chose not to warn
Feb. 17th, 2019 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://bit.ly/2BDWDIQ
I almost never use that warning. Chose Not To Warn.
I’ve considered it, though. I’ve had a few experiences where I wrote something, devoted a lot of thought to the tags, pointed out everything I thought could be problematic, and still wound up with a nastygram in my inbox because something triggered someone, something I’d thought was pretty well-explained within the text (drug use, but it was a prescription drug taken as prescribed; noncon, but it was consensual, just one of the characters had a drink to fortify himself before he went for it; underage, but both characters were of legally consenting age in the relevant jurisdiction and I just hadn’t specified enough, I guess?)
There have been a couple where people weren’t mad about it, but let me know that I triggered them severely, because I described something really vivid that happened to be something they’d experienced. But it was so specific– I’d put on a general warning, but short of having summarized the fic in detail there’d be no way to realize– even then, it was a descriptive detail I’d used that gave them a flashback, in one case, and they wouldn’t have known to brace for it, and I certainly wouldn’t have known to warn for it. It’s not possible; some triggers are so idiosyncratic, that if you just tell a vivid story, you’re going to risk setting someone off.
And even if the person wasn’t mad at you, it’s still upsetting. You tried your best, but you still upset someone, and that doesn’t feel good.
I write pretty straightforward stuff; I’m kink-adjacent, but not really very kinky, and my shit is generally pretty vanilla; I go in more for emotional self-torture than anything else, and it’s usually pretty obvious that I’m gonna fall short of the dark side of fic, even in the darkest stuff I publish.
And even I sometimes have trouble tagging my stuff. I’m a person without any triggers, but with some pretty serious squicks, so I get how serious it is, but just enough really to understand that there’s a lot I don’t know.
If I wrote more complex stuff, I’d probably use the CNTW tag. Like, I can’t guarantee that I’m going to get everything tagged correctly. Proceed with caution. I’d prefer a wider audience, so I’m gonna try to use the archive warnings and tag as specifically as I can, but it gets to a point, sometimes, where you’re just sure you’re going to miss something, or you’re just not sure how to tag it.
That’s why the CNTW tag even exists. That, and some people just don’t really understand the warnings system. If you haven’t spent eight years on Tumblr reading the various discourses, if you haven’t had much experience reading up on how fandom specifically handles this shit, if you’ve never been to therapy and you’re not entirely sure what any of that means, how the hell are you going to know how to properly tag your shit?
That’s why that option exists. Some stuff, you can’t warn for. Other stuff, you don’t know how to warn for. CNTW is a big general-purpose warning flag. If you are the sort of person who’s going to be triggered by something, if you’re someone whose entire day could be ruined by an untagged major character death, if you’re someone who’s going to go into a horrible anxiety spiral over something too vivid, then please, for the love of God, take care of yourself, and steer away.
It’s not a “fuck off, we’re too good for your kind here.” It’s a “I’m so sorry, we don’t know how not to hurt you, and we want you to be safe.” Maybe it’s a “we don’t understand you,” or maybe it’s a “we have to take care of ourselves and the way we do that is by creating painfully cathartic content that we know hurts other people but our own compass for that shit is so broken we don’t know how to tag it anymore”, but either way, it is a big, bright, sparkly “this is not a safe space!” neon sign, and it is really important, and it is there on purpose, and it is there so you can take care of yourself.
You can take care of yourself. And that is really the only way to guarantee a safe space: giving you the tools you need to make it safe for you. That’s what all warnings are, what all tags are. But you need to use them. You need to curate your own experience. You need to understand that other people have vastly different requirements from their fictional escapes than you do. You need to arm yourself. You need to empower yourself.
That’s how it works.
(Your picture was not posted)
I almost never use that warning. Chose Not To Warn.
I’ve considered it, though. I’ve had a few experiences where I wrote something, devoted a lot of thought to the tags, pointed out everything I thought could be problematic, and still wound up with a nastygram in my inbox because something triggered someone, something I’d thought was pretty well-explained within the text (drug use, but it was a prescription drug taken as prescribed; noncon, but it was consensual, just one of the characters had a drink to fortify himself before he went for it; underage, but both characters were of legally consenting age in the relevant jurisdiction and I just hadn’t specified enough, I guess?)
There have been a couple where people weren’t mad about it, but let me know that I triggered them severely, because I described something really vivid that happened to be something they’d experienced. But it was so specific– I’d put on a general warning, but short of having summarized the fic in detail there’d be no way to realize– even then, it was a descriptive detail I’d used that gave them a flashback, in one case, and they wouldn’t have known to brace for it, and I certainly wouldn’t have known to warn for it. It’s not possible; some triggers are so idiosyncratic, that if you just tell a vivid story, you’re going to risk setting someone off.
And even if the person wasn’t mad at you, it’s still upsetting. You tried your best, but you still upset someone, and that doesn’t feel good.
I write pretty straightforward stuff; I’m kink-adjacent, but not really very kinky, and my shit is generally pretty vanilla; I go in more for emotional self-torture than anything else, and it’s usually pretty obvious that I’m gonna fall short of the dark side of fic, even in the darkest stuff I publish.
And even I sometimes have trouble tagging my stuff. I’m a person without any triggers, but with some pretty serious squicks, so I get how serious it is, but just enough really to understand that there’s a lot I don’t know.
If I wrote more complex stuff, I’d probably use the CNTW tag. Like, I can’t guarantee that I’m going to get everything tagged correctly. Proceed with caution. I’d prefer a wider audience, so I’m gonna try to use the archive warnings and tag as specifically as I can, but it gets to a point, sometimes, where you’re just sure you’re going to miss something, or you’re just not sure how to tag it.
That’s why the CNTW tag even exists. That, and some people just don’t really understand the warnings system. If you haven’t spent eight years on Tumblr reading the various discourses, if you haven’t had much experience reading up on how fandom specifically handles this shit, if you’ve never been to therapy and you’re not entirely sure what any of that means, how the hell are you going to know how to properly tag your shit?
That’s why that option exists. Some stuff, you can’t warn for. Other stuff, you don’t know how to warn for. CNTW is a big general-purpose warning flag. If you are the sort of person who’s going to be triggered by something, if you’re someone whose entire day could be ruined by an untagged major character death, if you’re someone who’s going to go into a horrible anxiety spiral over something too vivid, then please, for the love of God, take care of yourself, and steer away.
It’s not a “fuck off, we’re too good for your kind here.” It’s a “I’m so sorry, we don’t know how not to hurt you, and we want you to be safe.” Maybe it’s a “we don’t understand you,” or maybe it’s a “we have to take care of ourselves and the way we do that is by creating painfully cathartic content that we know hurts other people but our own compass for that shit is so broken we don’t know how to tag it anymore”, but either way, it is a big, bright, sparkly “this is not a safe space!” neon sign, and it is really important, and it is there on purpose, and it is there so you can take care of yourself.
You can take care of yourself. And that is really the only way to guarantee a safe space: giving you the tools you need to make it safe for you. That’s what all warnings are, what all tags are. But you need to use them. You need to curate your own experience. You need to understand that other people have vastly different requirements from their fictional escapes than you do. You need to arm yourself. You need to empower yourself.
That’s how it works.
(Your picture was not posted)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-17 10:15 pm (UTC)Also, sometimes you do need something to land hard, and warning for it would make it not work. In that case I think it's fair to give a general "if reading a thing is going to fuck up your day, consider staying away from this one."
no subject
Date: 2019-02-17 11:27 pm (UTC)We can't put this all on the author and it is our responsibility to monitor out own internet usage. If things like violence or sex or drug use freak you out, just go read things in the gen rating. AO3 gives readers the power to do that and I feel that if an author is doing a decent job tagging, then it's on me.
I very rarely read fics that are Choose Not to Warn because I respect that the author chooses to do that and I choose not to read that. I also read less if the author put no or few tags because it doesn't allow me to make the judgement call on whether I can read that fic or not. So I just don't read it! That's it! I move on!
idek, I'm sorry people are nasty about it.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-18 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-18 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-18 03:21 am (UTC)there are some authors who i can immediately tell are not... copacetic to my worldview. like, i can just tell, they don't value things i do, i can't trust them.
there are other authors i love, but i know that if they've warned for a thing, i don't want to read it. so i don't. the tags are great for that-- both built-in ones, and the whisperspace tags.
it's hard. i don't have triggers, but i do have squicks that really set me off-- i mean, they can ruin a whole day, they can keep coming back as intrusive thoughts for weeks if it's bad. and they're not things people warn for. well, some are, and sometimes i read it anyway, and i'm like, what did i expect.
there's no easy answer to it. but beating people up for using the Choose Not To Warn tag for its intended purpose is not going to help anyone at all in any way, which is what this entry was in response to.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-18 01:13 pm (UTC)Sometimes I do feel that some people expect the world to make all the decisions for them so they can blame everything on other people. I am very here for creating safe spaces, don't get me wrong. But there will always be spaces that are decidedly not safe. And fanfiction NEEDS those very much.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-22 04:12 am (UTC)Personally speaking I come at this from the position someone who has a pretty cast-iron stomach for fictional violence (it can be written in ways that I find tasteless, of course, but it doesn’t squick me in and of itself), and yet also has a couple of Hard Nope Buttons which are both idiosyncratic and incredibly context-dependent - and thus essentially impossible to warn for. I would never expect anyone to warn for them. (I probably wouldn’t heed the warnings even if they did, because I find fiction that pokes at the bruise cathartic as long as it doesn’t cross the Too Much line, and it’s tricky to predict exactly where that line is going to fall in any given story.) So on a purely personal level, I find content warnings mostly useless when it comes to avoiding the sorts of things that can be day-ruining to read about.
It’s hard to say that without giving the impression that I’m pushing back against the concept of content warnings as a whole, though. Which I have no desire to do! In the most basic sense I think they’re a very simple and useful way for folks to watch out for each other. But as soon as you move beyond the basics, I think the concept has some glaring self-evident limitations - and what’s more, I think failing to acknowledge those limitations does far more harm than good. Because as you say, fiction functions via vivid and specific sensory details…just like triggers often function via vivid and specific sensory details. As you say, many (perhaps the majority) of triggers are idiosyncratic enough that it’s impossible to warn for them all. And when people go in expecting that everything will be warned for, they’re far more likely to get blindsided, and I think that can hurt worse than having no warnings in the first place.
Again - for a lot of people and a lot of stories I think the big standard-issue content warnings function really well, and I’m super glad they exist. I want them to continue existing. But I’d like to see a little more acknowledgment of the limitations of content warnings, because a good idea can be worth keeping without being foolproof, and imo acknowledging those limitations (which you’ve done beautifully here) actually makes the concept work better.