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Notes -
Yes, and trivially so.
Why would you be interested in some sparkly 17 year old (he's secretly much older than that but still acts like a teenager, something that's only really attractive to tween/teen girls) whose only thing he brings to the table is money and power he didn't actually earn if you could instead have a real man who is explicitly described as having attained all of those things himself? (Which is also true in the case of fanfic, I'll add- the man's daring deeds come well-established, so we don't have to come up with any other pre-made reason to ship our self-insert with him).
Men and women have different attraction patterns; men don't generally pursue older women because youth and beauty is important to them, and women don't generally pursue younger men because youth and the ability to gain power/money are generally mutually exclusive. (Women who choose this anyway get a 'predator' nickname for pursuing immature [from a sociological standpoint, not a normative one] men for the same reason men do when they do this to women.)
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