Reniard gets to flaunt his naked titties and say “fuck” now, because Stijn drinks copious amounts of alcohol.
tldr: Webtoon implemented a new content rating system with age brackets. Because there’s “mild to excessive consumption of alcohol” in Blood Bound, it has now gotten the “Mature” rating.
If you read the comic, you know that there’s some blood, violence, censored swearing, mentions of sex, and overall adult themes. I rated the full version on my website as 16+ because I don’t think an occasional swear word or mention of sex should matter for older teens. For Webtoon Canvas I used to edit the comic to fit their content rules so I wouldn’t have to mark it as mature.
But to be honest, lately I thought about changing the rating to “mature” after all, to avoid editing in the future. It’s also not that easy to always come up with alternatives to dialogue or cut out parts of panels in a way that doesn’t take away from the plot, just because the comic needs to fit a very broad audience. When Webtoon announced they will be applying the new content rating system from their Originals to Canvas, I was looking forward to it. Generally, I think my comic can fit into the YA category just based on the YA books I read. There would be some things in the future I’d still have to edit out, but much less than I do now.
Today the form was made available. I logged in to the notice that we have until some date to fill it out. Here’s the question that got me the mature rating:
Alcohol, drugs, and/or tobacco
0 – No alcohol, drugs, and/or tobacco
1 – A few mentions of alcohol, drugs, and/or drugs
2 – Implied or mild consumption of alcohol, drugs, and/or tobacco
3 – Depiction of moderate to excessive consumption of alcohol, drugs, and/or tobacco
Why? Well, Stijn, one of the main characters, drinks. A lot. And for some reason Webtoon decided that both “moderate” and “excessive consumption” should result in a mature rating.
Since I have no intention of cutting out that part of the plot so I can fit into Webtoon’s YA definition, I decided to just make the whole series mature on there and not have to edit anything every again.
You can read Webtoon’s notice here.