(![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
elspethdixon Jan. 26th, 2009 07:20 pm)
elspethdixon Jan. 26th, 2009 07:20 pm)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?
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?
Tags:
From:
no subject