This weekend I watched Ne Zha, the animated film that’s been a huge hit lately. Its plot design is quite inventive. I recall a saying about innovation: suddenly taking a detour on a road you walk every day — that is innovation. Embedded in this interpretation are some preconditions for innovation: first, the road must be one you walk every day, a familiar, well-worn path; second, the detour must be sudden. If that road isn’t one you walk daily, but merely one of several optional routes, taking a detour isn’t innovation; and if the detour isn’t sudden but a habitual one, that isn’t innovation either. So innovation turns out to be a small trick built on top of familiarity and repetition. And director Yang Yu’s (Jiaozi’s) little tricks here genuinely deliver no small amount of delight.

Yesterday I was reading through some commentary on Ne Zha. One view holds that for a mythological story aimed at young audiences like this, the violent, gruesome details — “cutting flesh from bone to return it to one’s parents” — ought to be omitted, and that this new adaptation, by softening them, better fits “the spirit of the times” and is more beneficial for young people’s wellbeing. I can’t agree with this at all. It seems to suggest that adults are entitled to an endless range of emotions, while minors must live a life that is purely “happy and carefree.” But why must it be “happy and carefree”? Why impose such restrictions specifically on minors?

Society is often caught in an awkward position on this question. On one hand it restricts people’s desires; on the other, it’s powerless to actually enforce that restriction. We’ve all had the experience of seeing some “forbidden” content, in one way or another, before we came of age — can that really be called breaking the law? China’s Law on the Protection of Minors requires guardians to “protect” minors, but what about when minors seek such content out on their own? The law, in dealing with this kind of issue, resembles an emasculated husband who can’t control his own wife. Meanwhile, public opinion is constantly broadcasting what counts as good and what counts as evil. Yet in the end, the slightest bit of “out of line” speech on Weibo is enough to instantly scatter all that careful moral guidance. It’s clear that public opinion, too, is just a microphone held under the pressure of the state apparatus, forever skating along the edge between the forbidden and the acceptable.

I recall that our generation produced quite a few “teenage writers,” and adult critics, in discussing them, were always careful about the restrictive function of that adjective. “Teenage” can refer to the fact that the writer became famous early, was a prodigy — but it also carries an implication of being a notch below adult writers. The subtext of the phrase “teenage writer” is roughly: let’s view this “writer” objectively and with reservations. To me, this is a form of discrimination by adults against minors, and more broadly, a way the adult world rejects and looks down on whatever it sees as “other.”

Freud proposed a famous concept: the Oedipus complex, broadly the story of killing the father and marrying the mother. Adults’ extreme restrictiveness on this question seems to be an effort to keep that plot from ever playing out. The excuses given are all manner of strange — some say it’s because children’s physiological development isn’t suited to exposure to sexual culture. But was that culture itself born out of research into adult physiology?

The real reason adults restrict minors looks more like a primal complex: reproduction brings offspring, which is to say vitality and fighting strength, meaning the capacity to produce more goods or capture more prey. If children were allowed to possess this power too early, or to know its strength prematurely, patriarchal authority would be threatened. So what adults truly fear isn’t the acquisition of knowledge itself. But this world remains, through and through, a patriarchal world — in other words, a world run by old men. For a person operating purely at the level of “personal meaning,” if one truly wished to cast off all patriarchal interference, perhaps the only way would be suicide.