23 Comments

1. Act says:

   July 24, 2017 at 9:26 am

   Unless it’s a major spoiler, you should list specific triggers.

   This is an interesting problem inherent to web fiction, isn’t it?

   Generally my feeling is that there’s no reasonable expectation of trigger warnings in fiction, whether it’s a novel or a video game, and part of it is definitely reason the author cites — they can be huge spoilers. The onus in these cases, IMO, is on the reader to do their research if they have concerns, and rely on reviewers to flag content, not the author.

   But the casual, episodic nature of webfic means that it’s expected that the author be consistently communicating anyway, and it’s very easy to add a note at the chapters that start the tricky content, at a point where it doesn’t have a huge effect spoiler-wise and there’s no risk to breaking immersion since it’s serial anyway. The author still has to make some judgement calls, but it’s a safer medium in general. That said, I think it’s still a valid decision to not want to break the flow of the story, especially if it’s not by an author who does communicate in between chapters.

   I think I’m on the author’s side here, that a general ‘disturbing content warning’ is a reasonable compromise between wanting to give people a heads-up and not wanting to give anything away. It becomes less reasonable the more involved the author is with readers in between updates, but I’m too lazy to look up that context here.

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   1. GoldenFalls says:

      July 24, 2017 at 12:54 pm

      I think AO3 makes it easier to do unspoilery trigger warnings because you can put them in the end note at the bottom of the chapter and have the top note say “warnings in the end note.” Then people can just click down if they feel they need to be aware of warnings and nobody else gets spoiled for what’s in the chapter.

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      1. CrazyEd says:

         July 25, 2017 at 3:37 am

         They’re not always used, and they don’t cover all triggers possible, but AO3 does have about a half-dozen trigger warning type tags, that an author can flag a work with, and have them appear in bold at the front of the tag list. I know rape and graphic depictions of violence are two of them.

         But, then again, so is “major character death”, so…

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         1. Keltena says:

            July 25, 2017 at 1:46 pm

            The other nice thing about AO3’s standardized archive warnings is that they give you two built-in options for using them: tag your work with whichever ones it contains (or “No Archive Warnings Apply” if applicable), or tag it “Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings”, in which case the reader can consider that to be a blanket warning that it might contain any of those four standard warnings without the author having to warn for them if they don’t want to. That plus the option to use freeform tags or author’s notes for additional warnings/end notes for spoilery warnings makes it pretty easy to warn or not warn however you want without sending mixed messages about which you’re doing.

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            1. Keleri says:

               July 25, 2017 at 9:42 pm

               Yeah, Choose Not To Warn is a useful and non-spoilery “Here Be Dragons”.

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            2. Act says:

               July 25, 2017 at 10:15 pm

               That’s a good system.

               I imagine is also keeps it both easy to find and out of the way, as opposed to FFN’s c. 1980 layout which requires you to detail warnings in any of several obvious, obstructive spots, as opposed to in a dedicated location where it flows nicely with the design of the fic itself.

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               1. CrazyEd says:

                  July 26, 2017 at 12:47 am

                  Honestly, the primary reason I decided to make an AO3 account for some inexplicable reason, and not a FFN account for some inexplicable reason, was that AO3’s site design wasn’t older than the bible.

                  It’d take a lot longer for me to filter out all the terrible A Song OF Ice And Fire fanfiction if I couldn’t just skim the tags for “Jon Snow/Sansa Stark” and “Alternate Universe- Modern Setting”.

                  Too bad that’s practically the only thing that site has over FFN, it seems.

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      2. Farla says:

         July 26, 2017 at 8:58 am

         I completely disagree – you could do that, and that’d work (with the risk of accidentally reading the end of the fic), but it means working against AOOOOOOO’s structure, which is completely backward in both the spoilers and triggers sense. It strongly encourages you to put that (and everything else) in the tags, which it then shoved in your face and nearly impossible to skip, and requires you to publicly categorize it according to certain types of warning – if you want to warn without any spoilers and your fic hits any of the standard ones, you have to pick that you’re choosing not to warn, then tell people that you are, in fact, willing to warn but not by using the standard system everyone else is using. 

         The thing is, people should almost never need to see trigger warnings in any archive with filtering capability, which AOOOOOOOO supposedly is. Either something is a trigger of yours, in which case fics containing it should be automatically removed from any search you do, or it isn’t, and you don’t need to know. (It’d also deal with the fact if something’s upset enough to be triggering, even seeing a bunch of summaries can be an issue.) And the warnings-double-as-advertisement argument, while valid, misses that there’s a difference between deliberately searching for X and wanting to always know if a story contains X. This is especially bad in combination with the rest of the spoilery garbage tags, because when you have twenty pieces of information about what the story involves, you can probably put them together even if none of them would’ve spoiled things on their own.

         (LJ-fic’s system of hiding content warnings with black boxes at the top of the fic is probably the second best option behind actual filtering, so naturally you can only do so on AOOOOOOOOOO by writing a pile of code yourself and it doesn’t even work reliably.)

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   2. illhousen says:

      July 24, 2017 at 6:21 pm

      I feel like a good solution to the issue of spoilery trigger warnings would be to create a panel for them that is hidden by default but can be viewed with a click of a button (or, for published works, have a page dedicated to them at the back of the book). There still would be an issue of having concerns about some matter, looking up warnings to see if it applies here and being spoiled about an entirely different matter that doesn’t concern you, but you run the same risk doing research on the work and reading reviews.

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      1. CrazyEd says:

         July 25, 2017 at 8:47 am

         This might just be my ignorance in the nature of spoilers (as I am pretty much immune to them), but… how exactly would someone be spoiled by a page like that? I feel like I’m missing something that should be obvious from context from the reading of this.

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         1. illhousen says:

            July 25, 2017 at 10:13 am

            It depends heavily on context. In a lot of works, trigger warnings are not really an issue any more than a summary. In others, however, it could be that the outcome is not clear from the start, but a tw would make it clear.

            Like, if you have a character struggling with severe depression, and a trigger warning reads “suicide,” well, now you know how their story would end, which was not necessary obvious otherwise.

            Then there are works that subvert readers’ expectations, starting as one genre and gradually morphing into another (like, say, PMMM) where trigger warnings would give the twist away.

            Then there are works where trigger warnings are not necessary spoilery, but a shrewd reader would be able to deduce that “cannibalism” + setup = main character eating their life interest to survive at some point.

            It’s all rather case-by-case stuff, though.

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            1. CrazyEd says:

               July 26, 2017 at 12:38 am

               Hm, I guess that makes sense, to an extent. But in the first example, a suicide trigger warning doesn’t exactly mean that the character commits suicide. It could just mean that the character considers it. It’d still merit a suicide trigger warning, but the trigger warning’s presence doesn’t say whether or not the character decides to actually go through with it. The same goes with the cannibalism example.

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               1. illhousen says:

                  July 26, 2017 at 9:45 am

                  Some people use “depiction of suicide” and “discussion of suicide” as separate warnings, actually, and it’s those specific warnings that are the most spoilery.

                  As for the last example, that’s the point: the warning by itself isn’t necessary spoilery, but someone who reads a lot of stuff in the genre and knows how it functions would be able to predict the plot based on limited information.

                  The bottom line here is that it’s not hard to put warnings in some kind of panel (forum format generally allows for spoiler blocks, for example), so there isn’t any particular reason not to do it.

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               2. CrazyEd says:

                  July 28, 2017 at 2:41 am

                  Some people use “depiction of suicide” and “discussion of suicide” as separate warnings, actually

                  Okay, I could see how that would be a spoiler, but it also seems a tad overly specific. Are there really people who can read an entire book about someone considering suicide, but if they actually go through with it, only then are they triggered? Is there a reason “suicide” doesn’t suffice as a trigger warning for both of those things?

                  it’s not hard to put warnings in some kind of panel, […] so there isn’t any particular reason not to do it.

                  If such a panel exists, sure. But AOO doesn’t have such a panel, to my knowledge.

                  But, even if there was such a panel, I would still have a problem using it. I don’t mean that to say I would dislike using it or refuse to use it on some sort of principle or something, but I would just… have a very hard time actually using it to tag my works. I have about as much personal experience being triggered by problematic material as I do having stories spoiled by spoilers. How am I to know what might be triggering in my work if it’s not blatantly obvious?

                  Of course, if I write a gruesomely graphic murder or rape, that’d be an obvious trigger warning. But I don’t write that kind of stuff. Unless there’s some kind of massive checkbox list of all possible trigger warnings (like what AOO has for its current bold warning categories) that I could scroll down and think “hm, could this at all describe anything in this work?”, it’s almost certain that whatever triggering material I’ve written is such a low-key trigger that the only way I’d think “oh, this could trigger someone” is if someone told me they were triggered by it.

                  So, even then, it’s not a perfect system. It’s better than absolutely nothing, of course, but for the first people who read it, it might as well be nothing. What would you suggest I do in that situation? Should I just rely on the first wave of readers to tell me what I missed, and add the appropriate tags after the fact? Is there any other better solution to that?

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               3. Act says:

                  July 28, 2017 at 11:07 am

                  Are there really people who can read an entire book about someone considering suicide, but if they actually go through with it, only then are they triggered?

                  Yup, I’m one of them. Though I think a general ‘suicide’ warning is perfectly fine. Life is risk. 

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               4. Hinebras says:

                  July 28, 2017 at 12:16 pm

                  I disagree. When I see a tag I automatically assume that that is going to happen to the prota. Or when I’m reading the story, I keep wondering who will commit suicide, at the minimum clues of someone depressed or opressed or acting overly happy, I call suicide.

                  I don’t read a lot, but those kind of trigger warnings do ruin surprises.

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               5. CrazyEd says:

                  July 29, 2017 at 3:41 am

                  Yep, I’m one of them.

                  Huh, okay. I legitimately didn’t expect people like that to exist. I’m kinda at a loss for words now. There are so many questions I want to ask, and each one is (probably) more insensitive than the last.

                  Life is risk.

                  I think this is why I just don’t comprehend trigger warnings from a personal perspective. I can’t imagine having a story “spoiled” by knowing what’s going to happen later in the plot, let alone what it must feel like to be so upset by reading something that you need a warning to tell you not to read it before you even start. If I read something, and it gets to something I don’t want to read, I just stop reading and that’s the end of it. 

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               6. Act says:

                  July 30, 2017 at 4:14 pm

                  There are so many questions I want to ask, and each one is (probably) more insensitive than the last.

                  I can try my best to answer, but a lot of it boils down to ‘brains are weird.’

                  let alone what it must feel like to be so upset by reading something that you need a warning to tell you not to read it before you even start. 

                  Well, it’s not a questions of ‘getting upset.’ It’s that conjuring up images and ideas related to severe psychological episodes can actually cause your brain to enact those psychological episodes (this is an effect that in benign forms is known as ‘priming’ and helps us think on our feet). So depictions of people offing themselves, for me, has a high potential to trigger a suicidial episode; depictions of people using eating disorder behaviors can trigger a strong desire to use eating disorder behaviors; etc. I’d… rather not have to deal with sudden, severe onset of those things, so it’s generally in my best personal interest to avoid media that depict them.

                  Trigger warnings get tricky because they can literally be anything. General warnings (rape, suicide, ED, graphic violence/abuse) can have a myriad  of subtle manifestations, such that, say, purging behavior but not binging behavior could be an ED trigger. And then beyond that, there’s the fact that triggers are, in their basic form, strong associations, and as such can take the form of anything your brain has decided to associate with a traumatic psychological episode.

                  That’s why I think there’s no reasonable expectation of triggers. It’s very nice of people to warn for the common, general ones — seriously, it’s considerate and I always appreciate it — but you could spend a lifetime cataloging them all (indeed, psychoneurologists do), and there’s absolutely no way to account for, say, the fact that I have a disproportionately violent psychological reaction to dead/injured dogs stemming from my brain’s association of my dog with psychological safety. I would and could never expect anyone to warn from that.

                  My responsibility as an adult human is to look out for myself, avoid media that seems like it could have that trigger, and bail on stuff that looks like it might (or, alternatively, push through and deal with the consequences). 

                  Part of healing from any illness is learning how to return to normal, independent functioning. For mentall illness, learning how to modulate your exposure to your own triggers and utilize your own resources to do so is part of that. I routinely ask my husband to screen things for me and read reviews on sites that take care to use common warnings (I also highly rec doesthedogdie.com!).* But I would never expect an author to be responsible for comprehensive trigger tagging, because it’s incredibly unreasonable to ask given the breadth of triggers, and beyond that, they’re not anyone’s doctor or caretaker. Also, sometimes people just forget.

                  *I would argue that reviewers have more an obligation than authors do, actually, since it’s a given they’ll discuss content and strong reactions.

                   

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               7. CrazyEd says:

                  July 31, 2017 at 3:19 am

                  Wow, this is a lot. I wasn’t expecting this. Um, let’s see here…

                  Well, it’s not a questions of ‘getting upset.’

                  When I used “upset”, I was thinking about when people have more minor responses to triggers. Like… getting anxious over something versus a full blown panic attack. I think I’ve mentioned this once before, but I have OCD (like, actual OCD, and not just “oh, I’d rather things be at right angles” OCD), so when I think of responses to mental illness, I tend to think of it in terms of anxiety spectrum disorders.

                  There are some things I can’t read about without getting anxious and wanting to check things because what if everything’s gone horribly wrong but it generally abates in due time if I just stop reading the thing that’s getting me anxious (especially now that I’m on medication for it), so I don’t personally really need trigger warnings because of it. And, in the specific case of OCD, immersion therapy is one of the major ways to try and break through it. If I didn’t read something just because it made me anxious, well then, that’s just one more thing I can’t do because of OCD. And there’s a lot of stuff that I can’t do because of my OCD already.

                  I think this might actually explain why, from my perspective, discussion of suicide and depiction of suicide would trigger the same response but why that’s not the case for you. Which was actually the first of my insensitive questions. Though, even if it isn’t the reason why exactly, I think it’s close enough a parallel that I understand now. So I’m going to consider that question answered.

                  Come to think of it, this whole thing is a discussion of… well, a discussion of the discussion of suicide, isn’t it? There have been times (mostly in the very beginning where I knew I had A Thing but not OCD) where I’ve gone “urgh, talking about this is just making me focus on it and work myself up, so I’m going to change the subject”. Yeah, I definitely think I get the difference now.

                  Trigger warnings get tricky because they could be literally anything.

                  This, I know all too well. Absolutely none of the things that make me anxious are things I would ever expect to be tagged as trigger warnings. For 99.999% of the population, they’re not even a touchy topic, let alone triggering. It’d be entirely unreasonable to want people to tag things that make me anxious.

                  purging behaviour but not binging behaviour could be an ED trigger

                  If I wrote something with either of these behaviours, I’d probably just be safe and pick the most blanketing trigger warning, which would be “eating disorders”. The people who purge might miss out on reading my story about someone who binges, but I’d rather err on the side of caution. That’s what trigger warnings are for in the first place, aren’t they? Cautioning.

                  I would and could never expect anyone to warn from that.

                  Yeah, this is exactly what I feel with my anxiety-generators, though to an even more extreme degree. I can see why dead and injured dogs would upset you on a logical level, even if it doesn’t trigger the same traumatic response in me (though, obviously, I prefer my dogs alive and uninjured), but I wouldn’t even expect you to understand why half the stuff that makes me anxious does even if I explained it to you. They’re probably things you do dozens of times a day without even realizing it. Hell, you’ve probably pet your dog today. I honestly don’t think I could do that without triggering my OCD.

                  Oooh, actually, I think that’s when I mentioned it. I said something once about how Lillie, in the Pokemon Sun and Moon anime, can’t handle touching Pokemon. I could totally relate with that type of anxiety. Her narrative arc, and Mallow’s attempts to help her with it, are 90% of my enjoyment of that anime.

                  learning how to modulate your exposure to your own triggers and utilize your own resources to do that

                  This is actually why I don’t like spoiler warnings. I totally get using (common) trigger warnings (like suicide, rape, or eating disorders) because I’m not a dick, but when someone yells “SPOILERS” at the first hint of talking about something they haven’t personally experienced, I just can’t. And yet, some people treat spoilers with the same seriousness that people treat suicide and ED trigger warnings.

                  But then again, I’ve seen some very unreasonably prickly people when it comes to spoilers. I have literally had someone yell at me about spoiling an episode of an anime for them… about thirty episodes before the episode they were on. As, an episode they had already seen. Months ago. And on top of that? The “spoiler” was something like “the good guys win with the power of friendship”. He was watching an anime adaptation of a long-running shounen battle manga.

                  People seem willing to declare something is a spoiler even if they don’t know if it’s a spoiler or not. Even when I, as someone who has seen the part it could possibly be spoiling, knows it’s not a spoiler. So, no dude, telling you the good guy wins with the power of friendship is not a spoiler when you’re 75 episodes into an anime and literally every fight in those 75 episodes has involved the good guys winning with the power of friendship.

                  That experience has lead me to a hobby of describing things in ways that, while technically totally accurate, are not at all representitive of the story. Like, as a random example, “Game of Thrones is the story of why you shouldn’t fuck your sister”.

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2. CrazyEd says:

   July 24, 2017 at 10:34 am

   I’m not sure what’s more impressive: Your ability to read all these pokescrewing fics without flinching or your ability to read these longwinded explanations as to why it’s not weird to want to screw pokemon. Either way, I am concerned for you.

   …

   Okay no, having actually managed to read through that longwinded explanation myself, that was definitely weirder than his wholesome romance with a three foot tall fox-person.

   I don’t know why I am surprised, but I am.

   … Dude. Having not played a Pokemon game at length since LeafGreen, having never seen a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game, and having no greater contact with the Pokemon fandom in my entire life than the few months I have been commenting on this blog… I am totally and completely unsurprised by this response, and am completely clueless as to how you can be.

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   1. Mini-Farla says:

      July 24, 2017 at 10:43 am

      Your ability to read all these pokescrewing fics without flinching

      You give me far too much credit. I don’t read them thoroughly.

      I am totally and completely unsurprised by this response, and am completely clueless as to how you can be.

      Well, PMD is a blind spot of mine since I’m so unfamiliar with it. Fandom had a history of gendering the legendaries long before PMD, so I thought it was just an extension of our desire for gendered pronouns rather than stemming from a specific source.

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      1. CrazyEd says:

         July 24, 2017 at 10:44 am

         You click them. That’s more than I could bring myself to do if I was you.

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      2. Hinebras says:

         July 27, 2017 at 1:49 pm

         St. Elmo’s Fire, reading shitty fetish niche fics so you don’t have to.

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