#frankly i dont think ive put any of my more splatterpunk-y stuff online anywhere so i think you guys might be surprised how gross i can get

[pleckthaniel]

thoughts on brighter fires, fiction ratings, and why i kicked it up to an M under the cut:

i realize i did this fairly abruptly and without much explanation. to be clear, i don’t think anyone who has been reading the story up to this point will have an issue with future chapters. and ultimately, i refuse to tell anyone what kind of story they can or cannot engage with. i just want to make it clear to people going in what’s going to be happening

firstly, canon is rated T. that is a firm belief of mine, like they market it as ‘juvenile,’ and that’s fine and i don’t have a problem with it or anything, but the books are fairly violent and dark, as many people have pointed out before. and brighter fires has always been intended to be like. ‘warrior cats, but a half-step up the maturity chart.’ so like if canon is intended for 9-14yos, then BF is probably intended for like, 14+.

and i do realize this is a fairly american-centric perspective of mine, but in my head, the fiction rating system just translates to the film/tv rating systems. like

G = G/PG/TV-Y7/etc

T = PG-13/TV-14

M = R/TV-MA

E = NC-17

which, again in my head, the way that translates into age ranges is:

G/PG = anybody can watch this and be fine

PG-13 = anybody can probably watch this and be fine, but prepubescent kids are generally supposed to get permission from their parents before watching

R = prepubescent kids probably shouldn’t watch this, though some will anyway. anyone else can probably watch and be fine, but teens are, again, generally supposed to get permission from their parents before watching

NC-17 = prepubescent kids definitely shouldn’t watch this. teens aren’t legally supposed to watch it (though let’s be honest with ourselves here, teens watch porn and that’s not going to change). adults can watch it and be fine.

so if you can’t tell, i’m very liberal with that sort of thing. i just generally don’t like it when people are told what media they can and cannot consume, lol. but back to my point, yeah BF was always kind of meant to be 14+, which i originally put as T because i was being very literal, and then changed to M because i re-evaluated it based on the rough translation algorithm that exists in my head as outlined above. maybe other people don’t see the ratings system the way i do, and maybe i’ll re-evaluate again someday. we’ll find out together, i guess.

the other thing is that like. i realize that on ao3, M and E are often just code for ‘this is a lime’ and ‘this is a lemon.’ but i kind of hate that??? there are a lot of other mature things in the world than just sex and frankly i really dislike that in western culture, sex in particular is held up above all other forms of mature content as The Most Bad Thing while detailed depictions of violence and abuse and severe mental illness and discrimination and child endangerment and etc etc etc - are all brushed aside as nothing.

especially violence. i don’t want to sound like a boomer or whatever here but it does concern me that at least in american culture, it’s completely normalized to watch peoples’ fucking heads explode on tv but you can’t even post a sexy pic online without getting your account murked. one of those is, imo, much much much more ‘mature,’ and it’s not the one that involves lingerie. of course, unlike the hypothetical boomer i don’t think the solution is to take away the Violent Vidya Games, it’s to normalize nudity and sex.

but we do also need to still warn people about things. like i am pro content warning 110%. so i guess what i’m saying is: “given an equally graphic depiction of a violent action scene and a sexy scene in two fics which contain no other ‘mature’ themes, each fic should be rated equally.” that’s where i’m at. liable to change, obviously, but it’s where i’ve been at since i started posting on ao3, basically, and you can apply this logic to all my other fics as well

and the ending of brighter fires gets violent. i mean, of course it does. it’s a warrior cats fic.

you may be formulating a response to this.

Q: But Scout, haven’t you said that you’ve known what the ending to Brighter Fires is going to be all along? and if so, haven’t you always known how violent the ending was going to be? So if that’s the case, why did you bump it up to an M so late in the game?

A: firstly, imaginary questioner, great job! you get extra credit points for being observant. yes, i have had a version of the ending to Brighter Fires planned since... idk, mid-2020, probably? and yes, i have had the current planned ending in my outline since spring of 2021. so yes, there have been plenty of opportunities for me to change the rating before now.

however.

let me tell you a story.

last fall, i wrote a piece for a fiction writing class about a family of cannibals. as i was writing it, i honestly didn’t think it was that graphic. i mean obviously it was very dark, and pretty violent. it did have a fairly prominent scene depicting a woman being butchered alive and then consumed. but other than that, there wasn’t a ton of gore, and it was even supposed to be darkly funny. i thought of it as being rated, like probably a really hard pg-13.

basically every single piece of feedback that came back included a variation on the phrase, ‘this made me nauseous to read.’ like, the workshop spent a good 5 real-time minutes discussing how sickening the gore was. and i was like, kind of shook tbh. it was not even the goriest thing i’ve ever written, not by a long shot.

i learned something about myself that day: despite barely being able to watch the blatantly-false gore in even the lowest-budget horror movies for how ill it makes me, i am apparently completely desensitized to depictions of violence in prose.

so yeah it made me re-evaluate how other people were going to perceive the levels of violence and gore in the BF ending lol