I’m writing an R-rated superhero story. My main character gets his powers from chemicals. His boyfriend, who’s older than him (maybe 6-14 years older), is murdered, and he brings his killers to justice. My main character is bisexual, and most of his love interests are 6 to 14 years older than him—maybe some even older. His best friends are in their 20s and slightly older than him too.

Should he be 21 at his “year one” start and 23 be the “year two” part of the story? That way he’s an adult, but he’s still young enough to have that youthful “young” vibe.

If he were 15-16, it wouldn’t work, mainly because, like I said, his friends and love interests are adults who are older than him, and he’s a vigilante whose whole thing is “justice”. That line would get skewed if his love interests were, you know, committing a crime just by being with him, and his adult friends would look complicit and not heroic for allowing it to happen.

If my character is 21-23, while it might be “weird” for him to date older men and women, the older partners don’t deserve to die for being with him, and they aren’t committing a crime because he is a consenting adult, and consenting adults have free will, so him fighting for “justice” won’t get blurry. What do you think?

Another problem with him being 15-16 is that if his significant other is 25-26, no one is going to care that she's dead. She's a groomer and a pedo, so no one is going to buy into this 'pure and innocent man/woman was a victim of crime', and it breaks our hero down to his core to the point where he decides he must fight crime and protect innocent people, which is the entire point of the character.

With him being 21-23 and his partner being 29-31 While some people will see this relationship as "weird" or "gross", no one will think an older person dating a 21-23-year-old deserves to be murdered, and they still fall into the category of "innocent". And so even though some people might find him/her "weird", if they are murdered for no reason or a victim of a crime, you will still root for my character to get justice.

Another problem with him being a teenager This is a dark, not really dark but more or less an edgy, R-rated, straight-up superhero story about the lines between vengeance and justice, and that symbolism gets thrown out the window when all his love interests would be in episodes of Law And Order: Special Victims Unit.

An easy fix to this would be making him 21 at his origin story and then just jumping ahead one year later when he's 22 or two years later when he's 23. He's still young and "youthful", but his relationships with older men and women won't be contradictory to his core beliefs about justice and vengeance because he's a consenting adult.