Blood

Growing up in an age of visual media has been an interesting experience, because trying to hide certain aspects of life in your stories becomes a lot harder when you can actually see what's going on. In writing, if your intended audience is children or teens, chances are you want to avoid certain subjects - blood in particular comes to mind. As far as text goes, you can say that there is a wound or injury, but if you want to avoid it, there's no reason for you to ever state anything about the blood. In a more adult novel, you might state that blood was seeping to the ground as the rusted and broken piping your character had landed on pierced his side. But for young adults, saying that the pain was intense is more than enough.

That kind of thing is a lot harder with video games, tv shows, and movies. After all, it doesn't really make sense to have a sword stab through a character's back and watch them drop dead without a single drop of blood leaving their bodies. And yet they'll do that, because the sight of blood would just be too much for the kids. Not that, you know, a sword stabbing all the way through their body isn't bad enough already. And yet that's how it will be presented.

Ironically, when making more adult content, we seem to try and do the opposite to compensate for how little blood we showed early on. Games and shows aimed for adults will have enormous, entirely unrealistic splatters and pools of blood any time someone dies or is injured. Their bodies will stagger and stumble, they'll continue to move long after they should have been dead, because it makes things more dramatic and unsettling.

And I don't know if writing has evolved in a similar matter, or if it was later kind of brought back to writing from the more visual media, but I find this is often true with novels nowadays. And I'm certainly guilty of it too - after all, blood is a very sticky, slow moving liquid. It would take a direct blow to a vein to cause a spurt of blood, and even then it is not a continuous thing as it is often advertised. A single spurt, maybe two, and usually caused by applied pressure rather than the simple wound and beating of the heart. Certainly not enough to make a pool.

I'm not sure where we got this idea that that was how things were supposed to be presented. I kind of grew up with it, so for me it's kind of just in my head. But it makes me wonder where it started.