#I am glad that my exposure to above my age rating violence was a movie that uses it the way it does because it hooked me

[caustic-light]

This is why books are important. Books have no real age rating system and what you can get away with in a book targteted to children is way beyond what you get away with in movies or series aimed at adults even (if you wanna air them at prime time uncensored).

You can get a book with a cover promising to parents that it's a cute fantasy story about a girl and a bear somewhere in the north having a magical adventure and what you get is people having arrows shot through their throats, hearts being ripped out of chests and eaten and soul torture/surgery that serves as a stand it for lobotomies and genital mutilation.

You can have a book about a boy in a weird society that feels like babies first dystopia at first and suddenly he is made to experience lying wounded on a battlefield, seeing a child soldier die before his eyes and then bleeding out for hours and you can see his trauma when the games children play in his society trigger him and he has no way to explain why to anyone.

You can have another babies first dystopia where the first book ends with police unceremoneously murdering a massive group of children who the protagonist only doesn't die with because he chickened out of going to the protest at the last minute.

You can have books about an 11y/o gay boy who's actually allowed to get boners and who's feelings aren't purely romantic fluff.

OR, since there is no real age ratings, you can pretty easily get your hands on stuff not targeted at children at all. You can be 12 and read IT. My one friend who did actually convinced me it's a much better book when you're 12 and I think I would agree.

You could get softcore porn yaoi manga, at least where I live. There might be an age check on the plastic wrapped stuff, but I was 15 buying basically porn at my bookstore.

Really one of my most strongly held beliefs is that it’s deeply unhealthy and soul-stunting for children to only consume media the world’s most coddling and judgemental adults determined was ‘age-appropriate’, and watching stuff that would horrify your parents behind their back should be encouraged and rewarded.