my idiotic little warning-label rant

[hth]

Warning labels aren't one of the things I get all exercised about, every six months when they become an Issue again in fandom. There are certain subjects I'm totally willing to revisit over and over again for the rest of my life, but that isn't really one of them, basically because it's become blindingly obvious to me that no solution will ever make everyone happy, and such is life.

However, just this one time, I want to say this.

As much as you, gentle reader, may hate accidentally reading a story that upsets or disturbs you in some way -- and I get that you hate it, I hear that -- that is exactly how much I hate being told before I even start the damn story that everything turns out all right in the end. I fucking *hate* that, because if the story is even remotely well-crafted, there was a perfectly good chance that I would undergo some amount of suspense and excitement while reading it, but not anymore. I hate it when people do it in the notes to their own stories, I hate it when people do it in recs, and I *really* hate it when people do it to my stories. I also don't want to be told that everything *doesn't* turn out all right in the end -- if I get warned for character death, I goddamn well want it to happen in the first three paragraphs, otherwise I consider it a spoiler.

Isn't it weird how fandom gets so freaky intense about protecting people from spoilers in canon (don't say it was a funny one! Don't say Ladon's going to be in it! Warn people if your story gives away the color of Rodney's cat as revealed last week!), and yet is totally blase about giving away the ending of fanfic before anyone has a chance to read it and think, even for a moment, Wow, I wonder how this is going to work out?

You see what I'm saying about the no-win situation? If you don't warn for unpleasantness, you'll piss off all those other people. If you do warn by giving away the ending, you'll piss me off. Warning labels are a fandom dead-end. Everything you do is wrong, so you just have to pick your poison.

I think of labeling and recs and that kind of thing as serving a function similar to movie trailers. I know what kind of stuff I like, and if someone's written that kind of thing, I want to know about it, and I also want to know what I'm probably not going to be into enough to spend my time on it. This is a sketchy proposition at best -- how many movies have you wasted your time on because the trailer looked really awesome, and yet, no? But, for example, take The Departed, which I saw not too long ago. I knew it was a Scorcese flick, and I know not only that I love him, but what kind of stories he's generally drawn to, so that helped. I also saw a bunch of commercials, which told me it was some kind of a gangster movie, which I took to mean it would probably be violent. I read a couple of reviews, wherein I was told that it was kind of a psychological thriller about the parallel lives of a gangster undercover with the cops and a cop undercover with gangster, and that the reviewers in question liked it. This is the kind of thing I want to know. I do not, under any circumstances, want to know the body count. I don't want to know that. I want to be aware that, given the setting, the plot, and the people involved, there could well be one, and then I want to watch the freaking movie. Equivalently, I don't mind vague warnings for "darkness" or "adult content" or whatever; that's fine to know, that helps me know the mood and milieu to expect. But then let me *read the story* to find out if it's the everybody-dies kind of darkness or the wow-close-call! kind.

Anyway. Like I said, I think it's just a decision that everyone who writes or recs has to make, knowing that they're helping some of their potential readers enjoy the story more and causing some of their potential readers to enjoy it less. You just make the call and then get on with your life.

Comments

LJ-cuts are a fanfic writer's best friend

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

Seriously. If you announce a story at a fanfic list, just put the warnings under an LJ-cut. That makes everyone happy.

(Here via metafandom, by the way.)

Like dmarley, I came into the fanfic community when warnings were being placed in 0 posts on lists. In fact, at the first list I joined, members were required to put the warnings in the 0 post under spoiler space. That way, list members could read the rest of the 0 post without having to read the warnings unless they wanted to.

If somebody has a multiple-post story at their LJ or home page, then it's easy enough to create a separate warnings post and (if necessary) link to it from every installment.

Alternatively, if you want to place the warning in the same post, or if have a table of contents where you want to place the warnings, just put them in white type. Then tell your readers to highlight the entire page if they want to read the warnings. (Control-A or Command-A.)

I surveyed folks at various slash lists once about whether they wanted warnings. Half said they did; half said they didn't. The ones who said they didn't stated they were fine with warnings being given as long as they were hidden from view.

Interestingly, a lot of the people who wanted the warning did so because they were using them like the erotica fiction world's story codes: so that they could find the stuff they liked. They wanted a death warning because they liked deathfic; they wanted a BDSM warning because they liked BDSMfic.

Because of this, I know that there are readers reading my warnings in order to find what they like, not because they necessarily like spoilers. I also have the problem that my warnings make my stories sound a lot more depressing than they actually are. And I've dealt with the problem that dsudis dealt with - namely, in about twenty-five percent of my stories, it looks as though somebody's going to die who actually doesn't.

So I've come up with a boilerplate warning (labelled as such) that warns but doesn't provide spoilers:

"I write hurt/comfort, angstfic, and darkfic. Many of my stories deal with the topic of abuse, death, or voluntary submission. All of my stories feature love or respect, though sometimes it takes a while to get there."

That covers the difficult topics which are most likely to arise in my stories: death, rape, physical abuse, severe violence, and power dynamics. For anything else, I add an extra warning.

Oh, by the way, I warn for religious references. I found when I was a reporter that the three topics most likely to tick people off are the traditional ones: sex, politics, and religion.

Re: LJ-cuts are a fanfic writer's best friend

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Actually, LJ cuts aren't that great, because while they're fine if you're reading a comm or your flist, if you're linked directly to the story, they don't work. And as an author, I kind of hope that people will be linking to my story, you know? So I don't even consider LJ cuts an option.

Re: LJ-cuts are a fanfic writer's best friend

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

"And as an author, I kind of hope that people will be linking to my story, you know?"

One would hope so. :) I was assuming that there would be cases where a comm required warnings, but the author didn't like putting them on the story itself. The stories at my Website don't have warnings; my story announcements at comms do.

If it's a case where you want the warning to be attached in some way to the story, then there's the separate-post or white-space options I mentioned.