(no subject)
Jun. 25th, 2009 10:43 amDear fandom,
Warning: I am mostly using this post as a way to get some stuff out of my head so I can stop reading every single thread on this issue and get out of the house. So it may not be all that well thought out. Also I really wish fandom had held off on this debate a bit.
Anyway, here are my thoughts:
1. I think warnings for non-con, self-harm, and abuse should be community standards, just like I think not being a racist asshole should be community standards, and owning your racism when it is pointed out to you should be a community standard. This is because these actions are capable of *hurting people.*
2. I don't think character death warnings should be community standards. Even though I personally do not often enjoy deathfic, and sometimes I get to the end of a story and think "fuck, I wish I had known before I spent three hours reading this fic that it would be a total freakin' downer", I also think that writers are correct when they assert that warning for character death negatively detracts from the impact of their story. There are ways of dealing with this, kind of like spoiler cuts - the practise of adding moderately specific warnings at the *bottom* of a fic and linking to that is an excellent practise - but in the end I accept that sometimes character death is one of those things that can happen to me.
3. I wish people would stop complaining about the warning police. Listen: even if we accept all of these as community standards, no-one is going to be able to come into your journal and force you to warn for these. Headers, including information like pairing and rating, are community standards, but there are several writers out there who don't do them. They are presumably aware of and comfortable with the fact that they lose readers because of this. There are writers out there who don't get beta-read. etc. Now there is a difference between being pissed off by shitty typos and being triggered (OF COURSE) but you can be aware of writers who as standard practise don't use any of this information. Nobody is going to hack their journal to insert warnings ffs.
4. I have seen people talking about survivors accepting personal culpability for their own triggering, but actually I would like to see people accepting personal culpability for triggering people. Someone used a metaphor which I think is good - actually I think it was![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zvi in an anti-warning post - the comparison was acute food allergies. She said, if you have a food allergy, you check the labels, and if you're in a situation like a bake sale where food labels aren't available, you ask someone or you don't eat the food. OK, but see, fannish community standards are kind of like the FDA! Some parts of fandom are clearly supermarkets (e.g. communities, journals where writers have explicit and clear S&P). You know what the rules are and if you don't want to abide by them you can sell your food at a roadside stall. Other parts of fandom are clearly bake sales - users who never use headers, for example. Neither of these areas are problematic. The problem comes when you can't tell where you are. And, OK, when you can't tell if you're in a supermarket or a bake sale it's probably prudent not to read anything, but sometimes it's so easy to think you're in a supermarket - you pick up the product and you check the label and it says "gooey chocolate bar, contains John/Rodney having explicit sex, may contain traces of nuts" and you're like, sweet! and you get it home and it turns out to also have traces of citrus to which you are DEATHLY ALLERGIC.
Now - to stretch this metaphor to its breaking point - we don't necessarily need to turn fandom into a supermarket. We couldn't do that anyway. But what we can do - and what I do not think is a big deal to do - is to at the bare minimum turn it into a place where you can tell if you're at a bake sale or a supermarket. I do think that is an obligation that we have.
Warning: I am mostly using this post as a way to get some stuff out of my head so I can stop reading every single thread on this issue and get out of the house. So it may not be all that well thought out. Also I really wish fandom had held off on this debate a bit.
Anyway, here are my thoughts:
1. I think warnings for non-con, self-harm, and abuse should be community standards, just like I think not being a racist asshole should be community standards, and owning your racism when it is pointed out to you should be a community standard. This is because these actions are capable of *hurting people.*
2. I don't think character death warnings should be community standards. Even though I personally do not often enjoy deathfic, and sometimes I get to the end of a story and think "fuck, I wish I had known before I spent three hours reading this fic that it would be a total freakin' downer", I also think that writers are correct when they assert that warning for character death negatively detracts from the impact of their story. There are ways of dealing with this, kind of like spoiler cuts - the practise of adding moderately specific warnings at the *bottom* of a fic and linking to that is an excellent practise - but in the end I accept that sometimes character death is one of those things that can happen to me.
3. I wish people would stop complaining about the warning police. Listen: even if we accept all of these as community standards, no-one is going to be able to come into your journal and force you to warn for these. Headers, including information like pairing and rating, are community standards, but there are several writers out there who don't do them. They are presumably aware of and comfortable with the fact that they lose readers because of this. There are writers out there who don't get beta-read. etc. Now there is a difference between being pissed off by shitty typos and being triggered (OF COURSE) but you can be aware of writers who as standard practise don't use any of this information. Nobody is going to hack their journal to insert warnings ffs.
4. I have seen people talking about survivors accepting personal culpability for their own triggering, but actually I would like to see people accepting personal culpability for triggering people. Someone used a metaphor which I think is good - actually I think it was
zvi in an anti-warning post - the comparison was acute food allergies. She said, if you have a food allergy, you check the labels, and if you're in a situation like a bake sale where food labels aren't available, you ask someone or you don't eat the food. OK, but see, fannish community standards are kind of like the FDA! Some parts of fandom are clearly supermarkets (e.g. communities, journals where writers have explicit and clear S&P). You know what the rules are and if you don't want to abide by them you can sell your food at a roadside stall. Other parts of fandom are clearly bake sales - users who never use headers, for example. Neither of these areas are problematic. The problem comes when you can't tell where you are. And, OK, when you can't tell if you're in a supermarket or a bake sale it's probably prudent not to read anything, but sometimes it's so easy to think you're in a supermarket - you pick up the product and you check the label and it says "gooey chocolate bar, contains John/Rodney having explicit sex, may contain traces of nuts" and you're like, sweet! and you get it home and it turns out to also have traces of citrus to which you are DEATHLY ALLERGIC. Now - to stretch this metaphor to its breaking point - we don't necessarily need to turn fandom into a supermarket. We couldn't do that anyway. But what we can do - and what I do not think is a big deal to do - is to at the bare minimum turn it into a place where you can tell if you're at a bake sale or a supermarket. I do think that is an obligation that we have.
