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Notes -
Aw, well, thanks; glad I checked anyway.
Though ... instead of asking a long-shot question on my own behalf, I probably should have asked an obvious one on my son's behalf: what age would you say "Thresholder" is appropriate for? My kids loved HPMOR and he's currently re-reading "Mother of Learning", so I'd like to be able to find other long /r/rational -style work I could recommend for him, but my own next two favorites would be WtC and Worm and both get too frequently explicit about the horror/gore/trauma/etc. sides of their stories. The only warning I see on "Thresholder" is for profanity, and if even that's really excessive (or if his little sister wants in) I could probably read out loud to do a little light censorship on the fly.
I am personally not fond of age-gating literature at all, being of the opinion that if you can read and understand something, it's for you.
But that doesn't mean I don't understand what you mean haha. Thresholder has some adult content, but anything graphic happens off-screen. That's a necessity to be hosted on Royal Road, I think (without being age-gated, but it's been a while since I checked). You might see the MC looking longingly at a lady's buxom curves, have them described, but you're not getting a blow-for-blow of what follows, just a fade to black or acknowledgement. Someone might pop a boner, but no loving description of the veins or girth involved.
I would imagine most people wouldn't object to 13 year olds reading that. If you're reading it out loud, you'd be doing a decent amount of censoring for younger age groups. There's graphic violence, but nothing that would upset a psychologically normal red-blooded young lad.
I do want to thank you for introducing your kids to rationalist or rat-adjacent fiction, though that might spoil them with high standards when it comes to mainstream slop.
Thanks for this! That sounds like something I could let the 12yo read to himself, or at least something that I could read to him and the 10yo.
I consider this to be a goal of fiction but not a tautology. One of my favorite books is "Citizen of the Galaxy", a book aimed at 10-12 year olds where one of the side characters is obviously (to adults) a brothel owner-operator but where the evidence to that effect would go over little kids' heads. I also have the greatest of respect for whoever wrote the line "If I had a black light, this place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting" in "Guardians of the Galaxy". And even for less clever writers, "there's a scene change and everybody who should know what happened off-screen can probably figure it out" often isn't too hard to set up.
But my kids all started reading at age 2 or 3, and started reading long-form stuff like Harry Potter at 5 or 6, and precocious intellect runs in my family in a way that precocious maturity ... does not. My kids are much more mature than I was at their ages, but even though they'd survive darker/grosser/etc. well enough, they still have their preferences. They all thought HPMOR was good enough to be worth its most upsetting scene, but they clearly thought there was a scale there with weight on both sides.
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There are at least some adult content works on Royal Road that do not have any serious age-gating: Blue Core is an example (cw: painfully straight tentacles-on-woman, imo mid-but-complete work). They do have warnings that are moderately well-enforced, but I would not give a pre-teen random access to the site.
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