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The current controversy over the finalized PG-13 rating of Venom stirred up yet more claims about what is or isn't needed to make a story "work," with some insisting that anything short of unfettered brutality will ruin the movie, even as others hold that stories can be successful without features like extreme violence. As with many polarizing topics, many people on both sides are fallacious and fail to embrace the rational nuance of the matter of entertainment ratings and content.
As for my own preferences, I hope the PG-13 rating is pushed to its absolute boundaries as far as the violence goes. With some stories, there is a great need for things like darkness, brutality, sadness, or sexuality. Not all of these aforementioned things have to do with Venom, but they are all examples of things that some viewers (or gamers) object to. The truth is that sometimes they are needed to convey something very important about a story or fictional world.
In fact, to remove or avoid including something like a thoroughly dark atmosphere in certain stories can actually cripple the narratives. Doing so cheapens the significance of in-universe events or diminishes the parallels between the world of the story and the world of experiential life. Some stories forfeit a great deal of substance when they are edited to minimize brutality, existential honesty, or sexuality. If the director of Venom wants to take the marketed anti-hero theme to its ultimate logical conclusion, the film needs to succeed in making the villain so malevolent and cruel that the conflicted Venom seems like a protagonist by comparison (this is why I initially hoped Carnage would be the villain). A story can only explore certain subjects if it is willing to engage the related concepts directly. The natural themes of a story should determine the content, not vice versa.
There are examples that go beyond the yet-unreleased Venom. For instance, Logan's violence complemented the emotional brutality of the film in a very natural, needed way. The story would not have been as powerful without the violence, because the savagery emphasized the bleakness of the (largely) post-mutant world and directly contributed to the thematic atmosphere. With the character of Wolverine living out his final days in physical and psychological anguish, the weight of the loss and violence from his past needed to be clear, smothering, and relentless. A key way to show that weight was to portray a dying Wolverine forced into vicious circumstances, his regenerative abilities fading.
When it comes to other factors, like sexuality, there is still a place in some stories. As an aside, the simultaneous acceptance of extreme violence and outcry against sexual content is mostly perpetuated by political or theological conservatives desperately clinging to prudery inherited from past generations. The stance contains inherent hypocrisy and the canonization of subjective preferences. But even the overt sexual content in something like Game of Thrones often serves a purpose within the story, both narratively and thematically. Is sexuality a part of human life? Yes. Even asexuals are sexual beings. Is Game of Thrones intended to offer a more controversial, honest take on the multi-faceted nature of human life? Absolutely! Thus, to omit all sexual content would hinder part of the very philosophical intent behind the book series the show is based on.
Of course no story needs to have violence, darkness, or sexual aspects to be made or to attain financial profitability. No story needs to be lighthearted and simple to bring about those ends either. Critics of "mature" media projects routinely fail to acknowledge this. Not every story needs to be full of brightness, and not every story needs to be full of darkness. Some stories only work best when they are distinctly placed in one category or the other. It is a disgrace to entertainment and to the nature of real life to expect or want all stories to be "family friendly," whatever arbitrary standard is appealed to as the baseline for alleged family friendliness.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying lighter films, just as there is nothing wrong with wanting films (or games or books) that are brutal, depressing, or erotic in nature. All of these things--from lighthearted, warm stories to stories of immense bleakness--can communicate truths about life that everyone needs to know. Storytelling allows for people to explore truth and fiction at the same time, and thus a work that has something important to say has every right to include content that some subjectively consider "objectionable." Again, the natural themes of a story need to dictate what kind of content is included, and nothing else, or the thematic heart of the story will be distorted.
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