[UA] PoMoMa NC17

[John Nephew]

Well--I feel I should add a little something more.

We put the "Mature Readers" label on the UA line, precisely because it does
have "mature" content, including some fairly extreme violence, sex, and
weirdness that not every parent might like their pre-teens "fantasizing"
with.

Individual stores (and distributors) make their own decisions as to whether
and how to carry products.  I make a point of doing my best to inform them
about content that might be objectionable under personal or local standards.
Definitions of "obscenity," for example, vary from one town to the next all
across the USA; and retailers each have their finger on the pulse of the
sensibilities of their customer base.  A retailer in Georgia, for example,
has decided not to display the UA poster with the cover art of PoMoMa; is
that censorship, or just a reasonable effort not to frighten away the
Pokemoms who frequent his store?  I think the latter.  I'm all in favor of
store owners making the decisions they see fit to support the atmosphere
that they want to make their customers comfortable...and coming back to
spend more.  If that means not putting up a poster, or holding a book behind
the counter and only selling it to adults, that's OK with me.

There isn't any consistency, really, in how products are treated, even
within the same retail store, because there are limits to how much a
retailer can know about all the thousands of products he carries.  One
distributor that I thought might find PoMoMa objectionable felt in fact that
the illustrations were not a problem, for example -- and I e-mailed him the
images ahead of release so that he was fully informed, and he could alert
stores that might see a problem with it.  The complaints that publishers get
are typically not the content itself, but the lack of information that
sometimes occurs -- a retailer doesn't realize what's in a book until a
livid parent comes in asking why their 13-year-old was sold something he/she
finds offensive.  Then the damage to their business is already done.

------------------------------------------------------
John Nephew    voice (651) 638-0077 fax (651) 638-0084
President, Atlas Games             www.atlas-games.com


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