Not safe for work

Not Safe For Work (often abbreviated to NSFW) is a category used to describe certain types of content that may be considered inappropriate for the workplace. Most commonly, this refers to sexual content, but it may also include violence, profanity, nudity, and/or potentially triggering content.

Not Safe For Life

Not Safe For Life, or NSFL, is a more extreme version of NSFW, indicating that content is potentially severely triggering or graphic. This might include footage of a person's death or a graphic medical procedure.

Shock Content

Shock content is often composed of graphically violent, racist, sexist, vulgar, profane, or otherwise some other provocative subject matters. The intent of shock content is to offend or provoke a negative reaction. Shock content is considered NSFW.

Shock Scenes

Shock scenes are scenes that intentionally disrupt the tone or mood of a visual novel using offensive or extreme content. Shock scenes are common in mystery and horror visual novels, or visual novels that feature genre shifts. A visual novel having a shock scene, or several shock scenes, does not automatically make it a shock visual novel.

Shock Advertising

Shock advertising is advertisement efforts that are intentionally offensive or upsetting to groups of individuals in order to incite outrage.

The general strategy behind Shock Advertising is to provoke anti-fans of a given work or studio to share the offending message with their network to share their upset, which can result in it being rebroadcast to individuals who either agree with the advertisement, or who have been made curious by the nature of the advertisement or the product.

Shock Visual Novels

Visual Novels whose entire theme or narrative plot is centered around repeated exhibitions of intentionally upsetting content are Shock Visual Novels. Such visual novels are made either as a joke, or with the express purpose of generating shock value. Despite their inherently offensive nature, shock visual novels sometimes find financial success through building outrage, and using the outrage and sharing of onlookers to find, develop, and build a paying audience.