To *MMM* or not to *MMM* · 2:33pm Jul 26th, 2024
Hey guys, just popping in to ask a question
So, I was working on the sequel to Don't Tempt Love last night, and I was going through a lot of concept work and planning things out. In a general sense, it's going to have a bit of a slice of life flair, with a decent backbone of a developing serious story-
Issue being, as I wrote it out, I found that I was naturally gearing towards some more... serious topics. Some, a bit more 'tame' like the nature of being thrown to another world, others more risqué like the differences between species and how that effects a developing pairing or two, and on top of that a rather realistic and uncomfortable view into how past relationships can fall apart not with a bang, but a painful whimper... after a yelling match or two. Or just the general uncomfortable feeling of people pressing boundaries, and the realistic reactions to it.
More particularly, I'm being very upfront and realistic with how I like to depict relationship failures for the past of two specific characters. On top of a few other things...
So I've been laying in bed for a bit, wondering, if I should rip off the band-aid for the sequel and outright go for an M rating or not. Because I'm not particularly one to pull my punches lmao.
Usually, I like to keep things T-ish because I think it's a good limiter. It makes a writer avoid using several crutches, like going overly serious with their melodrama, feeling open to getting 'porn-y' and so on- in other terms, it forces you to focus more on the characters than the physical aspect of the story. It avoids trying to use certain hooks that can get a bit distasteful, lmao.
But, but, I will also admit my favourite stories every wield their M-rating with pride, and go for it with no holdbacks. In other terms, the author trusts themselves to take the lack of limiter and self-regulate, but go wild on whatever story they want to tell.
I guess part of me is nervous outright going for that, so I'm looking for some opinions. My passion for storytelling is almost always balanced out by the crippling anxiety of wanting to make something good, and I fear sometimes I'm exceptionally bad at giving myself that extra push or knowing when to hold back lmao.
For an extra disclaimer though- the serious nature of things would not at all detract from the humour, or touches of wholesome romance and a desire to write something meaningful. I'm trying to slide in a bit of slice of life for it's benefits, not because I want to drag things out (but maybe I want to torture you all with slow-burn too-) There would just be a higher chance that the bite-back towards certain jokes Cadance tells or otherwise shenanigans would be less held back lmao.
What do you think?
Go wild, if you want to section it of do it in chapters.
I'd say go loud and proud. Just because you use a M rating doesn't mean you can't keep yourself limited. Write to your normal T standard, and use the M for parts that require it, or that you want to give some extra punch.
Do what you wanna do tbh. If writing what you think tells the story best means putting an M tag on it, so be it. I personally don’t think you have to worry about it being good, so I don’t think you need to restrict yourself. You wanna go there, go for it. 🙌🏽
I hope those two end up happy together and look forward to more cute adventures with them!
M can be a contingency in case you need it. You can always downgrade later if you don’t get too hard into the stuff.
Most of my favorite stories usually are of the mature variety. Sure, some are straight up clop. That said they all are favorites because of their narratives.
I feel a mature rating is more about having the flexibility and a full toolset to cover topics properly without holding back. It isn't just the sex, gore, foul language, drugs and death. It's freedom and taking off the boxing gloves.
Do what you feel works for your story. I'll read it either way. But I do hope you don't feel like you have to limit yourself or hold yourself back.
On the other side of the coin, an M rating could also alow you to explore more ways to add more weight to scenes. If anything, I'd say an M rating would allow you more freedom in what you're writing.
I'd say go for it. Touchy topics or scenes is a good way to build up the characters and the world.
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I see the general consensus so far has been 'go for it', and loud and clear lmao
It'll free up some worldbuilding aspects and allow me to really get deep into character dynamics/their pasts without feeling like I need to pull my punches, which has it's own benefits. And considering some of the earlier plot-points I wanted to touch up on,
particularly regarding Equestria and it's stagnation in the last thousand years,past the anxiety I can see the benefits of pushing more for a mature feeling to the story, hahah.I really am just, an obsessive writer, jeez-
... Not to mention if relationships down the line get particularly heated, I'm freed up to do w/e I want with it, which is nice. Doubly so with some of the chaos I have planned.
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🙌🏽 🙌🏽
I like reading stories tackling issues like these, but this is fore most your story.
As I write my own stories, I generally come up with an outline and just writing to see where it goes. If you end up having to make it M rated then so be it. Don’t restrict yourself to write a story for us.
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Seems like you already have come to a decision, but fwiw, I love the nitty gritty/expounding on lore, so long as it's paced correctly rather than diving head first into it like I've seen some other writers do. That said, I don't have to worry about that with you, so I look forward to the sequel
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Seems I'm a little late to the party so I'll just say do whatever you want to do that you think will let the story shine the most
To answer your serious series of queries around physicality first with a non opinionated series of facts:
1. The general fandom consensus I recognize *here on this site follows along the lines that within the bounds of the T rating includes the things of which you briefly described.
1a. *people who don't frequent this site may not view it this way
2. It is the tag itself that is required to make sure your audience is aware of the potential 'societally icky' subjects present within a story.
3. The Sex tag in the teen genre is typically used to alert the reader of: Talk about sex, jokes about sex, scenes leading up to (but not including) sex, and otherwise including characters that allude to, or lightly talk about having or having had sex with each other.
4. Heavy conversations about relationships and the pain that comes with them on occasion doesn't have a warning tag directly associated with it. (Ergo, knocking it up to mature is the only way to really get this point across with the system if the scenes or conversations in question meet the requirements)
Now for my opinion about those facts, I personally view things like 'biological' features not icky to talk about, since it's nominally something present in our society to be aware (hopefully) of your reproductive health; among other things. It is generally considered out of the ordinary to just casually talk about sex in a vacuum, but the fact that for some reason it's totally fine to just shout 'dick' for no particular reason lends to my tiredness with people treading lightly around the topic.
I think it's dumb, but I understand people have serious and genuine reasons for being freaked out, or literally having panic responses to stuff like that, and I believe that falls neatly into the reason we have a 'sex' tag on this site.
TL:DR So long as you're not outright describing a sex scene, or dialouge where the characters are very explicitly talking about sex (something like phone sex, as an example) I believe teen is fine, but also don't really see a reason not to rate your fic mature if you're on the fence about it.
And obviously, it goes without saying that anything sexual that doesn't fit into that category should go neatly into the mature rating.
As far as relationships and social interaction? The kind that really hurts?
I mean... I am typing a long winded analysis of my opinion on... well yeah, here, on a website for people who like coloured ponies doing things not originally depicted in the show.
I've got issues
But as a whole, I think the furthest you could go with intense relationships that hurt and may cause others to feel upset is adding the drama tag, and putting a warning in your description for the heavy topics discussed if you feel like it may upset people. Of course, it costs very little to give out a warning, and overall can generate far more benefit, so there's no point not to.
All that being said; (and I'm not going to produce an answer like: You should just do what you feel is right or Do whatever you want, cause that's not what you asked lol)
I think you should keep it teen and not limit yourself.
There's gonna be more than a few eyes glancing over you work because -ehem- hot damn is it good stuff, and if you trust the opinion of the community enough to ask this question, you can trust us enough to throw in the comments that "hey, this should be m-rated" if you end up accidentally going a bit too wild and not notice.
That, and you have the opportunity of plenty of other authors, editors (myself included) and fans and longtime site frequenters that would look over your work if you ever wanted a second pair of eyes to go on it before you hit submit. I know there's a handful of groups out there for proofreading and editors that would love to help out.
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I appreciate the detailed response, these kinds of things really do help a lot and get me going lmao
I think I was on the fence about it for a lot of reasons, but in the long-run I kind of thought of it like this:
1, I want to be freed up to tell the story how most naturally it might, without having to divert or censor anything aside from anything genuinely tasteless (but even then, there's a time and place for that as well-)
2, I very much was planning for it to run for a while. Like, I am very capable of cracking open several 'arcs', hell I've been boiling on a long-ish fic and some serious worldbuilding for a while. As I go deeper and deeper, especially into a fic where romance is a focus, things could get... serious.
3, A lot of the stories I've enjoyed most could probably technically pull a T-rating if it were by those standards... But they weren't. They were rated M. It would take very minor tweaks to make some of my favourite fics ever T-rated, but they still weren't. And from what I saw in those stories, a lot it pulled from an idea of the contents being more 'mature' in spirit as well. Not necessarily that it's annoyingly adult, and that there's sex and gruesome violence everywhere or w/e, but that it tackles topics that straddle a line that is definitely considered 'mature.' And a lot of them seem to have ran with that in stride, because they could write literally whatever they wanted, and it would fly.
(I mean hell, I've had a lot of people call the original Fallout Equestria tame after reading PH, and that already made me try and keep a close eye on ratings, because sometimes that line can reaaaally get muddled when people get 'used' to it)
4, The rating itself is ultimately kind of a statement of intent almost, as I see it? T-rated feels far more like a GTA-esque thing for me lmao, where it can straddle a line but ultimately it has a certain kind of goofiness to it, or that even if it gets extremely 'mature' it won't... y'know. I enjoy that line, hell there's a reason why all of my fics so far have kept to it, but I think even if I kept some of that goofiness around if I got this serious with some of these topics (Not to spoil anything, but when Cadance is talking about Shining armour, she has a moment where she gets frustrated that he was most emotionally available for sex but not much else, playing into a blow-up that happened between them as things slowly crumbled and she felt more and more detached from him) I wouldn't want people going in expecting my kind of t-rated goofiness with the occasional sexual joke- when it's moreso my style of humour and fun that gets genuinely serious and isn't afraid to push some uncomfortable lines.
5, Cadance as a character isn't going to filter herself very well lmao. She'll have some holdbacks due to her past, but as seen in the fic before, once unleashed she's a monster. Not like, y'know for those reasons, but because she's capable of talking about literally anything. She can and will crack a joke at your expense, and if you bite back the right way she has no filter. Love has no bounds, after all... And David, well, isn't that different. Nor the third mystery character.
6, Reading the tag information, I felt the line "The bottom line is that mature stories are more risky, explicit and intended for an adult audience." Said a lot, while in the 'sex' tag section for a T-rating, mentioning innuendo alone as a warrant for the tag says a lot about content that should be shuttled into a T-rating, especially since fics tackling subjects like sex seriously are often shuttled off into Mature anyways... Which makes a degree of sense, I think. Generally the idea of the line seems to be, the detail of it. You can do violence and gore in T, but you can't get into the real detail and horror of it or get too gruesome. But you sure can in M. And I think that kind of line in general is one that made me hesitant to keep it at the rating- not for the violence part- but the idea of the detail. Even in regards to the relationships, I don't want it to be floaty, easy stuff that's glossed over- I want it to feel real. Or, as real as a silly horse-story can get, y'know?
7, Playing into the part you said about warnings- I feel like if you're at a point where you're having to put warnings down before a fic or section, that's when you should already be bumping up a rating Imo. If I walk into an e-rated fic, I expect e-rated topics. If I walk into a t-rated fic, I expect t-rated topics. If I walk into an m-rated fic, I expect m-rated topics. And so on. It's a level of consistency, I suppose? Since I'm already straddling that line, even if I keep myself to my kind of fun humour, if I'm going to be approaching those topics, I'd rather have the rating already set for it and not have to be told later, than to push that boundary and hope things go well, since ideally I shouldn't have to self-censor at all (aside from trying to not be tasteless LMAO) I mean, that's what ratings and tags are for right? To directly go ahead and say hey, expect this! It's why video games have had near-fuckin'-wars over ratings, movies have to monitor their usage of the word 'fuck' or 'shit' to get released to certain audiences, that kind of thing. They exist for a reason.
Not to say I wouldn't put a small A/N at a start of a chapter, just to key people into the fact that a topic in the chapter might be slightly sensitive- but y'know. Keeping to the rating, is how I see it.
8, NGL I have a general uncomfort with most 'porn for the sake of it' and if I could get away with making a 'scene' that hits an emotional note, I can and will. Romance and emotions > Anything else, and helping people off the path is low-key something I do lmao. I'd never swarm a story with it, that would make me uncomfortable, but I think low-key a goal of mine is to be able to write a sex-scene but not write porn. A few of my in-progress stories (including a long-fic project that uses it as a method to communicate the difference between being used vs sharing something with someone, in reference to them both having been used by manipulators in the past but not realising it, on a few different levels that coalesce into what I'd hope becomes a beautiful scene of catharsis for both) have that as a general idea. A way to eventually test my skills and tread a line that I'd love to be able to cross with little effort in the future. A way to learn, I suppose? But even then, that would be in the distant future- I'm not going to rush the story to something like that anytime soon, I'm not the type that enjoys forcing stuff like that to happen 'just cause', I'd want to wait until it feels natural.
Don't gas me up, I'm really not that good lmaoI think it's also because I've had a few writer friends push me and go 'go for it' has influenced me a bit too. Some of which have, well, written very mature stories lmao. One of the few I got that really struck me was 'Take the training weights off, you're more than capable of self-regulating' with regards to the section above about authors self-regulating, especially for some of my favourite fics ever. That kind of struck me, and made me wonder if I was doing that to myself, lmao. Wearing 'training weights' and never quite pushing lines I did want to, at some point. I guess in order to really hit my stride, I've had to wonder if sometimes I should just go for it hahah- And the general push I've gotten from people has seemed similar
Sorry for the uh... potentially story-length response. You can tell a lot of thought goes into these things. In fact, most of my stories get this level of thought. Not just for the rating, lmao. I am the definition of an overthinker.
Nah, I am pleasantly excited to receive a cohesive response, conversation right? People paying attention to the words you say? Holy crap, it's almost like we're designed to get positive chemical feed back from that or something.
Not to overgeneralize a response, but (jeez I need to go to bed at some point) I totally feel pretty much everything you listed out.
- Freedom from the weight of mind that comes with crafting something someone else is going to look at is choice, imo. A value to chase after, and something I hope you read through the lines of word vomit I sent your way, as that was intentioned.
- Grasping at the future is hard, and limiting yourself before you fully have everything in front of you seems dumb, cause it is lol. You can always change things later after all, the idea of creativity is to start from a small point and build out, not to build in. That's marketing.
- and yeah, mature stuff should easily sit within the mature category. My opinion is a little scuffed because I... honestly have a poor grasp of society and care little of what others think. I do know of a few situations where I appreciated a sex scene done right. The first one I can remember was in a vinly/octavia fic and is pretty much what you described in terms of relationship (The nice one), and the other one was something that I send highly recommended when it comes to writing in general: an sequel to Gulheru's Journey with a Batpony.
Sounds like you've got what you need to have in your head. You would not believe how satisfying it is to hear a little confidence in intent from time to time. Good luck my friend!
Also I take offense to this, all of my seriousness comes from horses! I swear! XD
I say go for it, it was the glimpses and teases of the more gritty serious parts going on behind the scenes that made DTL stick with me and had me just thinking about it after I finished reading.
But at the end of the day it's your story fam, do what you think is best for it.
Honestly I'm pretty content with whatever you choose, I'll read either way. I just enjoy your writing style. Just, don't force yourself it do it a specific way is all I ask. Write what you feel is right.