akamine_chan: Created by me; please don't take (Default)
akamine_chan ([personal profile] akamine_chan) wrote in [personal profile] kate 2016-01-26 03:52 am (UTC)

I'm the Bandom (but not MCU) BFF [personal profile] glitteryv mentions above, and in general, she's right - I mostly have no real triggers or squicks - and yet...

I got triggered a few years ago by a podfic that had graphic talk of animal harm - and there was no warning for it. If there had been, I would have skipped over the story because I'm not comfortable with animal harm in stories.

I went to leave a comment about the lack of a warning (politely, of course) and someone else had beaten me to it (also politely). The author added a warning, but also remarked that they thought the "talk of genocide - light-hearted, I swear" author's note had covered the animal cruelty parts.

But even before this, I always tried to warn for the most common-ish triggers. I don't usually use "Chooses Not To Warn" - I don't care about spoiling the plot/ending of the story, I mainly don't want people to have to go through what I went through when I was triggered.

It never occurred to me to use that as a way of saying "none of these warning apply."

I'm not the best tagger of my fanworks, in spite of being a tag wrangler at the AO3 for a number of years. I've been wanting to go back and review the tags on my work, make sure that possible triggering content is listed, but I've been putting it off, because it's sort of daunting (I have a lot of fanworks up at the AO3).

At the same time, the warning system isn't as flexible or as useful as it could be.

For instance, I write a lot of fics that take place in a universe where death is not necessarily permanent. So...when a character dies, they often come back. Do I warn for Major Character Death? I know for a fact that that warning will keep people from reading the story. What about consensual sexual contact between two underage characters? Does that warrant the Underage warning?

Just to be on the safe side, I tend to over-warn and then add notes at the beginning to explain.

*hands* No easy answers.

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