>>113807518I don't think it sounds creepy, I think it sounds sad. I'm sad too. I don't even see it as a fundamentally sexual thing (even though I draw lewds sometimes), it's just another side to escapism. When you get older, particularly when you leave your 20s and are no longer broadly considered young (I'm also in my thirties), it's hard not to dwell on lost opportunities and, worse, opportunities you never got in the first place, and if your life already feels empty, you're probably going to gravitate more towards idealized characters like you would see in a cartoon or comic book.
What I really want isn't to have sex with Reggie, it's to be twelve again, but, you know, a better version of it, not the life I actually had when I was twelve. Life at twelve was awful, and when it eventually stopped being awful, it was just empty. That leaves you feeling cheated, but there are no do-overs, and there's nobody to blame but indifferent societal trends and dead people. I think a lot of people feel that way, and then Reggie becomes an especially appealing character because she overtly represents this with her self-conscious youthfulness and naivete like the title of the show suggests.
This is something I see a lot of in Twelve Forever itself. The Abbott house looks really dumpy (from the outside at least) and the school looks like an industrial zone. Reggie doesn't have a dad, her mom doesn't understand her. Her brother is distant. Reggie has a sad little life, and you can see why she would rather stay on Endless. Take away Todd and Esther and she has little. Because of the way society is now with high individualization and low cohesion, and with feminism and general nastiness in the West, like you said, a lot of people get pushed to the fringe and end up in the real world equivalent of that, indulging in media and hobbies and having relationships with fictional people. Yeah, it's an old discussion, but it's hardly gotten obsolete since 2010. I think it's interesting.