How Do You Age Rate Your Work?

I do it by amount of language, blood/gore- simple deaths are ok but decapitation or detailed suicides/murders become more T-, also sexual tension- kissing here and there and being romantic is fine but once it gets to the point where it becomes very touchy and grabby is more M added

 

I usually write tailored to teens and younger adults with just a hint of mature content. Of course some of them are a bit more profane than others, so I do write with a bit of an expectation that my readers are okay with reading something with strong language, violence, dark and suggestive themes.

Usually I will state a warning at the beginning of a chapter if I plan to use one or more of those above excessively

 

I try to keep mine in the T rating, and only have mentionings of horrible violence, blood, and glore in the past (hint hint to the next chapter of Autistic Truth). But I have seen a lot of M rated fan fictions on Wattpad mostly and some on Fanfiction.net and AO3. Most of the lemons.

 

Teen is no explict sexual content, mild swearing, no gore, no excessive violence. Of course, some things need a bit more, but a warning would usually suffice. If you go far out of these boundaries, it would be M-rated, I think.

 

Yeah, I agree with Cad and Marine the most. Things that are M rated tend to have a lot of sexual content within it, but T rated material doesn't include that. Yes, there may be blood/gore in either of these ratings, but the main difference is the sexual content that appears.

 

I used to leave the language stuff in M when I was less mature, but now that I understand more how teenage society works, I'm okay with language in T stuff. It eventually comes down to how I feel about the work. Explicit romance; that's M or worse. Blood and gore; probably T, unless it's really graphic and horrendous. Certain torture; that's M, because it's difficult to understand or take in for younger minds. Otherwise, there's a lot of grey area.

 

Rating your own fic is hard because we want most people to read it. That is why I usually start out with a T-rating and only if and when there is more mature content I will change the rating to M.

 

I often wonder about this for my future comic as it starts lighter than it ends. I think T covers most and M should be for extremes such as extreme gore and explicit romance.

 

I think we need to make a difference between Romance and Sexual Content. They are not the same. One goes with the other, but they can also be apart. Romance an sich is fine. Sexual content is not suited for teen, while romance can be.

 

I usually expect M-rated work to be categorised as such when it contains sensitive material that you REALLY don't want kids to be reading. This includes smut and excess amounts of gory carnage or basically anything that you would freak out about if you were a kid casually browsing the fanfiction archive.