Danger ranger likes your dress.

[sinsense]

Discussion of warnings on fic is going on again. I am leery of entering this debate -- last time I entered it, I was unclear, unintentionally hurtful, and misunderstood to the point of absurdity -- but I think I can get away with linking and a brief blither.

Link: untappedbeauty's post here, which in turn links to impertinence's very personal and illuminating post

Comments

[lovelypoet]

But even on mailing lists, as isolated as they could feel, when you signed up, you got that wonderful automated email with the rules and FAQ. There was always that sense of "here is how we, as a group, have agreed to function." And there's definitely been an amplification of the community feel by the move into LJ, where there isn't the strong division between the people we tell about our squee and the people we tell about our day at work. I think that's done a lot to develop the idea of fandom as community, but it is also something that's very hard for the type of person who has the attitude of "it's just the internet/fandom." Because for so many people, there aren't the kind of strong line of division between real life and fandom.

The censorship issue is an interesting one, because there is no one saying "don't write that non-con fic!" That's a separate wank entirely, and one on which I'd find myself entirely on the side of "write whatever you want!" But does asking for content warnings constitute censorship when LJ allows for so many ways of creatively concealing them from the people who may not need them? That's the thing, no one is saying that your warnings have giant blinking text in your headers. Warnings could be under a cut, anchor linked to the bottom of the fic, blanked out to be highlighted, in a separate entry altogether. There are as many ways to write and format a warning as there are to write fic, practically. Maybe it's even a case of language that's making people so adament about things. I wonder if maybe some people are reading "warning" as though it's a value judgment about the fic and having a reflexive response to that.

[sinsense]

I don't think LJ offers the kind of blanket community standards that mailing lists offered, I think because of the diversification that LJ offers (a community for every ship, and six or seven communities for the main show). It's what's causing a lot of the brouhaha, I think, because some people say "if there is no blanket statement, then I have no requirement to warn," and some people say that there is a group understanding. What it comes down to, for me, is a question of requirement versus responsibility. I'm rehashing things that impertinence said more concisely in zvi's post, but I think there is a certain responsibility toward fellow human beings, even if there's no letter of the law to enforce your adherence to a system.

I really like how you reframed the censorship issue, actually. That's really clear and clears up any of the sort of vague "it's about censorship!" associations I had with the debate. Thanks.