My two cents about warnings.
Originally posted in someone else's LJ, it has been spellchecked and spiffed up and added to:
Warning: Discusses season 7 Buffy in general terms and plot bits from my own fic Scenes from a Lesser War. (see, spoiler warnings I totally get)
It's all about spoilers for me.
The most fun I've ever had watching a show or a movie was going in unspoiled. And there are story lines in some shows I wish I hadn't known about, for this conversation I'll pick one that we are told we have to warn for (though this one I'm not really arguing about) in fic.
In late Buffy, there was an attempted rape scene. I viewed the entire episode differently because I knew it was there, it changed the entire experience.
My thing is that you don't get people posting in their live journals warnings for an episode (Warnings: Bunnies!) and then put their views/reviews/thoughts under the cut. (thank you liviapenn for stating it way better than I could.)
Okay, so we can all agree that there are ways to warn without worrying too hard about spoiling the people who don't want to be spoiled. It's not too hard, a separate link, a cut tag to the end, etc. (It should be noted that people have to know HOW to cut tag. I'd wager a lot of people don't know you have to end one before you can being another in order to cut directly to specific places in a post.)
My other problem is that it's so incredibly subjective. I mean TRULY subjective. I stare at my headers all the time and scratch my head. I honestly don't KNOW sometimes. In Scenes from a Lesser War I have John fucking some random OFC up against a tree. I did not warn for this because it was intrinsically part of John's emotional journey and oddly, no one really called me on it either. But I wouldn't have bowed to the pressure even if someone had. I felt that doing so would somehow have changed the entire perspective on the piece and since that whole story relied on your perspective and what you knew and didn't know I would have refused. I also would have argued that it wasn't "partner betrayal" or whatever else you might want to call it.
So let's look at this another way.
We're talking about the wrong thing.
Let's go back to the bookstore example.
Professional books don't have warnings, they have genres, they have book jackets. They have pretty covers. They give you a lot of information, they just don't hand it to you on a silver platter.
So instead of talking about warnings and that they need to be there and then watch the threads slowly degenerate into a name calling wank about and long lists of what needs to be warned and what doesn't and what is person dependent and then REWRITING it elsewhere because this person got it OMG SO WRONG and how angst SO DESERVES A WARNING and then have the other side calling them wussies.
We should talk about summaries. We should talk about what constitutes a good one and a bad one. We should talk about the sort of information a summary should impart and how not to make it sound like a bad movie preview.
I think the summaries are the answers to a lot of the problem. Real books have book jackets? Make author put out books jackets. Make them choose 150 words from their fic as the inside cover. Be clear that "plz read, kaithnx!" is not an acceptable summary of a story.
It's actually not a huge amount of work to pick your blurb if you're aware that you will be doing it later. There's plenty of places in the process for you to decide this.
Clarification, I'm not saying this is what SHOULD happen. I'm saying that summaries should actually provide information, that's all and sometimes a small blurb in fic does a lot of this for you.
Because God forbid we as readers have to glean information instead of actually having it handed to us on a silver platter. The horror. Your reading comprehension is NOT MY ISSUE. And I sound horrible and snotty and disgusting for saying it. But it's really not. If I provide between the summary and headers enough information to make an informed decision then I'm not going to feel bad when you wail at me in feedback that OMG YOU WERE SO TRAUMATISED THAT JOHN SLEPT WITH SOMEONE WHO WASN'T HIS TWU WUV.
Caveat: I occasionally suck at the whole summary thing too, but I like to think I'm learning.
And then maybe someone needs to post a few example headers and then teach the readers how to get the information they want. It is NOT solely the author's responsibility if they truly make that effort to put it out there.
Warning: Discusses season 7 Buffy in general terms and plot bits from my own fic Scenes from a Lesser War. (see, spoiler warnings I totally get)
It's all about spoilers for me.
The most fun I've ever had watching a show or a movie was going in unspoiled. And there are story lines in some shows I wish I hadn't known about, for this conversation I'll pick one that we are told we have to warn for (though this one I'm not really arguing about) in fic.
In late Buffy, there was an attempted rape scene. I viewed the entire episode differently because I knew it was there, it changed the entire experience.
My thing is that you don't get people posting in their live journals warnings for an episode (Warnings: Bunnies!) and then put their views/reviews/thoughts under the cut. (thank you liviapenn for stating it way better than I could.)
Okay, so we can all agree that there are ways to warn without worrying too hard about spoiling the people who don't want to be spoiled. It's not too hard, a separate link, a cut tag to the end, etc. (It should be noted that people have to know HOW to cut tag. I'd wager a lot of people don't know you have to end one before you can being another in order to cut directly to specific places in a post.)
My other problem is that it's so incredibly subjective. I mean TRULY subjective. I stare at my headers all the time and scratch my head. I honestly don't KNOW sometimes. In Scenes from a Lesser War I have John fucking some random OFC up against a tree. I did not warn for this because it was intrinsically part of John's emotional journey and oddly, no one really called me on it either. But I wouldn't have bowed to the pressure even if someone had. I felt that doing so would somehow have changed the entire perspective on the piece and since that whole story relied on your perspective and what you knew and didn't know I would have refused. I also would have argued that it wasn't "partner betrayal" or whatever else you might want to call it.
So let's look at this another way.
We're talking about the wrong thing.
Let's go back to the bookstore example.
Professional books don't have warnings, they have genres, they have book jackets. They have pretty covers. They give you a lot of information, they just don't hand it to you on a silver platter.
So instead of talking about warnings and that they need to be there and then watch the threads slowly degenerate into a name calling wank about and long lists of what needs to be warned and what doesn't and what is person dependent and then REWRITING it elsewhere because this person got it OMG SO WRONG and how angst SO DESERVES A WARNING and then have the other side calling them wussies.
We should talk about summaries. We should talk about what constitutes a good one and a bad one. We should talk about the sort of information a summary should impart and how not to make it sound like a bad movie preview.
I think the summaries are the answers to a lot of the problem. Real books have book jackets? Make author put out books jackets. Make them choose 150 words from their fic as the inside cover. Be clear that "plz read, kaithnx!" is not an acceptable summary of a story.
It's actually not a huge amount of work to pick your blurb if you're aware that you will be doing it later. There's plenty of places in the process for you to decide this.
Clarification, I'm not saying this is what SHOULD happen. I'm saying that summaries should actually provide information, that's all and sometimes a small blurb in fic does a lot of this for you.
Because God forbid we as readers have to glean information instead of actually having it handed to us on a silver platter. The horror. Your reading comprehension is NOT MY ISSUE. And I sound horrible and snotty and disgusting for saying it. But it's really not. If I provide between the summary and headers enough information to make an informed decision then I'm not going to feel bad when you wail at me in feedback that OMG YOU WERE SO TRAUMATISED THAT JOHN SLEPT WITH SOMEONE WHO WASN'T HIS TWU WUV.
Caveat: I occasionally suck at the whole summary thing too, but I like to think I'm learning.
And then maybe someone needs to post a few example headers and then teach the readers how to get the information they want. It is NOT solely the author's responsibility if they truly make that effort to put it out there.