In-universe, how does the rating system make sense? Some superhero stories are PG or PG-13, like Spider-Man and Superman, while others like Deadpool or Peacemaker are clearly R-rated. But in the real world, everyone swears, has sex, sees violence—it’s part of life. So are we supposed to believe that in-universe, some heroes just live in sanitized realities where blood, nudity, and language barely exist? Does intense violence, sex, and profanity only happen to certain people in their universe?
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This is an inherently Doylist question, and thus off-topic.
It happens, we just don’t see it. Alternatively, it just coincidentially doesn’t happen.
The same universe doesn’t always share a rating. For example, the Deadpool and X-Men films both take place in Earth-10005, but Deadpool is rated R. It’s just the X-Men tended to encounter fewer people swearing, or perhaps the movies didn’t show all the swearing. And in some cases, I’m inclined to think the lack of blood isn’t diegetic. In the same way that Rhodey didn’t canonically suddenly look different between Iron Man and Iron Man II, maybe the movie doesn’t show blood even though it’s canonically there.
We just don’t see moments where the R-rated stuff happens.
The notable example I can think of is Supernatural. Being on network TV, it’s only TV-14 which means they never swear worse than ass or bitch.
However, there is an episode called Ghostfacers which is shot from the perspective of some wannabe ghost hunters filming an in-universe episode. They encounter Sam and Dean and Dean at one point says he’s “going to die my fucking job” which the Ghostfacers bleeps. So Sam and Dean do use the big boy naughty words, we just don’t see it.
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