Minor citizens

In our system, the term "minor citizen" is used to refer to any minor alter in the system. Technically, it refers to minor alters who front and interact with the outerworld, but all of ours do that. Minor citizens are called that because, while they are considered equal to other Voidelian citizens, there are certain things that distinguish them from adults.

A fairly universal generalization about minor alters in systems is that they are not the exact same as outerworld minors OR outerworld adults, but different systems vary on how similar they are to each and in which ways. For example, there are some systems whose syskids participate in sex, which they see as okay because those alters are in an adult mind and they have the inclination to do adult things in-system.

However, where it comes to our minor citizens, they do not participate in the full breadth of adult activities that the rest of the system enjoys. This is because, in our system, the fact that they are a child represents a certain level of removal from adult topics and activities, such as sex or substances. If they DID have interest in all of those things, their innerworld age would not be represented as exclusively a minor, but rather an adult.

Normally speaking, in our system, minor citizens do not participate in sex or kink at all. Younger minors (under 13) normally do not participate in substances or romance. That means it IS normalized for teenagers to use substances in our system. If it seems backwards that teenagers using drugs is normalized but them having sex with each other is not, it's likely that our brain just doesn't want to see teenagers having sex with each other and gave them something else that's more adult for them to enjoy.

Occasionally, a minor citizen might want to be involved in things that would be considered atypical for their age, even by the system's standards. For example, our syskid Bobby, who is about 11, likes weed because he is an introject of someone we used to know who had, in real life, consumed weed from a young age. In a situation like this, the system has a discussion with the syskid in which they go over the typical guidelines of the system, make sure the minor knows that what they want to do is considered atypical for Voidelian minors, assess whether it speaks to an atypical level of maturity in other areas, and then decide what should be done.

In some programmed systems, the syskids don't know about the system's programming, because the system considers it too intense a topic for the kids to know about. This is not how our system operates. Our syskids are aware of our programming, especially because some of them seem to have been directly programmed themselves. However, the syskids are also aware that knowing everything about our programming isn't their responsibility, and they only know as much as they need to in order to understand why certain things work a certain way or why they remember certain things.

Syskids are allowed to serve management shifts, but they are never required to. While the system normally encourages alters to find some kind of job (i.e. active role) within the system, minor citizens do not need to have a job, just like how outerworld children don't have jobs. If they want to, they might concern themselves with some tasks, but that's akin to how a child can pursue some professions - say, an actor - if they have the inclination to, but generally speaking there's no real expectation that they do.

If our syskids seem to talk like adults, it's worth noting that we sounded more like an adult when we were a child, on account of reading so many books and emulating the way they were written in our everyday speech. It's also true that they have access to more adult vocabulary and sentence structure, and most of our alters take advantage of that even if they have a source, age, etc. such that you wouldn't expect them to speak that way.

Our syskids would normally prefer to be treated the way you would treat an adult who didn't like talking about NSFW topics. However, the teenagers are okay with jokes involving sex. Because of how our amnesia works, minor citizens do not remember anything inappropriate they see UNLESS it was specifically directed at them.