Ratings, Warnings, Thoughtsings
I've just updated the SWG's "Ratings & Warnings" document and, perhaps more importantly, posted to the SWG's social media about it, which will mean a few days of white knuckles whenever I open my inbox because no matter how many years we've gone around about this, it still triggers the fuck out of people. Having dealt with* ratings and warnings for sixteen years now as the SWG's owner, I have thoughts on them.
* This word chosen intentionally.
The rest goes below the cut because ratings/warnings themselves set people off, and I may well mention the kinds of things people warn for, so I'm warning now that those warnings may be under discussion of warnings that you will find below the cut.
I should get out of the way that, like most people, I have my own strong preferences about warnings. I was going to say "feelings" but I've found, in this latest round of edits to the document, that I don't actually have strong feelings anymore about their use in fandom overall. My own preference is that I don't need warnings and I definitely don't need ratings. I can read literally anything. I can count on one hand the number of times that I have read or viewed something that disturbed me enough that I perseverated on it. But I respect that I am probably an outlier in that.
(And I do get it. Lately, for example, I've found that "classic" films from the '80s and '90s, when I was a kid-to-young-adult, are often so sexist and homophobic that I can't enjoy them. I'm not triggered. I'm not unable to watch them. They simply piss me off because I see how my own views of myself (as a woman) and of LGBTQ+ people were warped by them. I don't enjoy them anymore and try to avoid them and honestly wouldn't protect a warning like "sexist and homophobic as fuck" before I invest three hours at a drive-in on their bullshit. So I do get the desire to spend one's limited time for entertainment on things that one is actually likely to enjoy.)
I used to have strong feelings on warnings and ratings, but this was when I saw them mostly demanded to help readers avoid having to read about sex and especially gay people. Neither seemed deserving of a warning to me. I picked up plenty of published books with pages-long graphic sex scenes that no one thought I needed to be warned about, and it wasn't like it was even the graphic stuff people wanted to be warned about. In the 2008 post I linked above, I reference a warning I remember very clearly from Fanfiction.net in my early fandom days where someone warned (in the summary) that Maedhros and Fingon hug at one point in the story and that might seem slashy to some readers. Give me a break. This is like putting an "Animal Abuse" tag on a story where a character eats chicken noodle soup. (Actually, the "Animal Abuse" tag is far easier to justify, imo.)
But the pendulum has swung away from that use predominating the discussion of warnings. Furthermore, AO3 popularized the idea of "Choose Not to Warn," which the SWG eventually adopted too, making it possible for authors who want to opt out entirely to do so. So I find I care far less. No one is being forced to do anything, and I do not, after all, object to information-sharing with my potential audience to help them choose the story that best fits what they want to read. If they aren't in the mood for violence, I have no qualms with helping them steer clear of my stories that contain it, which some do. (Likewise, I can't be the only person who sees a warning for violence and feels curiosity about the what and why??)
These days, my thoughts are much more along the lines of "how does one administer a system of ratings and warnings--which people by and large still seem to want--on an archive of fanworks?" This question has been under discussion in recent months on the SWG as we updated our warning tag list and revised our "Ratings & Warnings" document to add clarity and remove language that implies punitiveness. It always generates strong emotions: people who want warnings, who hate them, who won't read without them, who are afraid of what they signify.
I think the issue is less with warnings (and ratings, too, I suppose) than with what we expect of them and how we discuss them. For one, we often go into conversations about warnings/ratings with WAY too high of expectations. Part of why I wanted to revise "Ratings & Warnings" was to hopefully adopt language that tones this rhetoric down somewhat, instead of reinforcing the idea that not getting warnings exactly right has dire (dire I tell you!!1!) consequences. It comes from both people in favor of and against warnings. First, we have the people who imagine that if a system is inadequate, it will result in grave psychological harm to someone triggered by content they didn't expect and sent into emotional crisis. Two points there: first, most things that are unpleasant to people do not rise to the level of triggers. I have a mild blood-injury phobia. (Yes, despite loving horror stories and movies!) It can be really unpleasant for me to encounter certain stimuli when I'm not expecting them, but it's not fair for me to conflate my discomfort with the emotional crisis experienced by someone who has survived a significant trauma and actually is triggered (not "triggered") by certain stimuli, anymore than it's fair for me to equate the sneezing fits I have when handling a new batch of hay to a deadly allergy to peanuts.
Archive owners, who are volunteers, cannot be charged with protecting someone with extreme emotional vulnerabilities from triggering content on that archive. It's not realistic. Actually, the allergy analogy holds true here too: packages and restaurants generally label when something contains peanuts, but that won't protect a person with a severe allergy from sitting on a park bench five minutes after someone snacked on peanut butter crackers there. Someone with that severity of a response to something generally innocuous to the vast majority of the population by necessity moves through the world differently. It sucks. But we need to let go of the idea that warnings are enough to protect someone with significant vulnerabilities.
Then there is the ease with which we slide into the either/or fallacy that EITHER warnings must contain terminology so precise that every English-speaking person, no matter their personal characteristics or cultural background, will understand exactly what they mean OR they are completely useless and we need to get rid of them entirely. I call bullshit. Again, I think we expect too much. Yes, every person brings a unique perspective. All the same, the vast majority of people, if they are participating in English-language Tolkien fandom, and if they see a warning tag like "Child Abuse" or "Rape" or "Graphic Violence," know enough from those terms to know if they want to read a story or not. Yes, there are shades of gray, but we can get so caught up in those shades of gray that we forget that, in the vast majority of instances, we're pretty clear on what is being warned for. And keeping in mind the above--warnings cannot and should not be expected to protect someone with severe emotional vulnerabilities from being triggered--those shades of gray, at worst, create discomfort and a need to click out of a story.
What I've found helpful, in sixteen years of having these discussions, is to recalibrate my expectations of what warning tags--any tags really--can and should accomplish.
I accept that they are not going to be used perfectly.
I accept that their purpose is to help visitors find a fanwork that they want to read, view, or listen to: no more. (They aren't even a guarantee that, once clicked on, the visitor will even enjoy that fanwork.)
I accept that various creators won't want to tag their fanworks with warnings (including me, sometimes) and that's totally fine and honestly none of my business why.
(If we stated the above for genre tags or character tags, I doubt few people would disagree with it. We need to recalibrate our expectations for warning tags to match.)
These ideas keep me from being totally paralyzed when I need to do this work. I would love to see them more widely embraced. This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/449466.html
* This word chosen intentionally.
The rest goes below the cut because ratings/warnings themselves set people off, and I may well mention the kinds of things people warn for, so I'm warning now that those warnings may be under discussion of warnings that you will find below the cut.
I should get out of the way that, like most people, I have my own strong preferences about warnings. I was going to say "feelings" but I've found, in this latest round of edits to the document, that I don't actually have strong feelings anymore about their use in fandom overall. My own preference is that I don't need warnings and I definitely don't need ratings. I can read literally anything. I can count on one hand the number of times that I have read or viewed something that disturbed me enough that I perseverated on it. But I respect that I am probably an outlier in that.
(And I do get it. Lately, for example, I've found that "classic" films from the '80s and '90s, when I was a kid-to-young-adult, are often so sexist and homophobic that I can't enjoy them. I'm not triggered. I'm not unable to watch them. They simply piss me off because I see how my own views of myself (as a woman) and of LGBTQ+ people were warped by them. I don't enjoy them anymore and try to avoid them and honestly wouldn't protect a warning like "sexist and homophobic as fuck" before I invest three hours at a drive-in on their bullshit. So I do get the desire to spend one's limited time for entertainment on things that one is actually likely to enjoy.)
I used to have strong feelings on warnings and ratings, but this was when I saw them mostly demanded to help readers avoid having to read about sex and especially gay people. Neither seemed deserving of a warning to me. I picked up plenty of published books with pages-long graphic sex scenes that no one thought I needed to be warned about, and it wasn't like it was even the graphic stuff people wanted to be warned about. In the 2008 post I linked above, I reference a warning I remember very clearly from Fanfiction.net in my early fandom days where someone warned (in the summary) that Maedhros and Fingon hug at one point in the story and that might seem slashy to some readers. Give me a break. This is like putting an "Animal Abuse" tag on a story where a character eats chicken noodle soup. (Actually, the "Animal Abuse" tag is far easier to justify, imo.)
But the pendulum has swung away from that use predominating the discussion of warnings. Furthermore, AO3 popularized the idea of "Choose Not to Warn," which the SWG eventually adopted too, making it possible for authors who want to opt out entirely to do so. So I find I care far less. No one is being forced to do anything, and I do not, after all, object to information-sharing with my potential audience to help them choose the story that best fits what they want to read. If they aren't in the mood for violence, I have no qualms with helping them steer clear of my stories that contain it, which some do. (Likewise, I can't be the only person who sees a warning for violence and feels curiosity about the what and why??)
These days, my thoughts are much more along the lines of "how does one administer a system of ratings and warnings--which people by and large still seem to want--on an archive of fanworks?" This question has been under discussion in recent months on the SWG as we updated our warning tag list and revised our "Ratings & Warnings" document to add clarity and remove language that implies punitiveness. It always generates strong emotions: people who want warnings, who hate them, who won't read without them, who are afraid of what they signify.
I think the issue is less with warnings (and ratings, too, I suppose) than with what we expect of them and how we discuss them. For one, we often go into conversations about warnings/ratings with WAY too high of expectations. Part of why I wanted to revise "Ratings & Warnings" was to hopefully adopt language that tones this rhetoric down somewhat, instead of reinforcing the idea that not getting warnings exactly right has dire (dire I tell you!!1!) consequences. It comes from both people in favor of and against warnings. First, we have the people who imagine that if a system is inadequate, it will result in grave psychological harm to someone triggered by content they didn't expect and sent into emotional crisis. Two points there: first, most things that are unpleasant to people do not rise to the level of triggers. I have a mild blood-injury phobia. (Yes, despite loving horror stories and movies!) It can be really unpleasant for me to encounter certain stimuli when I'm not expecting them, but it's not fair for me to conflate my discomfort with the emotional crisis experienced by someone who has survived a significant trauma and actually is triggered (not "triggered") by certain stimuli, anymore than it's fair for me to equate the sneezing fits I have when handling a new batch of hay to a deadly allergy to peanuts.
Archive owners, who are volunteers, cannot be charged with protecting someone with extreme emotional vulnerabilities from triggering content on that archive. It's not realistic. Actually, the allergy analogy holds true here too: packages and restaurants generally label when something contains peanuts, but that won't protect a person with a severe allergy from sitting on a park bench five minutes after someone snacked on peanut butter crackers there. Someone with that severity of a response to something generally innocuous to the vast majority of the population by necessity moves through the world differently. It sucks. But we need to let go of the idea that warnings are enough to protect someone with significant vulnerabilities.
Then there is the ease with which we slide into the either/or fallacy that EITHER warnings must contain terminology so precise that every English-speaking person, no matter their personal characteristics or cultural background, will understand exactly what they mean OR they are completely useless and we need to get rid of them entirely. I call bullshit. Again, I think we expect too much. Yes, every person brings a unique perspective. All the same, the vast majority of people, if they are participating in English-language Tolkien fandom, and if they see a warning tag like "Child Abuse" or "Rape" or "Graphic Violence," know enough from those terms to know if they want to read a story or not. Yes, there are shades of gray, but we can get so caught up in those shades of gray that we forget that, in the vast majority of instances, we're pretty clear on what is being warned for. And keeping in mind the above--warnings cannot and should not be expected to protect someone with severe emotional vulnerabilities from being triggered--those shades of gray, at worst, create discomfort and a need to click out of a story.
What I've found helpful, in sixteen years of having these discussions, is to recalibrate my expectations of what warning tags--any tags really--can and should accomplish.
I accept that they are not going to be used perfectly.
I accept that their purpose is to help visitors find a fanwork that they want to read, view, or listen to: no more. (They aren't even a guarantee that, once clicked on, the visitor will even enjoy that fanwork.)
I accept that various creators won't want to tag their fanworks with warnings (including me, sometimes) and that's totally fine and honestly none of my business why.
(If we stated the above for genre tags or character tags, I doubt few people would disagree with it. We need to recalibrate our expectations for warning tags to match.)
These ideas keep me from being totally paralyzed when I need to do this work. I would love to see them more widely embraced. This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/449466.html