Why MPAA Age Ratings In Fandom Suck; A Primer

[athenemiranda]

I have been bottling up this rant for ages, but as I finally started thinking about doing something about it on mgs_fanworks I figured I should spell out why. Hello, Livejournal.

1. The MPAA age ratings in their original form, as applied to movies, really really suck and should not be emulated. Sometimes, fandom does inadvertently emulate the suck, most

Comments

[mushroom18]

I agree with this. I never really thought much about ratings in fanfic, but I have disagreed with MPAA ratings in movies. I also remember the time when slash communities were getting heavily censored by LJ whereas het comms got it easy. It really reeked of a double standard.

I don't really follow ratings anymore; what I value are warnings and tags based on fic content. I think it's because I ended up reading a really violent fic that was just rated PG-13 and I thought it should've been over that...

[athenemiranda]

Hey, The Dark Knight was rated PG-13! So it's all fine. :(

[chewilicious]

I agree, ratings suck.

My opinion might be alone here, but I feel it would be better to just have one NSFW tag, and require people to say why it's NSFW in the post description itself.

[athenemiranda]

That would certainly be simpler and more concise but at the end of the day tags are for helping people archive-browse and one tag that will always be in demand is the 'All The Porn' tag. I can see a 'Dark Themes' tag being similarly popular. So while I agree tag proliferation isn't truly necessary, it might help people find what they want to read.

[nakki]

ditto this. Tags are for aid in searching for the fap material you want to read. And if all you want is NSFW: fluff and bunnies! then you'll be really annoyed if you searched through 40 pages of NSFW fic and not a single one was fluff and bunnies!

And personally, I've always found that the best tagged communities are also the ones I return to the most often to read fic. I like being able to say "hmm, i'd really like some pegging fic with ronon/john" and being able to tell at a glance if a specific community can give me that.

[athenemiranda]

THIS IS WHY AO3 IS A WONDERFUL SITE and I'm pretty sure it also why, at one point, my sockpuppet had a near-perfectly inverse ratio of hitrates to feedback. Everyone uses kink tags to browse AO3!

What I love on mgs_fanworks is our pairing tags. It's a pretty small fandom but we've written/drawn about 55 different pairings in the last couple of years.

[oudeteron]

...so this post is great and I'm linking to it in explanation of doing the same thing on mgs_slash (shit, that will be considerably more work). I've had these problems with the ratings for a while but, unlike the fact that I have demanded that people use trigger warnings and do not use "warnings" for slash and other similarly innocuous things, I've never considered the option of DOING AWAY with MPAA-style ratings because they are so ubiquitous. But, yes, they also suck. The fact that you're taking this step with _fanworks has given me the incentive to do the same on _slash (even though it already has fallen victim to the double standard those ratings enable).

[hegglehog]

I'd never really thought about fanfic needing ratings, but I've never really ventured outside of Dr Who fanfic, so I don't know much.

[athenemiranda]

I still haven't instituted this on mgs_f, fuck.

I am sure different fandoms have different norms but the mimicking of MPAA ratings has always been pretty common - the Pit did it in the early Noughties (not that they were the first) and it just kind of caught on. As I just outlined, I think it's terrible.

fyi I am currently blogging mostly at http://thene.dreamwidth.org (and still mirroring from there over to the old Deadjournal) and posting fic on two Ao3 accounts, one of which has all kinds of things on it but mostly Metal Gear, and the other of which is a sock account devoted solely to my godawful OTP who I went crawling back to last year, oh dear god why can I not quit them :( (well in my defence my brain kind of needed a bolthole after my father died and from there it was TERRIBLE IDFIC ALL THE WAY)

[hegglehog]

Come back to LJ. It has me in the form of a hegglehog ;-)

[hegglehog]

Now, how do I get the dreamwidth stuff to mirror over here? :-p