These words comes to you as courtesy of the amazing, splendid, most wonderful fffffplayer1, so instead of quickly reading over them, take a moment to feel blessed that he's considered you worthy to hear of his opinions. These words also come to you in order to hide the possibly spoilerful content following below.
I'm just saying I want a story where James doesn't get to smugly explain the situation to everyone and instead be the one ignorant for once! :P
They are fighting a war! Wars are not for kids! Kids should be allowed to have a normal and happy childhood. Rushing them to a more able state both physically and mentally -to throw them into a war no less- is both unhealthy and wrong. It's wrong from a writer's perspective for what sort of message are they sending, what sort of actions are they placing upon the hands of those who are supposed to be the better persons of the story? But it is also wrong from a story-wise perspective. I can understand and agree that Imagination could have healing and aging slowing properties, but why would the Nexus, a source of a benevolent force, cause people to skip their childhoods, miss out on so much and practically urge them to become underage soldiers. It would be unethical and kind of contradictinf the aging deceleration. Remember that if a commercial tells you that their product fights both hair loss and excess hair growth, something is going wrong. Besides, even if children were often recruited as members of the Nexus Force, it's not realistic for them to be a major part of the Force. Let's say that the Force consists of ages 10 (I'm not going below that, which is still quite the stretch) to 60 (with decelerated aging, people staying healthy should still be able to fight, if somewhat impeded). That means that only 8 ages out of 51 are underage. Even if there are way more people in each underage age than each adult age (which I doubt), their percentage will still be lower than that of adults.