Some musings on rating a fic for violence (as opposed to sex)

[elspethdixon]

So, flist, I have a hypothetical question for you. If you were rating a piece of fiction for violence, how would you rate a fight scene wherein a character is decapitated and the pov character is covered in his/her arterial blood? For clarification, I'll add that the smell/feel/etc. of the blood is not described, just its presence, so it's not graphically described decapitation.

There's a scene like this in "A Pirate's Life" (minor character gets his head taken off by a canonball) and I rated that chapter and the fic in general PG-13, because the scene in question didn't include a graphic description of the blood & gore, and the decapitated character was an OC supporting character - essentially a redshirt. Decapitation of, say, Norrington or Elizabeth would have gotten an R rating from me, because of the greater emotional impact on the reader.

Was that a good rating, or should onscreen death-by-dismemberement rate an R or a "mature content?" Sleepy Hollow, after all, is rated R pretty much because of the onscreen decapitations (possibly also the blood and gore, but I have a feeling it's the peoples heads being chopped off and that one guy getting impaled by a fence post that won it the R rating, not the blood-squirting autopsy scene.)

Rating for violence is always a tricky concept, because while I'm pretty clear on the dividing line between PG-13-rated, R-rated, and NC-17-rated sex, and what elements up the rating, violence is discussed less often, and therefore is a much fuzzier area.

Another example: there's a scene in Classic-verse wherein a character is killed by Iron Man's repulsor ray, which literally burns a hole straight through his body. The scene is taken directly from a comics code authority approved issue from the 1970s that would probably rate about a PG-13 in a modern movie, but does the inclusion of sensory description -- like the smell of the dead man's burned flesh -- up the rating? I can't remember if we rated that fic PG-13 or R. And I know RR&R is rated PG-13, because the one sex scene in it is super-vague old-school romance novel-land, but it starts with a dead guy hanging from a meathook in a warehouse, having his blood drained from him like a butchered deer, and said blood is then used to resurrect a character's rotted corpse from the dead. And I seriously did not realize how disturbing that would be on a movie or television screen until I typed it just now. Did it feel more like PG-13 than R when we wrote it because we didn't dwell on the gruesome bits and it therefore *was* only about PG-13? Or because reading a lot of horror and fantasy and Patricia Cornwell novels has desensitized me to corpses and gore?

Comments

[dorcas-gustine.livejournal.com]

I think it all depends on how you write it. Movies and TV shows are always going to be way more graphic than written text, because, well the means of communication is images. The same sex or violent scene when written can vary in rating. Re: the resurrection scene in RR&R, I think you did right by putting a PG-13 rating, because while conveying the meaning, you managed to keep the imagery on a very non-graphic level.

For example, a fairy tale like Little Red Riding Hood is meant for children, but if you start writing it with, let's say, a Stephen King style it jumps straight to R (if not NC-17) rating. (That said, I still think the Brothers Grimm version is quite horrifying).

So yeah, depends on the way you describe it and the impact it has on the narrating voice.**

Or that's the way I see it.

EDIT:
(** The Patricia Cornwell thing is exactly what I'm talking about. When Kay Scarpetta describes corpses during autopsies it's fairly graphic of course, but it's not as horrifying as say, a passerby who happens to stumble upon the corpse. It's a clinical approach, so it deserves a lower rating.)

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

I think you did right by putting a PG-13 rating, because while conveying the meaning, you managed to keep the imagery on a very non-graphic level.

Graphic would have started to venture into zombie movies territory, I think, and that wasn't at all the mood we were going for.

The Patricia Cornwell thing is exactly what I'm talking about. When Kay Scarpetta describes corpses during autopsies it's fairly graphic of course, but it's not as horrifying as say, a passerby who happens to stumble upon the corpse. It's a clinical approach, so it deserves a lower rating

Yes - I tend to have a much easier time watching dead people get cut up in NCIS than I think I would watching something like the Saw movies, and Kathy Reichs and Patricia Cornbwell are both less gross/disturbing than the Aliens!-inspired childbirth scene in Breaking Dawn. Oddly, I have a much higher threshold for blood and gore in print, though my threshold in movies is still pretty high. The one thing outside of a horror movie that was ever truly too much for me to the point that I actually couldn't watch was everything that's ever had spiders in it Romano getting his arm cut off by a helicopter tail roter on ER, and that's because I have RL fears of airplane propellers (I used to work at an airport. One of the pilots once hit a deer with his airplane while taxing down the runway. The color photographs of the results were the best argument for being very, very careful around propellers that I've ever seen).

My textual disgustingness threshold is the dead baby scene in The Monk, which has to be read to be properly experienced. Mere paraphrasing can't do William Lewis's description of the crawling maggots justice.

[dorcas-gustine.livejournal.com]

It's like nakedness in the hospital, it's not erotic (well, except in 'let's play the doctor' fantasies), it's all about the context.

The only time I was kinda squicked by a cop show, was when they found half of a guy squashed between containers in CSI. The squick didn't last much, though, because someone mentioned getting a spatula, and I'm all for improper dark humor.

(Incidentally, ER was very squick-worthy! I remember the time when a guy came in with a fence in his mouth... Brr...)

[ouri.livejournal.com]

That's a tough call, because violence - even blatant, bloody violence - is so much more easily accepted in this society than any matters sexual. (*sigh*) Unanimous vote in my household, though, is that the "off-screen" decapitation would indeed be a PG-13.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

While I'd like to rate on-screen violence higher than it tends to be rated, realistically, I think you'd have to have actual torture or graphic dismemberment scenes to get above a PG-13 in text. I wouldn't consider that scene with Iron Man burning the hole through the diplomat to be rated higher because it was very clean - no guts falling out, no collapsing corpse, no long description of the victim's pain.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

That's close to what my instinct was, but I also read a lot of murder mysteries and dark fantasy and other fairly graphic stuff, including plenty of things that do have actual torture, so I was worried I might be underestimating how violent/graphic was "really violent."