Actually, I think the topic raises a valid question, one I fumblingly
tried to answer a couple months ago.
I think the key - or
a key, in one kind of story, anyway - is to show a progression in the perspective of one or more characters in the story. It can't be rushed to, because you're trying to make the implausible plausible. The reader "knows" a million reasons why an adult can just refuse a spanking, and you have to undermine those reasons in order to instill doubt - to make them wonder if maybe it really could happen. Science fiction and fantasy are poor comparisons; they're things we know won't happen, but when well done our reaction is
Sure, this can't happen, but if it COULD happen, this is exactly how it WOULD be.If you're gonna make it seem like an adult might get a spanking without having any say in the matter, a way to do it would be to one by one undermine the unspoken assumptions underlying the belief that they couldn't possibly get spanked:
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Make the subject be eighteen, so that yes, they're technically an adult, but only by the skin of their teeth...and suddenly that rock solid defense of "I'm an adult" seems like a very thin reed to lean on. It turns what seemed like a bulletproof argument into the flimsiest of technicalities.
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Make the teenager significantly physically smaller than the adult. Psychologically this matters; if the teenager is five foot tall and the adult is six two, that can go a long way to establishing who's in charge. Obviously the sex of the teenager and adult matter here; it's easy enough to have a five foot tall eighteen year old girl and a six foot four adult male is of course larger than average but not implausibly so. Even in the case of F/m pairings, though, it's far from an insurmountable obstacle. Men grow until something like the age of 25, so an 18 year old boy can be written as five feet tall, and be accepted by the reader as unusually small for his age without being
fantastically so; he isn't a hobbit. If he finds himself faced with a landlady or foster mother or female employer, teacher, or professor or whomever that is six foot two, the pairing is significant enough to provide a visual illustration of the fact that the adult woman is the one establishing the rules and the teenage boy the one who has to
follow the rules (but of course isn't) without seeming fantastical. The size disparity can be accepted - and this is the important bit, I think - without actually requiring any suspension of disbelief.
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Make the teenager look young. Not like a child. Like a teenager. Not a 19 year old supermodel or lineman on the college football team. Not a teenager-adult that might be on the football team or playing guitar in a club somewhere or fixing your car in a garage or modeling swimsuits in Sports Illustrated, but a teenager-kid.
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Make the teenager act young. Not like a five year old, but immature for sure. We're trying not to tax the reader's suspension of disbelief, remember? Ideally the reader won't be required to suspend disbelief at all, although that might require some clever writing, but the principle is there: knock down all the assumptions supporting the "Of course they're too old to get spanked" idea. You aren't going to make an eighteen year old seem like a five year old and trying to do so will just break the spell of plausibility you're trying to weave. But here's the thing. Sure, adults don't get punished with spankings whether they like it or not, but teenagers do, though. Not usually eighteen year old teenagers, but thirteen or fourteen year old teenagers? Sure. So what about an eighteen year old who tends to act like a thirteen or fourteen year old?
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Make the teenager dependent upon the adult. Financially, of course, but more critically in the case of living under the adult's roof. They should also be drawn as lacking the adult's life experience. All of this further establishes the teenager as being young and needing adult supervision - eroding any claims of independence or adulthood, and again shoring up their image as a kid. There are a lot of ways to do this sort of thing: 17 year old foster kid showing up to a new foster home a month before they turn 18, and the stay becomes inevitably and indefinitely extended, or a foreign exchange student staying with a host family, or a college freshman looking for an inexpensive place to stay and finding a landlady that rents a bedroom out cheap, etc. In the latter case there are always ways of creating a financial dependence to further establish who's the authority figure; financial aid dries up, or probably even better, the teenager's adolescent inattention to detail and procrastination means they fail to file the financial aid paperwork - but their landlady lets them stay for free anyway (presumably after being scolded for the irresponsibility) and gives them chores to do instead of the rent...which will eventually be forgotten, and which the landlady will have to remind them about - etc. and so forth.
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School situations can help. Assuming we're talking about non-parental situations (my preference, and they seem to be popular in the Library) if the teenager is going to be established as dependent on the adult (landlady, landlord, foster parent, host family, dorm mother, etc.) then they can't feasibly have an income (or not one they have control over, anyway) and so an explanation has to be given for why they don't have a job. The most obvious situations at eighteen commonly involve college. College freshman in a small dorm with a dorm mother in charge is one route, but something about that seems to be so alien to the current actual reality of dorm bacchanalia that it might stretch suspension of disbelief to the breaking point (or not; some writers pull these things off) so it seems like my own preference is the case of a landlady renting out a single room (as opposed to an independent apartment) or again, a case of a foster kid being sent to a new foster home very shortly before becoming eighteen, "just temporarily", only for one reason or another (and there's where the writing comes in) it never is feasible for them to move out, and the foster family never expects them to or even brings it up. In that situation the setup is domestic enough that it's easier for the dominoes to start falling. Also, you can put the teenager in high school, or even further back; maybe they failed a couple grades, and they come from a bad home, or a bad foster home, and never graduated? There are limits there, but
with some care you might be able to send them back a few years; just be wary of taxing the reader's ability to suspend disbelief, as I say.
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Try new situations, but tread carefully with them. I mean; I've come up with some oddball ideas. One was inspired by
Big, except that instead of a kid wishing to be big, a poorly-worded wish causes (Or does it? He never knows for sure.) a fire (no injuries; no point in sad stories, I think) an 18 year old (small, acts young, looks young, etc. as described above) to lose the seedy apartment he was renting, along with all his possessions, and especially the fake ID he was planning to use to buy beer. A (quite mature for her age) 21 year old woman stops at the scene and puts a coat over him because of the rain. The cops don't believe his story that he's 21, and take him to the station so that CPS can check their database. Through a comedy of errors, CPS comes to the conclusion he's a 12 year old runaway from the (terrible and under state investigation) foster program from the next county over. He spends the night on a cot at the police station, but the next day the 21 year old woman drops by the CPS office just to check up on the kid she saw at the fire scene. One thing leads to another, CPS asks if she can take the boy in as foster mother (just very temporarily, they promise, while they look for something longer-term) and she agrees, leading to a situation where Our Hero is temporarily living (much to his embarrassment) as a twelve year old kid. The TL, DR of it is that it's a case of hopefully plausible (and temporary) mistaken identity, but even still the story requires care not to demand
too much suspension of disbelief from the viewer. The mistaken identity has to be temporary - it's too much of a stretch to maintain indefinitely, although discovery won't end up being the total reprieve Our Hero assumes it will be. Questions of pacing still matter. If Miss Adult takes Mistaken Identity home that afternoon, and as soon as he gets in the door he accidentally knocks a lamp over, and the result is that sixty seconds later she has him in the bathroom over her knees giving him an underpants-down spanking, any semblance of plausibility is gone. The whole story is implausible to begin with, but the idea is to use care to make it
seem plausible. Bit by bit he has to bump into the new boundaries he's having imposed on him. He was already a rather immature teenage boy, rather than a teenage man, and the new situation he's in where people
expect immature behavior from him and treat him like a kid just magnifies his immature tendencies...which eventually lead to Unpleasant Consequences. These things have to be led up to.
Consider using secondary characters to support the division of age categories. The preceding example was essentially a one-on-one situation, at least in its basic setup: an 18 year old boy temporarily mistaken as a twelve year old, and his twenty-one year old guardian and foster mother. Well, what about a different situation. Imagine that "Tommy" (quite short, looks young, acts young, etc.) is seventeen and about to turn eighteen. He's in a foster program, but his (awful) foster parents were busted for fraud; they only marginally home-schooled him, but were really just keeping the foster assistance funds and home schooling vouchers (please don't take any of this as a comment on fostering or home schooling; I approve of both) for their own enrichment. The foster program took Tommy away, but didn't believe him suitable for early emancipation, and placed him with a foster family: a 36 year old foster mother (widowed) with five children, all boys, at 13, 11, the twins at 9, and the youngest 7. The situation allows for a few consequences. First, being around younger kids makes Tommy act younger. Second, his foster mother has friends her own age, and there are no people around in there early twenties that might bridge the gulf between the age groups. Tommy is only five years older than his foster mother's oldest kid, and eighteen years younger than her - she's literally old enough to be his mother, as are all her neighbors and friends. The absence of people in their twenties clearly establishes two age groups in Tommy's life, adults and kids, with a large gulf between them, and it leaves Tommy squarely on the kid side of that gulf. If Tommy's foster mother might have in principle treated a more mature (adult-acting, adult-looking, adult-sized) eighteen year old as an adult, in practice the natural result is that she treats Tommy like a kid. Not just due to childish misbehavior - his behavior in general, good and bad, tends to be immature, and he's actually the same height as her 11 year old son. Tommy finds himself drifting toward being treated like a kid in small ways - given a place at the kids' table when a couple families get together for a cookout, his foster mother replaces some of his worn out clothes with new things of course bought from the older kids' sections of the store, he gets reminded to brush his teeth before bed, gets reminded not to interrupt adults, and so forth. He feels himself slipping into being treated like a kid but can't seem to stop it. His foster mother does spank her own boys, and the first time he hears it he remembers getting spanked regularly at the same age; while out in public he sees a kid getting spanked, and his foster mother notices that he blushes at the sight and seems slightly unnerved and embarrassed by the experience. But all the same, despite fearing for his fragile status as an adult (in his own mind) he easily forgets himself and falls into horsing around with the other kids, sometimes finding himself being scolded for excessive noise right along with them. The distance to the adult group is just far too large for him to bridge, and the presence of other kids and his own immaturity (several years spent with that last pair of worthless foster parents) make it all too easy for him to fall into acting like a kid. The presence of the kids, lack of young adults, and being treated like a kid make it too easy for him to
act like a kid, which makes him again end up being treated like a kid, and so on in a self-sustaining cycle.
In short, do what you can to set up a progression where the reader sees either the teenager or the adult's perception of the situation changes, so that the reader's perception of the situation will change along with them. If you want the reader to find it plausible when the adult turns the teenager over their knee and spanks them like a kid, then you need to show the process of how either the teenager or the adult (or both) comes to find it plausible. You could have a teenager oblivious to the future consequences of their behavior, and show the adult's opinion progressing from "that's ridiculous, they're an adult", to "the next time she does X, I'm going to put her over my knee." Or, as described above, you could show a situation where a teenager comes into the situation convinced of their own adulthood, and bit by bit they gradually realize that not only are they not an adult, they're not at all immune to a trip across their foster mother's (landlady's, dorm mother's, stepmother's, host family mother's, next door neighbor's) knee for a spanking - and that their behavior is probably going to earn them exactly that. Or you could combine the two, where the adult begins by treating the teenager as an adult, but they gradually begin treating them like a kid, the teenager perceives this and begins to worry that maybe they aren't actually too old to get spanked like they thought - and the adult begins to wonder if maybe a good spanking isn't exactly what the teenager needs after all.
Sorry if I ramble; the topic of the thread just illuminated something I had been trying to (rather clumsily) express a couple months ago.
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