Warning Wanking
I confess I have not been online much, have been only marginally fannish for a long time, but I am a fanfic author of some renown in my small, dying fandom. The oar I have to put in these roiling waters is that, IMO, the problem with the dialogue is that it is a Debate, not a discussion. A discussion includes listening as well as talking, considering other's opinions as valid and honestly held, no matter what side they are arguing on. This warning wank is a debate - a verbal King of the Hill game. Whoever throws the most painful zinger wins. Usually, enough zingers get thrown by each side that everyone ends up bloody and feeling defeated. No one listens, they just talk, too caught up in their determination to put down the other side to actually consider, for a moment, that they have a valid point of view, however outrageously couched in inflammatory rhetoric.
Just for the record, my views on warnings evolved over time. I put general Adult or NC-17 warnings on most of my fiction because there was a lot of violence and explicit sex and I didn't want kids reading it. I resisted doing a laundry list of what *kind* of bad things happened because that seemed to me like I might as well give a whole Reader's Digest version of the story, then why would people bother to read it at all? I resented people who wanted (in my earlier viewpoint) to be 'protected' from stuff that might surprise them when the whole damned point of the story was to have twists and turns that surprised the reader. If people got squicked by some highly personal, unique set of circumstances then my reaction was, "So what? Your problem. Not mine."
But then time, observation and thoughtful conversation with people I respected convinced me of two things:
1) What some events/circumstances (and there were a limited number of things - not the entire universe of possibilities) evoked wasn't about a "squick" ("eeuw, Joe/Richie! Run away!"), but about very genuine terrors that, while I (fortunately) don't share them, invoke lasting and negative impacts on people I care about.
2) The very nature of fanfic means that readers have a major emotional investment in the characters we write about. What we "do" to them, or have them do, is like writing about family. It is an act of trust by the reader to enter into the world we created with *their* (the reader's) characters. When a writer subjects the character to some act that is way outside the accepted dramatic license that authors are expected to use, we enter into territory that - while perfectly valid as a dramatic, artistic expression - nonethless runs the risk of violating that reader/writer trust to the degree that - In My Opinion - deserves a warning. We all know where those boundaries are. The big ones, again IMO, are rape, pedophilia, torture, non-con and major character death. I also warn for violence, but that one is redundant in a fandom like Highlander. Duh. They cut off people's heads.
Of course, we can't warn for everything. I don't give a rat's ass about people's personal fandom squicks. I do, however, care about people. I actually care about them more than I care about my fiction, so the question boils down to: What do you care about? Throwing a couple of brief warning phrases at the front of a story is hardly going to make a difference in how people view the author's artistic integrity, or how they judge the quality of the writing. But it might save someone a great deal of completely avoidable emotional hurt.
We ARE a community. The community is largely formed by a shared caring about media characters that each one of us feels a highy intense, personal connection to. It is irresponsible to assume that abusing those characters doesn't, in some very real and personal way, deeply affect the community's members, some far more than others. Warning about it is, however, a choice only the individual author can make. I would hope that, if the author choses NOT to warn, at minimum they could make that clear up front, along the lines of: No warnings. Read at your own risk.
There. How hard was that?
Just for the record, my views on warnings evolved over time. I put general Adult or NC-17 warnings on most of my fiction because there was a lot of violence and explicit sex and I didn't want kids reading it. I resisted doing a laundry list of what *kind* of bad things happened because that seemed to me like I might as well give a whole Reader's Digest version of the story, then why would people bother to read it at all? I resented people who wanted (in my earlier viewpoint) to be 'protected' from stuff that might surprise them when the whole damned point of the story was to have twists and turns that surprised the reader. If people got squicked by some highly personal, unique set of circumstances then my reaction was, "So what? Your problem. Not mine."
But then time, observation and thoughtful conversation with people I respected convinced me of two things:
1) What some events/circumstances (and there were a limited number of things - not the entire universe of possibilities) evoked wasn't about a "squick" ("eeuw, Joe/Richie! Run away!"), but about very genuine terrors that, while I (fortunately) don't share them, invoke lasting and negative impacts on people I care about.
2) The very nature of fanfic means that readers have a major emotional investment in the characters we write about. What we "do" to them, or have them do, is like writing about family. It is an act of trust by the reader to enter into the world we created with *their* (the reader's) characters. When a writer subjects the character to some act that is way outside the accepted dramatic license that authors are expected to use, we enter into territory that - while perfectly valid as a dramatic, artistic expression - nonethless runs the risk of violating that reader/writer trust to the degree that - In My Opinion - deserves a warning. We all know where those boundaries are. The big ones, again IMO, are rape, pedophilia, torture, non-con and major character death. I also warn for violence, but that one is redundant in a fandom like Highlander. Duh. They cut off people's heads.
Of course, we can't warn for everything. I don't give a rat's ass about people's personal fandom squicks. I do, however, care about people. I actually care about them more than I care about my fiction, so the question boils down to: What do you care about? Throwing a couple of brief warning phrases at the front of a story is hardly going to make a difference in how people view the author's artistic integrity, or how they judge the quality of the writing. But it might save someone a great deal of completely avoidable emotional hurt.
We ARE a community. The community is largely formed by a shared caring about media characters that each one of us feels a highy intense, personal connection to. It is irresponsible to assume that abusing those characters doesn't, in some very real and personal way, deeply affect the community's members, some far more than others. Warning about it is, however, a choice only the individual author can make. I would hope that, if the author choses NOT to warn, at minimum they could make that clear up front, along the lines of: No warnings. Read at your own risk.
There. How hard was that?