rosemoonweaver:

So these have been on my mind lately and I just wanted to throw them out there to see what other people thought.

1. What do you consider Major Character Death? Is it any character important to the plot or just someone in the main ship?
2. What warrants an Underage tag? Is it any sexual relationship under age 18? Under age 16? Do you base it off the consent laws where you live?
3. What do you classify as darkfic? Is tone or content more important to the classification?
4. How violent does a fic have to be to warrant Graphic Depictions of Violence?
5. How do you rate fics? How mature is Mature as compared to Teen?
6. How do you decide what to change about a character when writing AUs? Have you ever writren a character so divorced from canon that you yourself had trouble distinguishing where canon ended and artistic interpretation began?
7. How do you decide how to write charactera that don’t appear in canon much?
8. Has writing ever changed your opinion on a certain character? If so, who and how?

So I wanted to bring these back up because I’ve gotten a few really interesting responses and there seems to be some agreement and some disagreement when it comes to these topics. Based on having this hang around for a while and with absolutely no scientific weight, here are some things that interest me.

1. What do you consider Major Character Death? Is it any character important to the plot or just someone in the main ship?
With few exceptions, it seems like the general consensus is that if a character who is important to the plot of the story or the show dies, the fic gets an MCD warning. That makes sense, of course.
2. What warrants an Underage tag? Is it any sexual relationship under age 18? Under age 16? Do you base it off the consent laws where you live? 
Again, with very little variation, underage is considered anyone under the age of 18 and extreme underage warrants it’s own separate content tag. I’m both unsurprised and surprised by this. Personally, I had always thought about underage in terms of consent laws where I live, which is 17. In this respect, I tend to think about it in terms of teenage sexuality. I can absolutely see tagging a fic underage if the people involved are 15 or younger, or if there was an age gap that would be considered illegal where I live. But to me, the idea of two sixteen-year-olds having sex isn’t something I want to read but it doesn’t seem that big of a deal to me. I think, to me, the connotation of an underage tag was more present in my thinking. But I completely understand the reasoning and I will change my own thinking.
3. What do you classify as darkfic? Is tone or content more important to the classification? 
This one was really mixed. Some people said it was content, some said it was tone, and others argued that it was a combination. There does seem to be a few things that make a fic automatically dark to some (rape, serial killers, torture, horror) but other things were subjective. Some people claimed that the content can be dark but the tone can be light and that doesn’t make the fic “dark” while others argued that a lighter tone with heavy content makes the fic darker than usual. It was very interesting and very subject, honestly. I suppose, as with many things, it comes down to how the author chooses to tag it.
4. How violent does a fic have to be to warrant Graphic Depictions of Violence?
This one was really revealing in my opinion. Obviously, if the violence is “graphic”, meaning described in detail, it warrants this tag but something like a punch to the face doesn’t really. But what I found interesting is that some people said that if the violence level was higher than that shown on screen (for Supernatural in this case) it got the tag but show typical violence was fine. Which to me is absolutely wild because regardless of cuts and how “off screen” it usually is, there are definitely scenes on SPN that I think qualify for this tag, if for no other reason than the sounds. But, that’s me.
5. How do you rate fics? How mature is Mature as compared to Teen? 
The general consensus seems to be that fics with light kissing or fics a person would be comfortable reading to their young kids are G rated.
Fics with make outs and swearing are typically Teen rated.
Mature seems to be where people are divided. Some say that implication of sex is fine for Teen rated fics, others say that’s a Mature rating. Some say light sexual content and fade to black is Mature, while others say that fade to black is Teen and sex just can’t be described in detail in Mature fics.
Explicit seems to feature detailed sex scenes.
What really surprised me, though, was that no one (or maybe one or two people) mentioned violence having anything to do with their ratings. I would have figured that a fic with Graphic Depictions of Violence as a tag would at least get a Mature rating, but apparently, violence doesn’t come to mind when fic rating is concerned. I found it interesting.
6. How do you decide what to change about a character when writing AUs? Have you ever written a character so divorced from canon that you yourself had trouble distinguishing where canon ended and artistic interpretation began?
In general, writers said that they either try to boil a character down to what they think their core personality is and change details based on the AU or that they don’t write AUs at all. There did seem to be a little discussion about when other writers get it wrong and write a character in a way that doesn’t seem true to the reader, which I also find very interesting. This is a question I think about a lot, and I tend to think about what characters would be like if they lived different lives. To me, AUs are an opportunity to do a bit of character study and obviously, that’s not going to be the same for everyone.
It’s also interesting to me the way in which AUs are approached. There does seem to be an element of character archetyping, by which I mean that Dean, Sam, and Cas all fit into certain archetypal roles, and those can be used to inform where the character goes in a story. It’s quite interesting in regards to different approaches and I think I’d like to explore that further.  
7. How do you decide how to write charactera that don’t appear in canon much?
Unsurprisingly, the consensus seems to be that rarer characters are blank slates and are used to explore headcanons and/or to advance the plot.
8. Has writing ever changed your opinion on a certain character? If so, who and how?
I was really surprised to see a lot of no’s with this one. While some people answered that they learn a little more about the character by writing them (like their personality, their mannerisms, the way they see the world) most people stated they write from their own personal interpretations of characters.

So, anyway, thank you to all the people who took the time to answer my questions. You all have given me some things to think about.