User blog comment:JERealize/An Updating of the Ratings Template/@comment-1874924-20130307043251

The only situation where I see this being an issue is if somebody wants to put R-rated chapters in an otherwise PG-13 story. Stories that are PG or less aren't required to display ratings at all.

Current policy allows rating chapters separately, but it's definitely not something we encourage because we don't want to encourage attempts to game the system. In any case, there's no reason to rate every chapter; give the story an overall rating and note exception chapters as needed.

In determining whether it's feasible to rate chapters individually, the real issue isn't chapter length, it's how well the rest of the story stands without the higher-rated chapters. For example, if a story is PG-13 overall, but the R-rated chapters contain material that's important to understanding the rest of the story, then readers who have gotten into the story expecting PG-13 are effectively being coerced into reading stuff at a rating level that they might otherwise have avoided. The TV analogy doesn't really work because, even with arc-driven series like TD, story chapters generally don't stand alone to the degree that TV episodes do.

My take on this is that if only one or two chapters would need a higher rating, then it's probably OK to rate those chapters individually; but if there's more than that, then the overall story must carry the higher rating. I would also say that a story's overall rating cannot be lower than the ratings of its first couple of chapters.

P.S. to JER: I was preparing a response on your talk page, but I saw the blog so I figured I'd post it here instead.