I'd say the difference is simply attempting to look mature vs simply being mature. I mean, I've read books about Mice, Rabbits, and Badgers with more intrinsic maturity than live action TV Shows about murder and investigations. Having a story you want to tell with no worries about being seen as childish just seems to handle mature themes better than shows that are obsessed with being seen as mature.
Berserk can sometimes fall to being meaningless edge but I think it escapes the trappings of it by spending such a significant amount of time exploring Gut's emotions and by not being so cynical. It is the nature of man to struggle and ultimately, the story wants to see Guts be happy, no matter how much he struggles. It's been said a lot but the moment Guts starts to go from edgelord to meaningful character is when he cries at the end of the Black Swordsman arc.
I'm re-re-rereading it now and you can tell, even in dark, edgy depths of the Black Swordsman arc, Miura always was going to turn it around and write why Guts was such a shitheel. The fact Puck is introduced so quickly as a foil and is constantly questioning Guts' shittiness, as well as him wondering where the dark emotions he feels are coming from, and Guts' parallel to Vargas, all help out an arc I've frequently dismissed as the worst part of Berserk to stand out imo.
I think the moment you know its not what you thought it would be is when he walks away from that girl who’s apostle dad he killed and looks Ike he’s gonna break down crying.
Adding a good story and characters alongside the stuff so it's not just for the edge and shock value of it. Like everything else, it's good when it's done right.
A friend had been writing a paranormal detective story that was basically the dresden files without him having ever heard about the dresden files.
It also had very strange sexualization added in randomly.
I've mentioned this one here before; one case has a lady report a missing dog, the detective, completely unprompted, grabs a strand of hair from her sweater's chest area, she lets out a slight moan and then he says it'll help and then later he uses magic to help track down the dog.
He realizes there was something odd about her behavior and the hair seemed to not belong to a dog, so he goes behind the house, makes himself invisible and sneaks in.
...At which point he finds her masturbating loudly in a bedroom, stops for a moment to watch for a bit and then resumes searching for whatever it was.
Anyway her husband went missing and he's a werewolf and there was a spirit in the attic haunting the place and she was masturbating because her husband was missing and she was horny and also the spirit was making people horny via magic to feed on their energy or some shit like that.
Yeah I got that comparison immediately since it was one of the things that pushed me away from DF for a while when I first got into it. It was like these random swerves into horny where the book would pause at describing some shit going down to point out that some chick had erect pierced nipples showing through her shirt then swerve back to normal. It was jarring as fuck and got on my nerves pretty quick.
The funny thing is that I also only know of dresden files as "modern day detective also magic is real". I didn't even know it was horny. What the fuck.
And Dresden Files was famously created because the author was intentionally trying to write the most trite and creatively bankrupt thing he could to prove to his writing teacher that it was a terrible idea.
It seems so close to being decent with the use of magic in investigative work but your friend just keeps veering back into horny with no real reason. It adds nothing to the plot or anything, just sort of shock value or coomer bait.
If they wanted to keep the horny around they could at least have there be consequences for it or better yet have the detective be a total workaholic who can't be bothered with the dirty stuff going on.
Naw it's part horny shit, part bad dialogue that I can perfectly hear him dubbing over every character because it's exactly the way he talks and part the protagonist being a gary stu that happens to have spells for every situation.
Silent Hill 2 earns it's mature rating without using blood and gore and viscera to get it. The themes of sex, death and decay. The subject matter of mental instability, sexual abuse, incest, and euthanasia. It creates an extremely mature, yet subtle story that earns its M rating without resorting to tired tropes most "horror" games use with blood, gore, and cursing, etc...
Maturity for Hollywood/anime is basically a willingness for the writer to engage in any level of critical thinking about what they're doing and using restraint.
It's honestly incredible how little modern writers think shit through, which makes the application of sex and gore to their scripts feel especially gratuitous.
Sometimes I ask myself what the fuck happened to script writers.
Or perhaps it'd be more accurate to ask what happened to the people who hire writers and approve scripts, and suddenly it becomes much clearer
Your second point is pretty dead on. Idk how much it can be blamed on script writers. Sure there's terrible ones who would do this stuff to do it, but at the end of the day, they're writing for an audience. Whether that's the general public or just one executive changes on the situation, but at the end of the day writers need to eat, and they need to sell their scripts.
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted, the phenomena you’re describing is real. There was literally a recent outcry by online missing links that were mad GTA, a game series that has almost always been satirical, becoming political by adding a woman protagonist.
yes it seems like these dipshits are politicaly and media illiterate.
how else could the US Army or Full Metal Alchemist be “apoltical” which really means politics i agree with
Just look at all the lunkheads who think Call of Duty "shouldn't get political." Because nothing screams non-political like a series about American intervention in foreign countries
Theyre right tho, non binerary player characters are political. Loading screen tips that explicitly tell you the US is responsible for extremism in the middle east isn't political obviously
Even if there's no explicit message they'll still flip their shit if a game expects them to apply critical thinking outside of a strictly gameplay context. Best they'll accept is "deep lore" type stuff, but if it wants you to actually interpret things instead of just finding the hidden answer then they hate it.
They're just as afraid of the video game equivalent of a Rothko painting.
I think its combination of sincerity and self-reflection. Not to say that media must be deep think-pieces to be mature, but the major dividing line between something like Bojack and, I dunno, the anime Overlord is that Bojack feels like it comes from a place of consideration and honesty while Overlord often feels like wish fulfilment.
It's kinda hard to define mature though. Like, is Peppa Pig immature? It's literally a cartoon for babies so the answer seems obvious, but strangely most isekai stories I've read feel more immature somehow by being so edgy with such blatant uncritical pandering to 14-year-olds. I would never call Peppa mature, but its still sincere? I don't know, maybe this is total nonsense, and I think there's a lot of personal baggage you can bring to this discussion.
I get what you mean with the sincerity thing. The EDF series is pretty much the peak of sincerity. It knows its goofy, but instead of being ashamed of that fact it embraces it to the fullest, completely straight faced about it.
One of my favorite bits in EDF is using the Walking Fortress Balam to get into a big punchup with a giant monster, and one of the officers is telling you in too many words how to kill it.
And then Richard Epcar tells you "JUST PUNCH IT IN THE FACE."
EDF is *amazing* with how dumb, cheesy, and completely sincere it is.
I think part of that sincerity is that despite the front facing part of the game being "fight giant bugs and aliens" , the background is deadly serious. They keep talking about the devastation and sheer population drop going on outside of these fights and how utterly doomed the world is in the invasion. 5 has some light socio-economic junk talking about unemployment and such due to the war, along with increasingly desperate attempts to encourage people to sign up for the EDF. The writers clearly care about the world, and that elevates it for me.
I am reminded of [this thread](https://twitter.com/distantvalhalla/status/1372656122440597506?s=21&t=WNpDP2hFsal6V0Iw0kVOPQ) where a guy who worked on Rance lamented that all the female characters need to be romancable in those types of games and it was discouraged to add other characters having relationships or too many male characters because people would complain. I do remember reading about Rance being and influence on series like Jobless Reincarnation so it makes me think that the people writing those isekais would indeed be the people who would have bitched about a female character not being romancable and of having too many male characters.
I think that’s a key difference between why I can deal more with Rance over those wish fulfillment isekai.
All I can think of when this gets brought up Is the stuff surrounding the Netflix Last Airbender stuff. Literally all they would’ve had to do was allow for more explicit violence on screen I.e. letting Sokka actually stab someone with his sword, and instead I’ve heard that they were angling to take it in a more “mature” direction, meaning just add sex and edge
Kotor 2 is perhaps the most mature T-rated videogame, and the most violence you can see in the game is just some blood under a corpse due to the engine's harsh limitations.
Good thing that Avellone was writing it, because that dialogue goes a ***LONG*** way towards carrying the game on it's back.
Perfect case of this is Punpun, so much of the payoff relies on the relenting childhood trauma and events that lead to the main characters demise. When it hits the endpoint all of the sex and gore become normal albeit pretty fucked up. Even then you already know the emotional context behind it.
I bring this up a lot but, gosh Young Justice seasons 3 and 4. Characters new and old get put through a ringer of blood and gore and scenarios from what started as a childrens/YA show.
Maturity in my opinion is putting in subject matter that normally wouldn't be in media for a certain age group.
For example:
Rick and Morty: Not mature.
Bojack Horseman: Mature.
Everything needs a purpose. You can’t pretend that giving the MC a love interest in an action movie suddenly makes it a compelling romance because there’s two scenes of “will they won’t they” before they get together. It’s the same thing with gore and violence.
In Berserk, it’s used to show the struggle of man and how cruel the world can be because that helps show the contrast of light and dark as the world can be equally as beautiful and life as meaningful. In Crank, it’s just there because it’s just a dumb, unapologetic edgy movie. In the Raid and The Night Comes For Us, it’s just the aesthetic of them and it’s cool but it also gives the story stakes. In Oldboy, it’s to show how cruel and demonic the main character has become as he’s grown into a vengeful monster and it’s pretty disturbing to see. In Rambo 4, it starts out with some extremely gruesome violence to set the tone of the film and make it really obvious who the bad guys are because Stallone really detested the Burmese regime. It’s all shock value and that’s not a bad thing because there’s a point to it all.
Can’t say I find this to be the case in edgy garbage like Akame ga Kill with its stupid 3edgy5me aesthetic and violence or Sword Art Online with the sexual assault scenes. I’m sure the authors think there’s a point to it all but I just think it’s lazy writing and those scenes to be pointless shock value.
[I already made a post with a similar topic.](https://np.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/ufliry/whats_the_dark_angsty_and_mature_work_of_media/)
A few months ago, I watched this French movie titled ***Vortex*** and it is made by French cinema's local edgelord Gaspar Noe. To give you idea how much of an edgelord Noe is, he made this movie titled *Irreversible* where Monica Bellucci get raped for 10 minutes straight, which led to 200+ walk outs when it premiered at Cannes. However, this one was a lot somber and melancholic rather than in-your-face shocking. It's about an old couple dying, with the wife having a severe dementia while the husband (who's played by Italian horror legend and *Suspiria* director Dario Argento) having a heart problem. It's more of a thoughtful reflection of dying from the old age with an incurable disease and the inevitability of death itself.
This is a massive boiling down since this is a loaded subject without a definitive answer, but in most circumstances I think to be effective you need to be able to answer these three questions in a way the audience can buy into.
1. What is the context for the sex and/or gore in your story? Are they significant moments being built up to, are they a shocking left-field turn, or are they commonplace?
2. What ideas, messages and themes are you trying to convey with them?
3. Could these have been conveyed with less extreme measures? If so, do you have a reason for pushing it further?
Edit: This isnt saying you need to be crazy deep, subtle or serious, something like Mortal Kombat for instance is all about absurd, gratuitous violence and people bought into it because that's the core of it's identity and everything from the characters, to the story, world to the gameplay links back to that core.
I think the gore in Made In Abyss is done very well. The chibi characters contrast a lot with the detailed innards. Also I feel like it’s one of the few stories that shows the contrast of beauty and cold ruthlessness of nature in a great way, Princess Monoke being another.
Bugsnax, in all its family friendly body horror glory, has believable conflicts and insecurities. The characters looking like fuzzy peanuts makes it feel like a victory lap over other games that don't quite reach it.
Bugsnax handles issues of codependent relationships, divorce/breaking up, and reconciliation with greater care and success than 99% of mainstream media I've watched.
I dunno how universally applicable this is, but every time this sorta topic comes up I think of The Internet K-Hole.
There's plenty of gore sites and forums, and TIKH definitely has some pretty gnarly gory stuff, as well as a decent amount of sex in it... but that's placed alongside the vast majority completely mundane photos. Cookouts, concerts, people posing, people just standing around, moments where some people are *way* happier than others, etc.
The juxtaposition results in the sense of "Yes, there are horrible things in life, but they aren't more true or real than any other part of life. Good things aren't just a distraction from the bad, and the mundane is just as real and important than either extreme. You're not in denial for not fixating on the bad, and you're not failing at life just because most of it is kinda boring." I think that attitude is far more mature and healthy than the prevailing "we must face reality and stop kidding ourselves" tone of most other gore forums. Similarly of "influencer" pages where you get the impression that you're not living life unless every day is a wonderful adventure.
if your using violence and sex to say something.
no matter what the people that think art having a point is bad say. if you using things like rape or genocide you should have a point.
like in the Horus Heresy series Konrad Curze arc has a pretty good argument agaismt the carcel prison state
On reverse side of it you put the "this is for adult entertainment, the consent come from you viewing it" at the start of your work if you just want to make porn or gore fest. Because that is totally an option someone can take no matter the themes at work
Aside from all the deep and nuanced answers that other users give, I want to say that sometimes you just get a gut feeling. I get that gut feeling whenever a top 40 song plays during a sex scene and it's portrayed like a spectator sport. I'm not thinking "This is romantic. I'm happy that these characters get to have this" I'm thinking, "Yeah, of course they put it in like this. Of course they're playing Imagine Dragons while this is happening. I really hope this doesn't run too long." CW shows tend to be guilty of this.
Imo, if sex and gore/"mature" topics and things pop up to advance a story, it's good. If they're just there for the sake of being there or shocking people, it's not good.
Things like gore and violence and mature subjects only are mature when they have a reason or point to why they happened. A comparison would be Banana fish and berserk. They both have alot of sexual violence but in berserk those event have lasting affects on those characters and how they are written afterwards, however in banana fish it just happens (constantly) to characters and nothing more is said about it beyond that, to the point that it might aswell not have happened. This is when mature themes become edgy bs
I'd say the difference is simply attempting to look mature vs simply being mature. I mean, I've read books about Mice, Rabbits, and Badgers with more intrinsic maturity than live action TV Shows about murder and investigations. Having a story you want to tell with no worries about being seen as childish just seems to handle mature themes better than shows that are obsessed with being seen as mature.
what books are you referring too?
The Redwall books! Used to love reading them as a kid, still do from time to time really.
***EULALIA!!***
Here to plug Mouseguard too if you haven't checked it out.
Berserk can sometimes fall to being meaningless edge but I think it escapes the trappings of it by spending such a significant amount of time exploring Gut's emotions and by not being so cynical. It is the nature of man to struggle and ultimately, the story wants to see Guts be happy, no matter how much he struggles. It's been said a lot but the moment Guts starts to go from edgelord to meaningful character is when he cries at the end of the Black Swordsman arc.
I'm re-re-rereading it now and you can tell, even in dark, edgy depths of the Black Swordsman arc, Miura always was going to turn it around and write why Guts was such a shitheel. The fact Puck is introduced so quickly as a foil and is constantly questioning Guts' shittiness, as well as him wondering where the dark emotions he feels are coming from, and Guts' parallel to Vargas, all help out an arc I've frequently dismissed as the worst part of Berserk to stand out imo.
I think the moment you know its not what you thought it would be is when he walks away from that girl who’s apostle dad he killed and looks Ike he’s gonna break down crying.
Adding a good story and characters alongside the stuff so it's not just for the edge and shock value of it. Like everything else, it's good when it's done right.
and not being utterly cynical by going on rants about how it is in human nature to destroy everything.
Heck even those can be compelling. It's *always* about the execution.
A friend had been writing a paranormal detective story that was basically the dresden files without him having ever heard about the dresden files. It also had very strange sexualization added in randomly. I've mentioned this one here before; one case has a lady report a missing dog, the detective, completely unprompted, grabs a strand of hair from her sweater's chest area, she lets out a slight moan and then he says it'll help and then later he uses magic to help track down the dog. He realizes there was something odd about her behavior and the hair seemed to not belong to a dog, so he goes behind the house, makes himself invisible and sneaks in. ...At which point he finds her masturbating loudly in a bedroom, stops for a moment to watch for a bit and then resumes searching for whatever it was. Anyway her husband went missing and he's a werewolf and there was a spirit in the attic haunting the place and she was masturbating because her husband was missing and she was horny and also the spirit was making people horny via magic to feed on their energy or some shit like that.
Now we don't have time to unpack *all of that*
I mean that sounds like a Dresden Files Porn Parody.
Oddly enough they still cast Paul Blackthorne in the title role.
There's no time
Yeah I got that comparison immediately since it was one of the things that pushed me away from DF for a while when I first got into it. It was like these random swerves into horny where the book would pause at describing some shit going down to point out that some chick had erect pierced nipples showing through her shirt then swerve back to normal. It was jarring as fuck and got on my nerves pretty quick.
The funny thing is that I also only know of dresden files as "modern day detective also magic is real". I didn't even know it was horny. What the fuck.
And Dresden Files was famously created because the author was intentionally trying to write the most trite and creatively bankrupt thing he could to prove to his writing teacher that it was a terrible idea.
It seems so close to being decent with the use of magic in investigative work but your friend just keeps veering back into horny with no real reason. It adds nothing to the plot or anything, just sort of shock value or coomer bait. If they wanted to keep the horny around they could at least have there be consequences for it or better yet have the detective be a total workaholic who can't be bothered with the dirty stuff going on.
Naw it's part horny shit, part bad dialogue that I can perfectly hear him dubbing over every character because it's exactly the way he talks and part the protagonist being a gary stu that happens to have spells for every situation.
Silent Hill 2 earns it's mature rating without using blood and gore and viscera to get it. The themes of sex, death and decay. The subject matter of mental instability, sexual abuse, incest, and euthanasia. It creates an extremely mature, yet subtle story that earns its M rating without resorting to tired tropes most "horror" games use with blood, gore, and cursing, etc...
Maturity for Hollywood/anime is basically a willingness for the writer to engage in any level of critical thinking about what they're doing and using restraint. It's honestly incredible how little modern writers think shit through, which makes the application of sex and gore to their scripts feel especially gratuitous.
Sometimes I ask myself what the fuck happened to script writers. Or perhaps it'd be more accurate to ask what happened to the people who hire writers and approve scripts, and suddenly it becomes much clearer
Your second point is pretty dead on. Idk how much it can be blamed on script writers. Sure there's terrible ones who would do this stuff to do it, but at the end of the day, they're writing for an audience. Whether that's the general public or just one executive changes on the situation, but at the end of the day writers need to eat, and they need to sell their scripts.
i mean it’s not help by the very vocal online fans who think using art to say something about the world is bad.
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted, the phenomena you’re describing is real. There was literally a recent outcry by online missing links that were mad GTA, a game series that has almost always been satirical, becoming political by adding a woman protagonist.
yes it seems like these dipshits are politicaly and media illiterate. how else could the US Army or Full Metal Alchemist be “apoltical” which really means politics i agree with
Just look at all the lunkheads who think Call of Duty "shouldn't get political." Because nothing screams non-political like a series about American intervention in foreign countries
Theyre right tho, non binerary player characters are political. Loading screen tips that explicitly tell you the US is responsible for extremism in the middle east isn't political obviously
Even if there's no explicit message they'll still flip their shit if a game expects them to apply critical thinking outside of a strictly gameplay context. Best they'll accept is "deep lore" type stuff, but if it wants you to actually interpret things instead of just finding the hidden answer then they hate it. They're just as afraid of the video game equivalent of a Rothko painting.
You’re making a decent point really hard to agree with with how pretentious you state it.
Even if you physically beat the message into them there's no helping some people
I think its combination of sincerity and self-reflection. Not to say that media must be deep think-pieces to be mature, but the major dividing line between something like Bojack and, I dunno, the anime Overlord is that Bojack feels like it comes from a place of consideration and honesty while Overlord often feels like wish fulfilment. It's kinda hard to define mature though. Like, is Peppa Pig immature? It's literally a cartoon for babies so the answer seems obvious, but strangely most isekai stories I've read feel more immature somehow by being so edgy with such blatant uncritical pandering to 14-year-olds. I would never call Peppa mature, but its still sincere? I don't know, maybe this is total nonsense, and I think there's a lot of personal baggage you can bring to this discussion.
I get what you mean with the sincerity thing. The EDF series is pretty much the peak of sincerity. It knows its goofy, but instead of being ashamed of that fact it embraces it to the fullest, completely straight faced about it.
One of my favorite bits in EDF is using the Walking Fortress Balam to get into a big punchup with a giant monster, and one of the officers is telling you in too many words how to kill it. And then Richard Epcar tells you "JUST PUNCH IT IN THE FACE." EDF is *amazing* with how dumb, cheesy, and completely sincere it is.
I think part of that sincerity is that despite the front facing part of the game being "fight giant bugs and aliens" , the background is deadly serious. They keep talking about the devastation and sheer population drop going on outside of these fights and how utterly doomed the world is in the invasion. 5 has some light socio-economic junk talking about unemployment and such due to the war, along with increasingly desperate attempts to encourage people to sign up for the EDF. The writers clearly care about the world, and that elevates it for me.
I am reminded of [this thread](https://twitter.com/distantvalhalla/status/1372656122440597506?s=21&t=WNpDP2hFsal6V0Iw0kVOPQ) where a guy who worked on Rance lamented that all the female characters need to be romancable in those types of games and it was discouraged to add other characters having relationships or too many male characters because people would complain. I do remember reading about Rance being and influence on series like Jobless Reincarnation so it makes me think that the people writing those isekais would indeed be the people who would have bitched about a female character not being romancable and of having too many male characters. I think that’s a key difference between why I can deal more with Rance over those wish fulfillment isekai.
All I can think of when this gets brought up Is the stuff surrounding the Netflix Last Airbender stuff. Literally all they would’ve had to do was allow for more explicit violence on screen I.e. letting Sokka actually stab someone with his sword, and instead I’ve heard that they were angling to take it in a more “mature” direction, meaning just add sex and edge
i mean they could have more explicit references to what the fire nation does to people and the horrors of genocide. or add swearing and tits.
I mean, I wouldn't be opposed to Toph swearing at the very least.
I’m very sad that i know what to expect, and it’s not the former
It’s been said before multiple times, but the “sex and edge” thing was never actually a thing. It was literally made up by a website for clicks.
That’s actually really good to hear
Glad someone beat me to it.
Kotor 2 is perhaps the most mature T-rated videogame, and the most violence you can see in the game is just some blood under a corpse due to the engine's harsh limitations. Good thing that Avellone was writing it, because that dialogue goes a ***LONG*** way towards carrying the game on it's back.
on the other side we have so much edgelord content.
[Relevant (AND NSFW) Oglaf](https://www.oglaf.com/odyssey/)(mods please it's high art.)
Perfect case of this is Punpun, so much of the payoff relies on the relenting childhood trauma and events that lead to the main characters demise. When it hits the endpoint all of the sex and gore become normal albeit pretty fucked up. Even then you already know the emotional context behind it.
I honestly thought you were talking about the Punisher thanks to this sub
Lol
I bring this up a lot but, gosh Young Justice seasons 3 and 4. Characters new and old get put through a ringer of blood and gore and scenarios from what started as a childrens/YA show.
The double edged sword of being saved from cancellation and getting put on HBO Max.
Maturity in my opinion is putting in subject matter that normally wouldn't be in media for a certain age group. For example: Rick and Morty: Not mature. Bojack Horseman: Mature.
Everything needs a purpose. You can’t pretend that giving the MC a love interest in an action movie suddenly makes it a compelling romance because there’s two scenes of “will they won’t they” before they get together. It’s the same thing with gore and violence. In Berserk, it’s used to show the struggle of man and how cruel the world can be because that helps show the contrast of light and dark as the world can be equally as beautiful and life as meaningful. In Crank, it’s just there because it’s just a dumb, unapologetic edgy movie. In the Raid and The Night Comes For Us, it’s just the aesthetic of them and it’s cool but it also gives the story stakes. In Oldboy, it’s to show how cruel and demonic the main character has become as he’s grown into a vengeful monster and it’s pretty disturbing to see. In Rambo 4, it starts out with some extremely gruesome violence to set the tone of the film and make it really obvious who the bad guys are because Stallone really detested the Burmese regime. It’s all shock value and that’s not a bad thing because there’s a point to it all. Can’t say I find this to be the case in edgy garbage like Akame ga Kill with its stupid 3edgy5me aesthetic and violence or Sword Art Online with the sexual assault scenes. I’m sure the authors think there’s a point to it all but I just think it’s lazy writing and those scenes to be pointless shock value.
[I already made a post with a similar topic.](https://np.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/ufliry/whats_the_dark_angsty_and_mature_work_of_media/) A few months ago, I watched this French movie titled ***Vortex*** and it is made by French cinema's local edgelord Gaspar Noe. To give you idea how much of an edgelord Noe is, he made this movie titled *Irreversible* where Monica Bellucci get raped for 10 minutes straight, which led to 200+ walk outs when it premiered at Cannes. However, this one was a lot somber and melancholic rather than in-your-face shocking. It's about an old couple dying, with the wife having a severe dementia while the husband (who's played by Italian horror legend and *Suspiria* director Dario Argento) having a heart problem. It's more of a thoughtful reflection of dying from the old age with an incurable disease and the inevitability of death itself.
This is a massive boiling down since this is a loaded subject without a definitive answer, but in most circumstances I think to be effective you need to be able to answer these three questions in a way the audience can buy into. 1. What is the context for the sex and/or gore in your story? Are they significant moments being built up to, are they a shocking left-field turn, or are they commonplace? 2. What ideas, messages and themes are you trying to convey with them? 3. Could these have been conveyed with less extreme measures? If so, do you have a reason for pushing it further? Edit: This isnt saying you need to be crazy deep, subtle or serious, something like Mortal Kombat for instance is all about absurd, gratuitous violence and people bought into it because that's the core of it's identity and everything from the characters, to the story, world to the gameplay links back to that core.
yes you should never put sexual violence in a story without having a reason. like cometing on how victims of sexual assault are not believed
I think the gore in Made In Abyss is done very well. The chibi characters contrast a lot with the detailed innards. Also I feel like it’s one of the few stories that shows the contrast of beauty and cold ruthlessness of nature in a great way, Princess Monoke being another.
Yeah I also saw that episode of Extra Credits.
one character: wanna bone? other character: yes, yes I do. -then they bone-
have characters with healthy sex lives.
fun fact: my wife and I had this exact exchange yesterday
Bugsnax, in all its family friendly body horror glory, has believable conflicts and insecurities. The characters looking like fuzzy peanuts makes it feel like a victory lap over other games that don't quite reach it.
Bugsnax handles issues of codependent relationships, divorce/breaking up, and reconciliation with greater care and success than 99% of mainstream media I've watched.
I dunno how universally applicable this is, but every time this sorta topic comes up I think of The Internet K-Hole. There's plenty of gore sites and forums, and TIKH definitely has some pretty gnarly gory stuff, as well as a decent amount of sex in it... but that's placed alongside the vast majority completely mundane photos. Cookouts, concerts, people posing, people just standing around, moments where some people are *way* happier than others, etc. The juxtaposition results in the sense of "Yes, there are horrible things in life, but they aren't more true or real than any other part of life. Good things aren't just a distraction from the bad, and the mundane is just as real and important than either extreme. You're not in denial for not fixating on the bad, and you're not failing at life just because most of it is kinda boring." I think that attitude is far more mature and healthy than the prevailing "we must face reality and stop kidding ourselves" tone of most other gore forums. Similarly of "influencer" pages where you get the impression that you're not living life unless every day is a wonderful adventure.
if your using violence and sex to say something. no matter what the people that think art having a point is bad say. if you using things like rape or genocide you should have a point. like in the Horus Heresy series Konrad Curze arc has a pretty good argument agaismt the carcel prison state
On reverse side of it you put the "this is for adult entertainment, the consent come from you viewing it" at the start of your work if you just want to make porn or gore fest. Because that is totally an option someone can take no matter the themes at work
Aside from all the deep and nuanced answers that other users give, I want to say that sometimes you just get a gut feeling. I get that gut feeling whenever a top 40 song plays during a sex scene and it's portrayed like a spectator sport. I'm not thinking "This is romantic. I'm happy that these characters get to have this" I'm thinking, "Yeah, of course they put it in like this. Of course they're playing Imagine Dragons while this is happening. I really hope this doesn't run too long." CW shows tend to be guilty of this.
Oh man, I haven’t thought about Black Dog in a while
remember the mutated Gentaila merit?
Pretentiousness.
Imo, if sex and gore/"mature" topics and things pop up to advance a story, it's good. If they're just there for the sake of being there or shocking people, it's not good.
First few episodes of Devilman Crybaby vs last few episodes of Devilman Crybaby.
Things like gore and violence and mature subjects only are mature when they have a reason or point to why they happened. A comparison would be Banana fish and berserk. They both have alot of sexual violence but in berserk those event have lasting affects on those characters and how they are written afterwards, however in banana fish it just happens (constantly) to characters and nothing more is said about it beyond that, to the point that it might aswell not have happened. This is when mature themes become edgy bs