THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF DARK SUBJECT MATERIAL

There are, in my own humble opinion, four main criteria necessary to make a fiction extremely dark and edgy, or rude and crude, or unsuitable for people below their mid-teens, which is the same. Since there are four of them and they tend to crop up together and be wicked, I call them the Four Horsemen of Dark Subject Material. All four of them are more or less taboo to a younger target demographic. And who are these Horsemen? They are (in no particular order): Foul Language, Drug Use, Sex, and Death.

1. Foul Language involves all instances of swearing and using taboo words, including (but not limited to) the famous seven dirty words: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cock, motherfucker, and tits. One that did not make this list but is also quite common is ass, or arse. These are only the tip of the scheissberg...
2. Drug Use involves the consumption not only of illegal drugs (cocaine, maryjane, meth...) but also of the so-called legal or social drugs (nicotine and alcohol), and even of fictional drugs (rauha, tracker jacker venom...); long story short, any substance that stimulates the mind and creates a habit that can spiral into addiction.
3. Sex involves anything related to erotica, be it straight or LGBTQ+, from the first foreplay of curious late-teens to the presence of sex toys and shops where one is able to purchase them, from the presence of dominatrixes and S&M dungeons in villains' dens of iniquity to the practice of "dropping the soap" in the men's shower at the county jail (Highlight if you didn't get the "dropping the soap" joke yet.) The joke here is that, when the guy that dropped the soap bends down to pick it, naked, in the shower, a more muscular and taller cellmate ambushes and ass-rapes him from behind. It's a very distasteful and painful joke that, nevertheless, Hollywood has not wearied of.
4. Death refers to those deaths that are more impactful than others. The death of a child or adolescent, a violent murder, the carnage of war or of a Mafia shootout, poisonings with graphic effects like arsenic or strychnine... That kind of deaths that it actually hurts to watch or to read about. Unless you have watched and/or read so much dark subject material that you have become desensitized.