"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'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 Sidney Harris cartoon of an "Adult Bookshop" featuring a seedy-looking storefront filled with copies of Einstein and Kant and advanced economic theory? *g* It's certainly a paradox that content that we require a certain level of maturity to view is not always what we would label "mature" in itself.
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