wherein Liz rambles about warnings; also, a smoke shop construction update

[edenfalling]

I have nothing new or of any particular relevance to say about the warnings debate that has been flying around metafandom this past week, but some of the posts have made interesting reading. I had never thought about stories triggering people, but now that this has been brought to my attention, I think it is only common decency to stop causing easily avoided harm to people.

Since I already thought it was common courtesy to warn people about potentially objectionable content (I use that phrasing because the idea of content being actively harmful had honestly not occurred to me), I have tried to be conscientious about filling out a warnings line when cross-posting stories to fic communities, and when posting stories on public archives. And I have bolded warnings in my master directory archive posts on my own journal.

But I have not been particularly conscientious about putting warnings in front of stories on the actual journal posts, which is a little odd now that I think about it. I suppose I tend to assume that if someone is reading my personal journal, they are likely to already know something about my personal thematic quirks and the series for which I write.

This is lazy and indefensible, especially since I don't lock posts. I can't assume people will come to my stories via my directory posts or via a community cross-post, so I can't assume they'll have read the warnings in those places. Also, I can't assume people know me, or know all my series -- one way I fall into new series, after all, is to read fic by authors I like for series I have never even heard of, so I can't just say, for example, "'Debts' is a story about Alexiel's cycle of reincarnations," and expect people to understand that any such story will, by its very nature, include horrible lives and horrible deaths, many of which will likely have fucked-up sexual text or subtext... because not everyone casually flicking through my journal will have already read Angel Sanctuary. So I am going back and pasting in some warnings. (This project will take a few weeks.)

Also, I am noticing that I have a rather idiosyncratic list of things I consider worth warnings. I generally warn for death of major canon characters, explicit sex, familial and/or societal dysfunction, suicide and suicidal ideation, torture, murder, graphic depiction of war and other violence, post-traumatic stress, religious issues, depression, self-harm, ethical issues and/or discussions of ethics, and, of all things, literary analysis. (I have also warned for polyamory and cross-dressing, though in retrospect I think those are not warnings, as such, and I plan to unbold those words in my directory posts.) Anyway, I think this list says more about my own issues than about what fandom at large considers the standard issues that need warnings. For example, I have never seen anybody else warn for religious issues, but to me religion is such a central aspect of life that, while I am unlikely to be personally upset by any whacked-out interpretation of any faith, I cannot help thinking that for someone with a more restrictive approach to religion, running across a seeming perversion of her/his faith could be very upsetting.

My warning list is also related to my writing preoccupations. I write (or try to write) stories about people moving through and interacting with social networks, so if a society or family is fucked-up, it's important and I mention that. I write people dealing with depression and the aftermath of non-sexual trauma, and I spent several years struggling with depression, so I think that's important and I mention it. (I have never set off a depressive spiral by reading somebody else's interpretation of depression, but I can sure as hell write myself into a blue funk if I'm not careful. And I am not at all sure that reading a narrative steeped in the experience of depression couldn't set somebody else off, so I try to warn for that.)

But I don't warn for non-con or dub-con, because I don't write kinky sex. I hardly write sex at all, so what I call 'moderately explicit sex' is probably what somebody else would call 'implied sex' or not even think to mention. I think the closest I have ever gotten to kink is one fade-to-black scene with mostly implied light bondage and... well, okay, I once wrote sex that involved snakes, but that was a deliberate experiment with the border between squick and erotica, and I think I said as much in the summary, but maybe I should go back and add an 'animals used as sex toys' warning? I dunno, I have never had complaints about that story...

I do, however, warn for incest. I blame this entirely on Angel Sanctuary. (Okay, and Saiyuki, for basically the same reason.) Incest is not, never has been, and probably never will be a kink of mine, but the main canon ship in Angel Sanctuary is incestuous, and so are several of the strongly implied subtextual ones, so what can I do? (Incidentally, I am not saying that I condemn incest stories -- whatever floats your boat! -- just that they are not my kink. I sometimes even seek them out, but that is generally because I am interested in reading stories about a strong relationship between the two characters in question, and, fandom being fandom, any strong relationship tends to default to sex. I think the idea that sex and/or romance automatically make a relationship better or deeper is stupid, especially when applied to familial relationships, but it's the prevailing assumption and I have learned to deal with it.)

And I warn for rape. I say 'rape' rather than non-con because on the rare occasions I have included rape in a story, it is not meant to be titillating, it is not meant to be sexy, and it is not meant to be anything but be a horrible, awful thing. Hell, the one time I wrote an 'aliens made them do it' fic (for Harry Potter, weirdly enough), the crack!fic aspects were mostly drowned out by the whole 'dude, you do realize that this is horribly degrading slavery, that the alien conquest of the earth killed thousands -- if not millions -- of people, and that nobody has really gotten over that trauma, right?' aspect. Come to think of it, I should probably put a stronger warning on the collection of which that ficlet is a part. (One of the other component fics needs an 'assisted suicide' warning as well. Bother. Or should that be 'consensual murder' or 'willing self-sacrifice' instead? Terminology is so imprecise!)

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In other news, the construction workers shut off the water to the smoke shop's building this morning. This was scheduled to happen from 7:30am to 8:30am. The actual timing was 7:10am to about 9:45am. This meant JM and AO did not get all the coffee made before they ran out of water, and we had several unhappy customers -- including the construction workers, who came in on their morning break and wanted to buy coffee!

I am of the opinion that if you say you're going to shut the water off at 7:30, you shut it off at 7:30 or maybe a few minutes later. I can understand running behind schedule getting it turned back on, but an early shutdown is abominably rude.

Comments

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Consensual murder sounds like...an oxymoron. o.o

[edenfalling]

Well, it was technically murder (in order to create a Horcrux) but the person being killed suggested the plan and was essentially grabbing at an opportunity to commit suicide while still being useful (so self-sacrifice, of sorts, but in a very selfish and violent way), and was not dying (so assisted suicide in its usual meaning is not quite accurate either), so... consensual murder.

I admit it sounds weird, but how else would you describe that situation?