New Look & Wondering About Smut Fic Ratings

Got fed up with the old look, so got a new theme made by the talented MonicaNDesign. I tinkered some with the CSS to make it a little more colorful 🙂

I’ve going back and forth about how to rate my fic the last couple of years! They’re smut, PWP, erotica or whatever your want to call it, and for the longest time most of the similar smutty fics in the fandoms wrote and read in was usually rated R (ff.net and every place else in years past) or Mature (AO3). I think mine are the same kind of sex scenes you can find in sexy romance novels, and that’s always been talked as rated R or M in my circles, while erotica (like the novels published by Black Lace) and outright porn is NC-17/Explicit (AO3).

But in the last few years it’s started to seem to me that there’s been a shift and the kind of romance novel typish smut fics are now rated Explicit on AO3, while Mature has gotten a lot more tame and with less words dedicated to to the sex itself? I don’t know. I wonder if that’s true, or if I’m imagining things… or maybe there’s differences in rating smut between different fandoms? It’s true that I’m now reading more in other, usually newer fandoms.

Personally, I’ve always rather thought that consensual sex scenes between adults should be R/Mature and non-con and just pure violence and abuse merit NC-17/Explicit. But that might just be because I’m Finnish and I don’t think we’re as puritanical about sexual and non-sexual nudity and sex as the people from US generally seem to be to me, and I guess the ratings that are mostly used for fanfic were created by US people.

So if you’ve noticed the ratings changing here or on AO3 that’s just the rating itself – no fic content has changed! It’s just me waffling back and forth about the proper rating. I think I’ve landed on Explicit finally, but if you have any opinions on the ratings in general, or what you think my smut would best be rated, I’d love to hear them!