How much realism do I put into a war simulation story for Young Adults?
I am writing an action/thriller light novel for YA audience.
The story involves characters "playing" in a war-simulation game in an extremely realistic and full immersive Virtual Reality. By "full immersive" I mean that the person who plays this simulation feels like they are experiencing it. Note that this includes themes like death, fatal wounds, pain and such.
My concept may be seen as similar to Sword Art Online (SAO-Wikipedia page), where the protagonist gets drawn into a virtual reality, immersive fantasy rpg. In my case, I need it to be a bit more... adult and graphic. It would be a first-person shooter VR war game (see, for reference, Escape from Tarkov).
Now, because I'm aiming for an older teen audience (16+), how much detail (both gore and psychological impact) can I put into this light novel before it crosses the line between thriller and horror?
This question is similar, but it deals with how much a young audience can handle at all, whereas I'm trying to find the line between thriller and horror.
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Hell, the Animorphs series could get very frank at times with the themes of war and the moral implications of a guerilla war on children... There was a point in my reading where the ploy of having one of the heroes lose a limb (in an animal morph) was kind of something the series had desensitized me too. In the 13th Book, they have an alien essentially scalp himself to prove a point that he was not under control of the brain slug antagonists of the series... and it does get worse. And this was a series for an intended audience of late elementry school to early middle school aged kids.
The dirty little secret about YA novels is you can get away with a lot of graphic violence depictions to a much younger audience than TV or Movies or Video games and this is doubly so for books targeted to a male audience. This is because of two factors: YA has an over-surplus of novels with a female audience in mind compared to the novels for a male audience, and no matter what gender is reading, most parents are so happy to see the kids reading that they don't bother to check if they are reading a kosher amount of violence.
Additionally, when writing novels with no visual elements, people will visiualize the story differently. A kid who enjoys violence and gore will probably paint his mental picture red with blood, where as a kid with a lesser appreciation can self censor. Also, Kids are really capable of handling complex situations that adults didn't think they could.
For example, I personally remember watching an episode of "Batman Beyond" in middle school that dealt with a fairly obvious Steroid metaphor. Now, as a kid, I used to privately praise the episode for this one scene where the heroes' mother finds the drug paraphernalia in his school bag and there is a heated argument and I distinctly recall the mom expressly using the word "Drugs" during this scene, which most cartoons would dance around. When I went off to college, I binged watched the show out of a sense of nostalgia and to my great surprise, the word "Drugs" was never used in that scene (instead the ridiculous name "Slappers" was the term for the drug... it was a nicotine patch like delivery system). That was something I had added because, yeah, it was drugs... that's what the episode was discussing without saying the "D-Word". And I checked because the series was censored when parents got wind of some things that were much darker but that episode wasn't censored. And with that said, they did show rather unabashed results of prolonged drug use and what is effectively an on screen OD. All of which I had remembered from the time of viewing and found my adult self rather taken aback by the boldness of the episode to be so direct and so subtle about the topic.
One fun thing you should do (since you clearly like Japanese Media) is watch a few episodes of Super Sentai and it's cross-Pacific American Counter-part and prepared for a culture shock. Most Americans would balk at some of the shows more serious episodes for being that dark. But the funny thing is, the Japanese viewer will watch U.S. Power Rangers and be equally horrified (Japan gets away with the serious elements by very zany humor... it's usually a live action cartoon when they want to be funny, and this offsets the humor. The American version largely avoids the mood whiplash and the lack of the more wacky humor leaves the Japanese asking the same "This is meant for children?" response to Power Rangers that Americans have to Super Sentai).
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At 16, the books our school recommended included 1984 and All Quiet on the Western Front. Crime and Punishment was part of the matriculation exam at 17. Also at 17, we were visiting Auschwitz. You don't get more horror than that.
Which is to say, you can put any amount of horror in a novel for 16+ audience. By this point, teenagers are adults enough to understand it.
The only issue I see is, if you go sufficiently far into a realistic description of the horrors of war, and the psychological impact of those horrors on those who experience them first hand, what you're writing is no longer a "light" novel.
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