How far can you go with profanity and is there a point to having it?

I read a lot of korean/japanese novels, some of which are huge, sometimes approaching GOT in popularity (domestically anyway) that throw around terms like r*tard, but completely avoid conventional swearing.

But from what I've seen, western web novels avoid any terms that could be considered derogatory like the plague but overuse common swear words. Basically every other good story on Scribblehub is marked with excessive profanity, and most if not all of the very mid ones are too.

So, my question is, what do you think is acceptable on this platform (not necessarily rules-wise), and does profanity improve/downgrade a story in any way?

IMO, excessive profanity makes characters who use it seem immature. If everyone is cursing up a storm then it the whole narrative seem immature, like it is a bunch of kids in middle school being cruel to one another.

Swearing happens all the time irl. Not having it would seem unnatural- except that I usually don't notice it's missing.

Include it if you want, leave it out if you don't. It makes no real difference.

Swearing can add character to a character, but I agree with Melchi. Unless you are writing a story with groups of people who swear more. Like if you have a pirate story or something.

slang and curse words are a bit like word spice to any conversation

Unless your writing looks like *********************************************************** for ******************************** using too ************** many **************************************** because of some ************************************************ reason, everything's free game. Some might not like it, some murrican's might think the characters are too polite, but you can't please everyone.

Cursing within the writing itself has no place. If a character is cursing, then it just depends on context. Usually it accentuates extreme circumstances. For instance, a character may curse when they see someone die for the first time. They should not, however, curse after they see their hundredth person die in separate instances.

Cursing lets the author express the character's distress and naivete to a situation.

In smut, sometimes you might decide to make a character curse a lot during, *ahem*, intimate moments. It gets repetitive, but what smut doesn't?

melchi said:

IMO, excessive profanity makes characters who use it seem immature. If everyone is cursing up a storm then it the whole narrative seem immature, like it is a bunch of kids in middle school being cruel to one another.

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TRUE!