While I've been writing my most recent updates and alternatively studying for an economics exam, a certain unpleasant thought crossed my mind: there are a lot - and I mean a lot of fanfics that deal with carnal relationships with a pretty significant age difference. And funnily enough, it's not just the Hermione/Snape fics that fall into this category.

Let's take Harry/Tonks, for instance - while it might be every guy's dream to have a spunky shapeshifter polish his +12 Staff of Penetration, there is a seven year separation between hers and Harry's birthdates, according to the HP wiki. Harry/Narcissa or Harry/Bellatrix are even longer. And yeah, I understand the MILF appeal, but when it gets to characters like Bellatrix, who are in full possession of manipulative abilities/magic, where does one draw the line? Is there even an 'age of consent' in the wizarding world, or are we solely relying on discretion/libido appeal when it comes to this?

I'm raising this question because if one goes by the tried and true rule of sevens (separation between partners must equal older partner's age/2 + 7), even when Harry comes of age, the rule doesn't apply between him and Tonks (although I feel correct in adding that Lupin is breaking the rule of sevens as well when he and Tonks hook up, with him at 36 and Tonks at 23). In fact, the rule doesn't work until Harry turns 21. What does this say about all of those fics that have them hook up early consensually?

So what gives with this? I understand I'm probably treading on taboo ground here, but in a serious story with realistic characters, these issues might come to light. Where does one draw the line? Are there different terms that apply with women vs. men in this instance - and given the relatively gender-neutral nature of magical society, would those rules even exist in the same manner? Is there a rule of consent in the wizarding world, or do Victorian values still remain in effect?

 

It's fanfiction, Silens. As long as you're happy writing it and you feel you can justify it, you can have Harry bang whoever the shit he wants.

The rule of sevens is a good rule irl, but then again, there are no metamorpmagus' that you'd be tripping over your jailbait dick to get to irl.

 

I'd assume that the'd just follow U.K law in which case the age of consent would be 16, so Tonks is more then welcome to Harry's meatsicle.

Reasoning being, the Minister of Magic has to report to the British PM, so I'd assume everything non-magic related i.e. the age of consent, would be governed by UK law.

 

He doesn't have to report to the muggle PM. Keeping the muggle PM in the loop is just easier for everyone involved.

 

Ahh. I was under the assumption he reported to him rather then you know.. just .. reporting the goings on to him to keep him in the loop. My bad.

Well. In that case, I still think it'd make sense for them to have the same age of consent across both worlds. Even so, I'm not sure why silens is so deeply disturbed by this..

 

That's extremely spurious reasoning. All we know is that the Minister of Magic reports to the PM if there are any major magical issues that affect the Muggle world. That doesn't mean the non-Wizarding government suddenly has jurisdiction over anyone/anything in the magical world. For example, if Harry raped Ginny, it would be dumb to expect that Muggle law would apply. I think that, for the most part, the Wizarding world just does its own thing. I doubt the MoM would tell Muggles about Obliviations, for instance.

EDIT: ninja'd

 

Wizards reach adulthood at 17, and there's no reason to believe the age of consent is any different. True, there are a bunch of complicated laws all over the place that mean it can go plus or minus anywhere from 1-3 years (at least in the US)...
On the other hand, wizards (and witches) are made out to be more emotionally mature than their muggle counterparts. This is likely only applicable to Harry and his inner circle due to various life-threatening experiences that they go through, though.

 

The joy and the curse of fanfiction is that inconvenient guidelines (from the original canon, from real life, whatever) can be ignored, or even shat upon. As it happens, age differences and gender preferences are among the most commonly shat-upon guidelines.

Why do we have age of consent guidelines in real life? Certainly not all 18-year-olds or 16-year-olds are created equal - the age at which a person is truly ready to assume responsibility for their own life can vary pretty significantly. But in real life we don't have any way to quantify that: there can be no standardized test for measuring maturity. That's where the age of consent comes into play. It's not a perfect thing, but, given a sufficiently conservative age line, it does a reasonable job of ensuring that only those of sufficient maturity can give consent.

In fanfiction, you're shaping your character and determining how mature he or she is. You can make your character exceptionally mature, or unrealistically mature, or even impossibly mature, depending on your whims. This is where things vary from real life, IMO: in the case of fanfiction, you can determine whether a character is mature enough to be engaged in sexual activity, independent of their biological age.

If a writer is going to have an adolescent romantically involved with an adult, it then becomes his job to prove that the adolescent is mature enough. If you don't do a good job of this, your readers will (rightfully so) be extremely creeped out by your pervo-prose. If you do it right, most readers will accept it. There are limits to this, of course - the vast majority will not accept a pre-teen or child engaged in sex with adults, no matter how mature he seems to be. Some things go beyond the pale.

Let's look at your version of Harry, from Renegade Cause. I don't know what the masses from fanfiction.net think, but over here people seem to have accepted this relationship without too many complaints. Perhaps DLP isn't a good reflection of anything, but I've got a reason as to why this relationship works reasonably well:

Your Harry has 1. assumed responsibility over his family finances 2. involved himself in the very adult political world, with some savvy 3. killed enemies and risked his own life 4. learned enough to know that it's not ideal for children to "grow up" as he has in your version of 5th year (witness him trying to dissuade his former friends from following in his footsteps). IMO, that character is mature enough to be able to give consent to have sex with a 20-something woman.

tl;dr: Forget about that 1/2 age + 7 shit; it's all but irrelevant in the context of fanfiction. It's especially irrelevant when both parties are past the age of majority; if one person is a few years under that age, it's a case-by-case basis.

 

Only problem with this, is that age of consent doesn't equal age of majority.
For example in Australia and the UK, age of majority is 18, but age of consent is 16. So there's a pretty good reason to believe the age of consent is different to wizard adulthood.

Those 'complicated laws' only apply in cases (at least in commonwealth countries) where one person is under the age of consent (16), in which case the other person must be within 2 years of age (14 and 16 for example) for intercourse to be legal.

edit: but back to the main point. Harry should always be dicking Tonks

 

This is going slightly off on a tangent, but that's not the way canon suggests it. From the way that the Minister's job title and the MoM is named, there's a strong possibility that it exists merely as another branch of the British Government.

Ministry of Defence
Ministry of Justice
Ministry of Magic
etc.

Minister for Secuirty
Minister for Women and Equality
Minister for Magic (In the American versions it's 'Minister of Magic')
etc.

Just sayin'.

Anyway, there's nothing in canon to suggest that Wizards are not expected to abide by the laws of the United Kingdom.

 

True, but canon also seems to point towards the Ministry of Magic being an independent governing body that barely interacts with its Muggle counterpart. If it is a branch of the Muggle government, then it is probably a branch in name only.

 

JKR left this one vague as well (both age of Consent and common law, I mean), but I would suggest that magical laws inherit from the muggle laws around them just out of sheer laziness. The wizards seem to have laws and tribunals only to redress abuses of the use of magic, though they 'police their own' when it comes to cross-culture crimes; Sirius was sent to Azkaban, despite murdering more than a dozen muggles. This may have as much to do with the ease a wizard would have in escaping a muggle prison as anything else.

That said, I'm sure everyone would agree that JKR was more than happy to consider all sexual activity beyond kissing as something reserved for those who had left Hogwarts entirely.

The flip side of the argument is between the writer and reader. If the writer explores sexuality with Harry and never goes any deeper than 'Whoo-hoo! That's fun!', it doesn't seem like acceptable ages in the wizarding world has much to do with it. This discomfort is defined by the user. The younger Harry starts, the smaller the audience who will read the story (and the higher the rating goes). If the writer goes into the deeper emotional impact, then waiting for it to be legal strains believability, unless we're talking about Hermione.

I'd give buckets of credit to a writer that started from the 'Harry is more mature because he's suffered' camp and hooked him up with Fleur or Tonks, only to properly address the difference between battle-ready and sexually experienced. If anything, Harry should have a harder time exploring sexuality, given that his relatives discouraged questions and never provided an example of desirable affection. In that scenario, Tonks may back away quickly, saying "Uh, sorry Harry. I thought you'd been banging the gels in yer quidditch squad and all. Breaking in a virgin isn't something I'm into."

Basically, whenever a writer re-imagines HP fiction with an eye towards (a little more) realism, they have to adjust the tone to acknowledge that this is a story about coming of age. Leaving the sex out of the process is almost cowardly.

 

Exactly my point, and I've gunned for realism in my stories, so why should it stop at sex?

Here's my point: I'm looking to write human characters in my story, and sex is a part of that. Sure, it might be satisfying from a superficial POV to write fics where Harry effortlessly hooks up with Narcissa, Bellatrix, or even Tonks without thinking and fucks their brains out (I'll abstain from calling this the 'Sesc formula' out of good taste), but for stories that have a serious tone and are more grounded in reality, these questions do come up.

And even in my fic, the level of 'fucked-up' that both Harry and Tonks are (especially considering a load of other implications, mostly involving simulamancy and Tonks in specific) still doesn't mean I can ignore the questions and just go with it - it doesn't fit well with the atmosphere. That's one of the reasons I excised the Harry/Tonks/Fleur threesome I had been planning in the fic since near its inception - it just didn't work anymore with the tone I was using.

And in all due honesty, even though we are only talking about fanfic, many authors on DLP are good enough to be published - hell, some of us are. As adults, it makes sense to raise implications like this. Sure, fanservice is fun, but stories that have emotional resonance will take that fanservice and make it feel real.

 

Just as society collectively determines whether or not something is permissible, your story's society needs to determine it as well. The difference being your singular voice can determine that, unlike in the real world. Which is why Sesc comes off as silly.

 

I haven't read a single fanfic with sex scenes in it that I'd consider a good story. I'd be hard pressed to name one that I consider to be mildly enjoyable.

It's the wrong universe for it. I have a hard time suspending disbelief and enjoying a story where Harry uses expletive language, let alone one where an entire chapter is devoted to courting and bedding someone who usually ends up having zero characterization. Which might be the issue. We have a ton of authors who make Harry a flawless character in the first place; he then spends the better part of several chapters "relating" to another flawless character--it's a poor story and it's bullshit.

The age of consent is what you make of it in your story. When I read that story however, I'm bringing my background. Mine is very reality-based, and it is steeped with enough experience interacting with chomos to be turned off to older women engaging in a sexual relationship with a 15 year old (e.g. OOTP Sirius' Will bullshit). And vice versa.

As a male it may sound perfectly alright for a 40 year old woman to have sex with a 15 year old. But it's not. Not really. You're going to have to do a lot of explaining and justifying in your story's society and chances are it's going to be terrible. As it tends to be.

 

There are some very good points made, but one ignored.
Fanfiction being on the internet - has an obligation to adhere to Rule #34.

 

It's not an obligation, just a force of (un)nature.

(I'm doing my part, so you don't have to)

 

A lot of HP fanfic puts forth the idea that because Wizarding society is still full of Victorian Age sensibilities, the laws regulating marriage and age of consent are of that era.

I will draw attention, once again, to JKR's Black Family Tree. Leaving aside the 'canonicity' of Dorea=James's mother and all of that business, let's have a close look at Bellatrix's year of birth versus her father's.

Bellatrix = 1951
Cygnus = 1938

Bellatrix's father was 13 when she was born, and, in all likelihood (3 out of 4 chance), was 12 when she was conceived. No word on her mother's age.

Makani* made a comic poking fun at this, and at the notion that the Black sisters each have a different hair color (this was before DH came out, and we discovered that Andromeda is a dead ringer for Bellatrix, with brown hair).

Of course, this is the kind of thing that would never make it into the canon of a book marketed (mainly) to children. It all depends on how far behind the author wants their Wizarding Britain to be.

And, as was stated before, age of Majority and age of Consent are usually two different things.

In America, for instance, you can die for your country years before you can drink to it. Legally being an adult, or being able to consent to sex, doesn't mean you're old enough to do everything, according to the law.

The Wizarding world may or may not be different, depending on who's behind the pen/keyboard.

*Couldn't find that pic on her dA account, and rather than steal bandwidth from her, I just placed the pic on a hosting site. It normally resides in the Silly Art section of her site, under the name "solved a few mysteries of the black sisters."

An exceptional artist, but another one of those gals that's sporting a disturbing stiffy for ALL of the HP villains... while disdaining the majority of the good guys.