"It's All Been Done Before": A "Hornblower" Fan's Perspective on the Content-Warnings Debate

[nindulgence]

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

Comments

[prairiedaun]

I really enjoyed this, thank you.

For me, warnings really do depend on the fandom. Another example is the Black Hawk Down fandom- I really don't need an Angst!!! warning, because dude. It's implicit in the canon. Whereas popslash... not so much.

So you can see why an HH fan might become rather cavalier about content warnings. This is a fandom in which even the sweetest and/or most PWP-ish of fics take for granted a background of violence and non-con and Articles of War that make "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" seem positively emo and nurturing. This was brilliant- may I quote it?

[nindulgence]

Another example is the Black Hawk Down fandom- I really don't need an Angst!!! warning, because dude. It's implicit in the canon.

Hee! Goodness, yes--I can't imagine going into that fandom expecting fluffy bunnies and curtainfic. *g*

This was brilliant- may I quote it?

Please, feel free--and thank you! I honestly didn't realize how potentially disturbing HH was in its canonical content until I considered it in the light of the warnings debate: we sailslashers tend to accept "rum, sodomy, and the lash" as a perfectly normal state of affairs.

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[dastier]

now i know why i've always felt so comfortable in HH fandom :) and i was thinking it's because of the sea...

re: warnings in general - a source of eternal confusion. even if i start to plan to write one, there's never knowing for sure what to include there, and i stop, feeling that what i define as a moderately fluffy fic with a happy ending can be a violent non-con angst with a death on top for somebody else. or vice versa.

[nindulgence]

i stop, feeling that what i define as a moderately fluffy fic with a happy ending can be a violent non-con angst with a death on top for somebody else. or vice versa.

Yes, exactly! I use "mature content" as an all-round warning, but when I go back and look at even some of my fluffier fics, they're all DEATH! and ANGST! and SADNESS! and BETRAYAL! It's actually kind of hilarious...in a really screwed-up sort of way. ;-)

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[tiferet]

I'm very pro-warnings, and I haven't noticed you not using it.

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

[tiferet]

Well, you're excellent writers, and that always helps--what you do, you do well and tastefully, and as for pairing listings, I trust that if you put people in bed together you'll show me how they got there in as much detail as is necessary to make it believable. (I don't read by pairing much. Actually I read in AOS fandom first by author, then by fandom, then by character. I will look at almost anything about Edward, but sometimes I don't look at much of it.)

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.

[sori1773]

Huh. Your point is interesting about the need for warnings varying from fandom to fandom. I can understand that. That said, though, I'm a 'warnings' kind of reader. I'm very vanilla in my tastes (and so there are long lists of things I don't read *g*) and I want the author to give me an idea of extreme content. (Angst warnings? Ummm. No. I think this generally falls into the common sense arena but I know people will argue about the whole 'common sense by whose definition' but...okay.) I read the endings of stories first, I usually read off recs and basically, I do everything I can to make sure I don't run into things that I don't like. So I'm proactive in my read selection but, seriously, a little help is always nice. If someone's going to pull out a knife and start having some mutilation and bloodplay in a BDSM club in the middle of 200k story I'd like to know about it. :) Ahead of time

[tiferet]

Okay, I have written chan involving someone as young as 12, but I would never dream of not warning for that.

And also, I would never dream of having the older character think "Wow, and he's only 12," in the middle, because my reaction to this is apparently "What, you just noticed?"

[nindulgence]

I'm very vanilla in my tastes

Oddly enough, I am as well, mostly because I'm all about character exploration in fanfic and I find that a lot of stories (not all--there are certainly exceptions) begin to stray into "any two guys" territory the moment they become PWPish (or BDSM-ish, or what-have-you). It's like character goes on the back burner in favour of writing about the sex, or the specific kink...and that just does nothing for me.

It's not that my day is going to be ruined or I'll be living with trauma forever if I run into things I don't like. It's just...I don't have much time to read (far, far less time than I'd like) and I don't want to end up having to consistently stop reading stories in the middle when a simple hey! there's a huge, graphic rape scene in the story could pretty much save me all the trouble.I find that an eminently reasonable and persuasive argument--none of us has as much time as we'd like for fandom, do we? And all that clicking in and out of stories can really add up, especially for folks on old or

[quigonejinn]

In Hornblower fandom, almost any upsetting event that you can imagine has already happened in canon.

*falls over laughing* You know, it might be just hte time that I came into the fandom, but I really wish that there was more of this upsetting stuff in the fic. A lot of what I found was cute, escapist stuff about ponies and kilts and fixits, so I spent a while stomping around and feeling cranky because nothing was as bleak and terrible as the books.

[nindulgence]

A lot of what I found was cute, escapist stuff about ponies and kilts and fixits, so I spent a while stomping around and feeling cranky because nothing was as bleak and terrible as the books.

Hee! Yes, we do have our share of wacky fluff, don't we? I still don't quite grasp how the ponyfic came about...

Coming into a fandom and not finding what you were looking for there is such a great opportunity, though: you can write it yourself without any sort of fannish anxiety of influence--as indeed you have!

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