Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-995426-20141111195833/@comment-995426-20141111210647

To be perfectly honest, I'm beginning to wonder if this was a good idea to begin with. I know that a lot of the wiki visitors are kids interested in the 2012 series. But there's all these relatively more mature references sprinkled throughout the multiverse, and many Mirage reference articles share their space with their 2003 series equivalents.

I'm beginning to question whether separate Teen and Mature templates were a good idea. Even most Mirage content is relatively teen-friendly, but the truth is that it was fundamentally unrated content, with the occasional more mature reference thrown in without batting an eye. Maybe 4Kids and Nickelodeon fussed about the appropriateness of content that goes on television, but the comics frequently let it slide without anything resembling a content rating system.

If it were up to me, I'd not have advisory warnings at all, and let the entire TMNT multiverse just be what it is, references and all, without fearing the disapproval of the most easily-offended parents online&mdash;after all, I'm not a child, and I haven't been one for a long time, and I don't enjoy TMNT stuff the same way a child does. But, it's not up to me. See, I proposed this idea in the first place because it seems to be very important to the administrators to keep the wiki relatively kid-friendly. But so much TMNT content is anything but kid-friendly, and I thought it important to be able to retain every TMNT reference without bowdlerizing them or mincing words after the fact. This option is sort of a compromise, balancing the separate legitimate interests.

But the more articles I put the template in, the more I feel like instead of advising people, we're stigmatizing or even shaming everything that can't be shown to 7-year-olds on NickToons. I didn't feel that way when I was proposing the compromise and making the templates. But now it feels...somehow wrong, as if we're forcing mature content to apologize for being mature, when it never cared before whether it was mature or not. Even if it was generally understood that many of the comics and such were for relatively more mature audiences, the publications themselves pretty much never bothered to insist upon it, and seemed to even invite readers of any age to read all the bloody gory racy details. Content ratings make sense in a world of litigious parents who plant their children in front of the TV to babysit them for hours on end because their parents are too busy for them. But most TMNT print publications have been about as far-removed from the question of readers' parental approval as you can get; G-rated, R-rated, those distinctions don't seem to exist there. Even Palladium Books' 12-and-up rating seemed to be an afterthought after most parents thought TMNT&OS First Edition was far too adult for their kids. With such a free-spirited print world, I now suddenly feel like I've become the pushy hall monitor who never thought he'd ever become The Man.