a good term. "Savant" generally means that the person in question is beyond prodigy level in some area. Verbal skills are where she appears to be lacking, so she's the exact opposite of a verbal savant. "Computer savant", "technological savant", "interface savant" are possible, if you want to keep the term "savant". Otherwise you could go with something like "asocial prodigy".

As for the age, in the late medieval period and pre-industrial periods, apprentices generally started working at between the ages of 8 and 11 or so, depending on location, time period, craft in question, and other factors. The apprenticeship came with a contract, forcing the apprentice to serve for 10 years. I've heard that this is where our modern notions of adulthood at ages 18-21 come from, as that was the age an apprentice would set out on his own as a journeyman.

Also, about the OP: what are you concerned about specifically. So far I've identified three possible issues. First is father and son being in relationships with sisters. I can't help you there, as I doesn't send off any squickiness factors for me, but some people I've met have problems with the idea of two brothers marrying two sisters, so its a possibility. Second is the teacher with 13-year old scenario. Possible solutions: well the only thing I can think of is that depending on where she falls on the autistic spectrum, she may have a similar level of maturity to him, but, as the third point, she might actually have less emotional and mental maturity than him.

And I'm not sure why he needs to stay 13. If you want to change his age, all you have to do is change how old he was when he went into stasis and/or the length of the war. Also, on that note, if the war was ten years long, as your post seems to have implied, he'd be 3 when he went into bios-stasis. Unless there's something special about this bios-stasis that I'm missing(I'm thinking of it like cyro-stasis) A) he'd probably have a 3-year olds' knowledge and mental faculties, not a teenager's B) same with attitude C) if its cryo-stasis based, he body won't have aged either D) he'd probably not remember it.

edited 16th May '14 8:46:40 AM by Sharur

How to make a sexual relationship between a 13 year old and a 28 year old autistic girl not-squick?

Either:

• Make the boy older: Doesn't even have to be by much, and it would change absolutely nothing about your story. Hell, it'd even make more sense with his father thinking that he is developmentally stunted. No one looks at a 12 year old not wanting to leave home and gets upset, anymore. 16 would solve the squick issues, and seems like a far more reasonable age for someone to be expected to pilot a ship that is going to be dealing with the strange side of physics regularly.
• Make the girl younger: Emphasizing that she's a prodigy when it comes to interfacing with the ship. You could make her a physically immature 16 or 17. As to the fact that that would make the dad a ephebophile (read: creepy pedo by American standards) for dating her twin, I can't help you. Though it'd be just as easy to keep the other sister older.

Or, now that I think about it... Don't make it a physical relationship. At the age of 13 the kid doesn't fully understand WHAT sex means. It'd make it a bit more romantic if the readers could look at it and go, "Awww, that's sweet," instead of being forced to imagine a child railing a mildly autistic girl behind the scenes. Other than those three things, unless this is pure Author Appeal on a level that you're not ready to give up and I'm not quite comfortable contemplating, you'd need to change or acknowledge how messed up it is.

edited 16th May '14 10:51:44 AM by Poisonarrow

I'd just like to point out how nobody's against the "cyborg" part. So far, this is all about the age of the two characters.

I mean... It's cybernetics. I feel like 99% of TV Tropes would accept cybernetic enhancements. Hell, I'm already getting one this summer.

Kids actually getting married at eight though wasn't all that common though in many cultures though. They couldn't produce heirs at eight years old, and weren't guaranteed to live long enough to get power, making it a risky and pointless marriage until they were older anyway. 13+ was more common for girls, who were generally the younger one in the marriage.

On topic- I agree with Poisonarrow. The only way for it not to be squicky is if they're closer in age or if it's not a physical relationship. Whether or not 13 is considered an adult in your story, 13 year olds are not actually adults in the real world, which means me and a lot of other people would just see it as abuse.

edited 19th May '14 5:08:26 AM by QueenPanic

Also, allow me to point out Toy Ship. That's more for fandom, but the concept is still useful.

^^ The more important consideration is that they weren't expected to have sex or, in many cases, even live together as a couple when they were married that young. The legal connection was present, but they weren't but what we'd recognize as an actual, functional marriage wasn't. They weren't adults in an adult marriage.

edited 19th May '14 8:00:57 AM by Madrugada

Well it's a space setting, right? Have their ages counted in systems that aren't compatible with each other (Earth and Space years, for example). There's also the whole relativity thing - time spent traveling at high (read: relativistic) speeds is time passed differently.

Or, just throw in the squick and have everyone comment on it. Sometimes it's easier to just work with an obvious problem than to just dance around it. I suppose you could also chide the reader for being stuck in their own culture and what's permissible in it, rather than the story's culture... but that's a bit hard to do without sounding like a handwave.

It'll gross some people out, but so long as you don't go into any graphic detail... eh. If the sexes of the characters were reversed, of course, you'd be letting yourself in for Katrina-level shitstorm.

Now this kind of double standard is a problem, and you might want to avoid taking your story in a direction that could help perpetuate that problem, but just as a technical exercise? I think it can definitely be done. Focus on emotions rather than physicality (or at least, avoid focusing on how sexy this thirteen-year-old is — easier to tell it from his perspective). Or on other characters' reactions. Basically just avoid the impression that you're writing it with only one hand on top of the table.

Actually, Poisonarrow's post brought something up: how old is Dylan's dad?

There is no way to remove the squick. This is, by definition, an inherently squicky situation.

Speaking as somebody with high-functioning autism—and as someone with a number of friends who are all over the scale—there's no good way for you to make the female character work for the story. If she's high-functioning enough to be flying the ship and interacting with "normal" people, she's going to be far, far too mature for the kid. If she's low-functioning and emotionally immature enough to want to screw a thirteen year old, she's probably not capable of even interacting with the rest of society, let alone doing a job like flying a space ship. As a general rule autistics like myself—those who can hold down a job, attend university, pass and/or function in normal society—are about three years behind everybody else emotionally. And while this means that at sixteen we're emotionally thirteen (it sucks) it means that at twenty-nine we're emotionally twenty-six, which is way, way to old to be into teenagers, let alone a kid who isn't out of puberty yet.

I'll also note that at thirteen years old a lot of kids, male and female alike, aren't even ready to think about sex, let alone have it. If your thirteen year old is having sex with other thirteen year olds, that's usually a sign to call a shrink. Now, you can go on all you want about how attitudes are different in the verse, but it's still going to make your audience sick to their stomach. This goes even further for the girl—if she's so emotionally delayed that she's only able to connect to a thirteen year old, then there is no way she's ready for sex. A lot of autistics, in fact, find the notion of sex unspeakably gross, and the more handicapped we are, the stronger that tends to be. That's assuming we even grasp the concept in the first place (I didn't know how human reproduction worked until I was entering high school, and I'm a ninety student who can pass as normal).

In short, there's no way to make this story work without being squicky. I can assure you that if you wrote it the way you're talking about writing it, I sure as heck wouldn't read it, and I don't know anybody else who would. I understand the urge to be risky and edgy, but this is beyond that—it's just unpleasant. Either bump up the guy's age, or bump down the girl's. Better yet, do both. Put him in his mid-to-late teens and her in her early-to mid-twenties. I might—and might is the operative word here—be able to accept such a relationship, if it was well-written, and if you made it very obvious that they were intellectual and emotional equals (if you don't do that, it's statutory rape even if he's fifteen and she's twenty).

I applaud you for wanting to work a character with autism into your sci-fi story. But I resent the notion that having autism makes it alright for you to screw a child. "Normal" people go to prison for that. We do too, as we should.

I'm going to have to second this. Truth be told, I'm not sure what you could possibly be trying to achieve with it in the first place.

Bear in mind that although the story may take place in the future, your audience is located here in the present. You can only go so far in expecting people to set aside their core cultural values.

People will also be less willing, at least in my experience, to set them aside for a story set in the future than for one in the past. Stories taking place in the past—or in medieval style fantasy settings—have the luxury of drawing on the actual past (or more frequently what people think of as the actual past) for their in-universe cultural and moral values. Even then there's a limit on what an audience will accept (I was furious when a YA fantasy novel I was reading decided to set up its sixteen year old protagonist with her thirty something, casanova teacher).

In sci-fi, on the other hand, the audience is much more aware of the fact that they are reading fiction, in a 'verse that owes its morals to you, and nobody else. They are going to be far less likely to accept this as just the cultural mores of the setting.

Finally, I will reiterate once again that being autistic does not make you an ephebophile. Seriously.

Honestly, I think this sounds...pretty offensive to people with Autism. Lots of people with it are high functioning and moral individuals who would be aghast at having sexual relations with a child.

It's also putting people with autism on the same 'level' as children which strikes me as...insulting.

Exactly.

I'll also add that even ignoring that, this relationship certainly couldn't last. If we accept the premise—that the girl is emotionally immature and trapped at a younger age—the protagonist is eventually going to grow up., and leave her behind, emotionally and mentally.

@Ambar: I'm completely ashamed at how I didn't mention this before. Thanks for doing that.

And now I'm starting to think the original idea sounds like Wish-Fulfillment.

The age difference is probably going to have to be reduced anyway if the author intends to publish the work anywhere outside of, say, the Alt-Sex-Stories Text Repository...