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]

That's too cool -- I'd love to do that. *g* That's why I like generic "angst" warnings: it's appropriate both for a story where the focus is, say, wrestling with one's mortality and for one where there's an actual death. The reader knows that only the stout-hearted should go forward, but they don't know any details of the plot.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I was really annoyed recently. I was invited to post a fic of mine on an archive, and it had the usual pull-down menu for warnings, and I chose "dark", then put in the author's notes to scroll to the end for detailed warnings (which was a huge compromise for me, because I don't even like saying that there is any need for a warning, because that in itself is a spoiler to some degree, but I'd had some complaints and decided I didn't want to deal with the wank, so I put warnings at the end) and it was rejected by the moderator. She said if I reposed it with the proper, spoilery warning, it would go through, but I just decided not to archive there, because I'm sorry, but if saying it's dark and there are more detailed warnings if you need them isn't enough, then too bad. I refuse to spoil everyone else for a few whiners.