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

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

It sort of cements it for me that not everyone takes their own safety into their own hands the way I do, and when they feel that their safety has been breached, the last person they're going to blame is the person they see in the mirror. Hence, my feeling that it's better not to offer them an obvous scapegoat.

I think I see what you're saying, but honestly, I don't feel like I need any kind of protection from people saying or thinking mean things about me. Part of being a writer, I think, is taking your lumps from people who, justifiably or unjustifiably, dislike what you're saying. If I couldn't cope with that, I wouldn't be showing my work to strangers on the internet.

With things like movies or books, we have some ability to research -- but most of us don't, in any great detail. With television, at least if you watch first-run television, you usually have even less control. And yeah, what that means is that you get shocked sometimes, and the deeper your issues run, the more at risk you are. That's a hard truth, but I'm not sure it's one that writers are under some kind of responsibility to fix. In the case of death stories, for example, I wasn't warned, nor did I get a letter of apology, when Law & Order suddenly killed off Claire Kincaid, or when Due South killed Louis Gardino, or when Buffy the Vampire Slayer killed Jenny Calendar -- all shows that, up to that point, had never killed a significant character and that I had no particular reason to expect it from. I wouldn't expect that kind of warning, and if those fictional stories touched off something in viewers' own lives that needed to be addressed, I would assume those viewers addressed it without asking Dick Wolf, Paul Haggis, or Joss Whedon to help out. Hopefully, they also did it without shifting the blame to those writers, but if they do choose to scapegoat in that manner, honestly, so be it, you know? I wouldn't expect TPTB on those shows to change their decisions about how to proceed narratively because someone, somewhere was unhappy about it.

I personally am more likely to warn for sexual violence, because in most stories with that theme, the dramatic heft isn't in *whether* the violence will occur, but in how the characters respond to it. Likewise, if I write a story where the death is the precipitating action and the story is about the fallout, I don't mind "warning" -- I wouldn't consider it a warning, per se, but essentially a summary of the premise. My objection is specifically to warning lables that reveal the end of the story, not all warning labels everywhere. I think you're right, in many circumstances they're helpful all the way around the board. In others, not so much.

Look, personally, I myself have a serious rape squick, and from time to time, that's something I've had to cope with in my entertainment life. I vividly remember seeing Rob Roy in the theater, and having to go outside and sit in the hall to freak out quietly until I could pull myself together for the rest of the movie. I did the same thing with Pulp Fiction, and I damn near had the same freak-out over the "Pegasus" episode of Battlestar Galactica. Such is life, you know? My issues are my issues, and I deal with them, and not everything I encounter in this world makes me feel good; some things make me feel awful, in fact. Other people deal with their issues in their own ways, and if the only way they can deal is to write me an angry e-mail because I wrote something that made them feel awful, then I hope that helps. But I'm not going to be the first or the last person to piss them off in that way -- hell, maybe they saw Rob Roy in the theater, too -- and nobody can expect that every movie producer, novelist, screenwriter, and fangirl is working full-time to protect them from things that make them feel awful. It's just an unfair expectation to put on other people, and I'm not going to let myself be bothered by a small handful of people who would like to put that expectation on me.

[fantasyenabler.livejournal.com]

As long as you're aware that you're opening yourself up that way, that's your right. Personally, I'm not that worried about things like character deaths. I figure they're a part of the dramatic form and anyone who says they're not prepared for that possibility is being far too naive to live in this day and age. I also think that people who want character death warnings are more worried about wasting their time on a story that's going to ultimately disappoint them than actually offend them. Yes, that's annoying, but not actually potentially damaging.

It's things like sexual abuse and violence that causes the problems to my mind, and the fact that the Net is open to so many people who don't fully comprehend its vastness or what they might encounter as much as they do with other more familiar forms of media. They're the ones who hurt themselves and often in retaliation, try to blame it on other people. Thus, I think it's worth keeping in mind that when it comes down to it, fanfic writers don't have a union or a corporation with any sort of stake in their product that can act as intermediary or protective agency. In general, they're just a loosely grouped band of individuals, so any way that one can cover one's own back, I think, isn't necessarily a bad idea.

[duskpeterson.livejournal.com]

I'll read stories without warnings - heck, I'm still getting used to the idea of warnings after five years in fandom - and if another author doesn't want to use warnings, no prob. But I do think warnings are helpful to some readers, not only so that they can avoid their squicks, but also, as I pointed out above, so that they can find what they like.

Another way to do this is through subgenre labels. If I say, "This is a darkfic story," then the reader who knows fandom terminology is going to be very naive indeed if they're surprised that one my characters gets hauled off into captivity at some point. It's like saying, "This is a horror film," or "This is a thriller." People have a general idea of what to expect.

I agree with you that warning labels encourage freedom of speech. In five years of writing gen & slash darkfic, I've never once received a letter from an annoyed reader. I'm sure this is partly because I carefully label my story announcements and my Websites - but do so in such a way that readers who don't like warnings can skip them.

[alias_sqbr]

I'm not so much arguing against you as trying to better understand the situation, since I'm a gen reader and new to fanfic at that.

Anyway.

I can understand complaining if fic isn't labelled at all(*), but if there's a generic "Rated NC17(**) for disturbing content" warning then how can people get up in arms that the content is disturbing in some particular way? I can see the point of generic warnings, since presumably you really could have kids after G rated gen stumbling across it by accident, at least in some settings.

(*)Though books don't get such ratings. For example, when I was 12 asked my mum for "something long to read while I'm sick" and got possibly the most pornographic book I've ever read (though that may be a trick of memory).
(**)Or whatever. The equivalent rating here is called "R" which is probably why I never hit anything remotely disturbing. I get the feeling the american PG is much stricter than the australian.