there is a major difference though! i got a little carried away with this, im sorry. but i've seen more than one person do this comparison and i have some thoughts.
i absolutely think art can (and should) not be limited by any sort of concept of purity or morality, its job doesn't have to be to create some utopian version of what human behavior should be like. in fact, in my opinion, the best art is always the one that raises questions, deals with hard topics, and explores situations that can be uncomfortable. this is what euphoria does, we're talking about a show about mental illness, drug addiction, abuse, queerness, and teenage sexuality. these are all very complex and relevant topics, and yes the show is target at teenagers because it literally deals with topics very relevant to young people now, and though the themes of the story are very realistic the show never tries to pretend to be a realistic portrayal of teenage life. ( mandy and sarah said that they wanted the fic to be a realistic depiction of what being a teenager was like, but more on that later)
If you have watched euphoria you know that everything about it, from the way it is shot to the breaking of the fourth wall to the clothes and make up creates an atmosphere that doesn't reflect teenage reality at all. there is a good video essay about how the show doesn't portray teenage life but rather plays into a fantasy (im on my phone rn but maybe i'll link it later). So it's not trying to portray actual teenage life, that is already a major difference in tone and intent from Teenagers, that was actively trying to create an everyday life atmosphere and a story that felt intimate, and yet featured two sixteen year olds having a ridiculous amount of graphic sex for some reason.
however what we really should talk about is how and why all of the graphic sex scenes are shown. i agree that euphoria is way more explicit than Teenagers, and also features some of the grossest thing mandy and or sarah have written about (explicit and "concensual" sex between a minor and an adult). the difference is the way the scenes are framed.
smut is literally written pornography ( and that's not inherently a bad thing!) but it does mean than when a scene is smut the whole point of it is to explore the sexual desire, to make it hot. the graphic details are there to arouse the reader, or at the very least to describe in detail the sexual experience a character is having. So for adults to create this type of content about sixteen year olds is questionable, not because it's wrong to explore teenage sexuality in writing but because it's being done in a way that focuses on sexualizing the characters (who are kids in this case!) the point of the scene is the sex and not actually creating any kind of commentary, development or exploration.
that is NOT comparable to euphoria because even if the show is more graphic and dark, the sex scenes are not done in a way that could ever be described as pornographic. In fact, one of the episodes has a narration about how porn fucks up the way teenage boys understand sex, and shows how that ultimately leads to one of the main male characters hurting his girlfriend during sex. the explicit scenes all have content behind them, they can be analyzed and used to understand the show's themes, they can be interpreted and tied back to some of the very real issues the show tackles.
look at the scene of rue masturbating, under the blankets, depressed, in a completely unerotic way and tell me it's in any way comparable to the very detail description of dan and phil's genitals in this story where they are meant to be sixteen.
all of this to say that when we criticize mandy and sarah for writing this fic it is not any sort of moral purity censorship, it isn't us saying that teens can't be represented in a way that explores their sexual desires, it isn't even saying that adults can't write about the topic. but rather, it's us questioning how and why they are doing it, because a medium that is literally porn is not it. there are better, and much more interesting, ways to do it.
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