"It's All Been Done Before": A "Hornblower" Fan's Perspective on the Content-Warnings Debate
In fannish whack-a-mole news, I see that the debate over content-warnings in fanfic has been popping up its furry little head all over LJ this past week, and has been quite impressively whacked in a number of sensible posts by various LJers
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I'll be very frank. Yes, in canon all that stuff has happened--but the writing style implies far, far more than it actually says.
If you're going to post an explicit description of a brutal rape, then you should warn people. I know you don't get warnings on real books. But there are a lot of real-book authors that don't get a second chance from me unless someone who absolutely knows me can tell me that reading a specific book of theirs won't put me on the ceiling. The people I trust to tell me whether or not this is so have a stake in the matter, as they are the ones who usually end up having to talk me down from there ( ... )
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How much of a problem warnings are does vary by fandom. In Harry Potter I won't touch anything without warnings even sometimes when I know who wrote it because there is just so much you can do to people and have them still live through it that you can't in other fandoms. And ignoring emotional damage is canon. Also there are a lot of 15 year olds of all ages who think it's tehkewliez to torture their characters.
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Not that I'm ever likely to write such a scene, but what would you consider an adequate warning in that case? Would "mature themes, explicit sexuality; content may disturb some readers" do, or would you want to know exactly what the potentially disturbing content was?
The other thing about HH fandom is that they/we are mostly good writers. If you had seen some of the angstwh0ring "realistic" crap on say, Wizard Trauma? You'd want to be warned so you could stay the hell away from it.Indeed, it's usually style rather than content that makes me hit the back button. If I'm really enjoying an author's writing, I'll generally be willing to follow her story into an unexpectedly dark place; if not, I'll more than likely back out of it before the content ever becomes a problem ( ... )
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I think that if you have a scene like that in a story the very least you can do is warn for "nonconsensual sex", because if I'm really enjoying an author's writing and I come up across that, I don't want to go to her unexpectedly dark place, I want out now. (I once suggested with respect to the Thomas Covenant books that women readers should have a contest--I really want to know who left the biggest dent in the wall.)
There's no need to say who is doing it and to whom it is done in the warnings, but that is a sufficiently awful thing that to expect a reader, even one who likes your style, to be willing to follow you there is too darn much. It doesn't matter whether you are a published author or a fanfic writer--people who put that kind of thing in their books generally don't get re-read by me unless I can talk to someone else who has read the book. And that list does include good writers, like Octavia Butler (who was one of my favourites before "Parable of ( ... )
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See, to me that level of detail is somewhat spoilery--but I've seen people using a system of brief warnings in the header, with a link to more detailed warnings at the end of the fic, so I suppose that's a way to accommodate both camps, and I wouldn't be averse to using it.
I once suggested with respect to the Thomas Covenant books that women readers should have a contest--I really want to know who left the biggest dent in the wall.
Ah, yes, Thomas Covenant. (WTF?) Even in that case, though, I would have to say that ultimately my biggest issue with that series was the way it kept lapsing into huge stretches of booooring between plot points.
There's this sense I get from the "no warnings" crowd that there's something wrong with people who don't enjoy reading things that have ( ... )
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Goodness, this is a thorny topic.
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Also "mature content" is imnsho a rather bad description of swearing and sexual language. In general, when someone says "fuck" a lot my first impression isn't that they're a very mature person, although the word is certainly used by mature
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I've often seen that described as a particularly American (or perhaps North American) approach. I wonder whether it might also have something to do, however, with the distinction between public and private, given that sex (except in a marketing sense) is still seen as a relatively private activity, while various forms of violence (from school bullying to war) take place daily in much more public arenas.
Teenagers tend to love angst and violence and most of them grow out of it.
Good lord, yes--I certainly have some overly angsty fanfic of years past lying about in a drawer somewhere. ;-)
Thankfully, one learns to do less with more as one develops as a writer.
Also "mature content" is imnsho a rather bad description of swearing and sexual language. In general, when someone says "fuck" a lot my first impression isn't that they're a very mature person, although the word is certainly used by mature people.Have you ever seen the ( ... )
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Presumably there's still a learning curve for newcomers...but yes, this is a fandom in which it's relatively feasible to keep track of the most prolific authors' styles and approaches, especially if you only follow a certain character or pairing. In a behemoth fandom like HP or SGA, I should think that would be far more difficult and the learning curve much steeper.
damned_colonial and I have quite a good and concise warning system worked out, but we hardly ever use it.
Hee! When I set up this LJ, I made the decision to friends-lock anything that went past a certain line of explicitness, but I've never actually got around to writing anything that crossed that line. So it was a bit of a shock to the old perspective to re-consider the fic that I'd mentally categorized as "safe"...and to realize that some of the themes it dealt with might be upsetting to certain readers.
*appends ( ... )
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