Story being rejected for underage when no underage.

[RaistlinMajere]

Pretty much the title. I posted a series of stories I wrote in the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles world. This is a game without most existing characters and the player character is custom to you. So writing the story, obviously I would have to make up all of the characters myself. Now I wrote this years ago in high school and forgot that I made one of the main characters seventeen and it was rightly rejected. My mistake, and it was one I quickly corrected by adjusting the entire story to make that character eighteen.

No problem, right?

Well now my story has been rejected twice more despite my specifically saying in the notes that I fixed the underage character. My only assumption is that the person rejecting it does not know that these are not existing characters and are actually originals that I made. Therefore I should be allowed to change their age, right?

So can I just link to this explanation in the submission to get it accepted or what should I do?

 

[Jada59]

Doesn't matter if the characters are real or made up. All have to be 18 or over. Read through it again and make sure that they are. Then put a disclaimer at the top that all characters are 18 and over.

 

[RaistlinMajere]

I said above that the character has been fixed and I am certain they are. I already stated this during both subsequent resubmissions that have been rejected so far.

 

[Jada59]

I said above that the character has been fixed and I am certain they are. I already stated this during both subsequent resubmissions that have been rejected so far.

I did see that but just make sure that you didn't miss something. And again, put the disclaimer at the top. And are you sure there isn't anything in the story that would make the reader think that a character was underage?

 

[RaistlinMajere]

100% certain. The age of the character didn't pertain to the story much at all. In fact it was only referenced once near the beginning. They're adventurers and fighters going through a world of might and magic.

I feel this is a case of misunderstanding and someone just keeps rejecting it because they think I'm resubmitting in the hopes of slipping it through or something. That or they, quite understandably, don't know the source material and so don't know that I am allowed to age up characters I own.

 

[DragonCat91]

FFCC! Omg I love it and #TeamSelkie

But nobody else wants to hear me ramble, so...just put a disclaimer at the beginning saying characters are 18 or over. Same thing happened to me once, and I did that and it went through.

 

[Blind_Justice]

The easiest way to check what Laurel (the sole vet reader and site owner) deems inappropriate is to directly ask her, either by submitting the question in the NOTES field of your submission in question or by sending her a PM. Be patient, she's busy.

And hooray for FF-Fanfic! Post a link once it goes through.

KWEH!

 

[ElectricBlue]

You need to make sure that you are not writing "young" characters. I suspect the rejection has nothing to do with the source of the characters (yours or anybody else's), but Laurel is picking up content that reads as underage. You need to go through your text to make sure you are writing adult characters. A disclaimer, "they're all over eighteen," isn't always enough - they need to be written as over eighteen.

If it's come back twice with the same reason for rejection, you've got something that's flagging as under-age. It's up to you to find it and change it, if you want to publish on Lit. I don't think Laurel engages in discussion on this kind of thing in PMs though - you have to provide her with content to review, by way of an edited story.

 

[KeithD]

^ ^ This. There's only one submissions editor here, one of the site owners, Laurel. Each time your story has been rejected it was by her. You can only clear this up by convincing her your story doesn't come across as under age TO HER. Two options in connecting with Laurel on it: Either in the notes section of what you resend or by Private Message (PM) (top right of this page) addressed to Laurel. No one else here can help you.

 

[RejectReality]

Was there any other reason listed? I had one get rejected for what was totally a brain-fart on my part, and the underage rejection was also on there. The one was easy enough to correct, but I had to PM Laurel concerning the underage, because I wasn't sure what might have triggered it.

She didn't remember even ticking that box. That's not the only example I can think of since the infrastructure update where people have scratched their heads about a second rejection reason of underage on their stories. It's possible that there's a glitch causing some rejections to append underage to other rejections, so if there's any other rejection reason, you might want to look into that.

If it's the only rejection reason, then EB66 is probably on the right track. Final Fantasy ( hell, most JRPGs ) are widely populated with underage characters. The teenage protagonist is a trope. In keeping the flavor of FF, you may be inadvertently inserting some Loli behavior/appearance traits that are crossing the line — probably in female characters.