Thread:The S/@comment-995426-20190104123524

I've been thinking about Template:Teen vs. Template:Mature when it comes to Mirage continuity articles. Since we adopted the system, we've been using the mature template for Mirage articles, because we're not a ratings bureau and because one of its stories, Bodycount, is extremely graphic. But this was a preemptive decision. Similarly, the Archie continuity articles use the teen template. But after I started to include material from Ninjara: Seed of Destruction, which I hadn't realized in advance was for adults only, I gave the associated articles mature templates, leaving the rest of Archie with teen.

I'm beginning to wonder if this might have always been a better approach than rating an entire continuity according to its most adult work. If I had to do it all again, I'd give the Mirage articles teen templates by default, but use adult templates for articles relating to the adult Mirage works. And not just Bodycount, but any other Mirage work that has extreme graphic violence, like Tales of Leonardo: Blind Sight (Leonardo imagining his own suicide, where I had to edit his morgue scene because his corpse was too gory), and perhaps certain scenes of City at War (Splinter cannibalizing another rat, or a Foot Elite being impaled by a lamp post).

Thing is, we're still not a ratings bureau, nor really are we qualified or equipped to be, because these are broader subjective value judgments and we're more like librarians. How do we decide these things, being broad enough to encompass blatantly adult works, without making the casual wiki visitor think that something like Day in the Life is too mature for a 12 year old? And for that matter, how do we handle the Image continuity articles? They do seem generally more intense than most Mirage and IDW material, what with the occasional mutilation, but are they more mature than teen? I honestly don't know if I'm qualified to say. It does seem like IDW may have already given us a rule of thumb, with the IDW comic and the Mirage and Image reprints given teen warnings, and Bodycount instead reprinted by Top Shelf Productions which is IDW's special label for adult-rated comics. There's also the issue of evolving content standards, where something printed 20 or 30 years ago may be considered more mature or less mature today. I still don't know, really.

What I do know is that I don't want to go back to editors disputing whether non-graphic mentions of Mikey and Seri's one night stand are too racy for younger wiki readers when the source material was never meant for them. Nor do I want to give the false impression that all Mirage TMNT comics are racier or gorier than they actually are. In the past, I might not have cared labeling Mirage TMNT articles adult, "because they were never for kids anyway." But I've seen a few comments since then that suggest it may be misleading some wiki readers into thinking it was one big slasher porno in comic form. Content advisories, no matter how much they are crafted not to resemble badges of shame, still create impressions like these merely by existing. How do we judge content for appropriateness when so much of it was fundamentally not-rated? 