Metaresponse re: young people in fandom.
There seems to be a general attitude in this discussion that fandom is full of people who are terribly ageist and unwilling to value young people's opinions. I believe this is a misperception. While certainly there are some of those people, by and large fandom, like any other large group of people, is full of jerks who aren't interested in valuing anybody's opinions. It isn't possible to outgrow these people's contempt; they'll just phrase it differently later.
At some point anyone who wants to be a part of fandom is going to have to deal with the existence of those people, and putting it off just makes it harder. There are plenty of strategies available, but all of them basically boil down to recognizing that the people who respect you are your actual audience, and to hell with the rest of them.
This problem with this misperception is that it seems to lead to the idea that the people in your age cohort are the ones who will respect you and those outside it will not. Whereas I think if you stop to think about this for a minute, you'll recognize that there are plenty of people in your age cohort who couldn't give a damn about what you think, they just express it differently. So if you segregate, you don't solve the problem, but you certainly do deprive those of us who are interested in what you have to say of worthwhile perspectives. It's a lose-lose proposition.
