I just read a little bit of context for the warning debate, decided that my first comment here was too naive to be useful, so I'm reposting it after more thought. My gut reaction was that I totally endorse the idea of "warnings" as advertisements or genre labels, but I was sort of uncomfortable with the word "warning" itself because it seems to suggest a dreary world full of minefields, rather than an adventure that sometimes veers into extreme but interesting territory. But people who have posted about "triggering" suggest that, in fact, their experience of reading is full of minefields.
I'm wondering now if there is a way to be respectful of that, to give different readers the information that they need, without normalizing a standard of excessively cautious labelling, which seems a bit inhibiting, reductionist, etc. Not sure where to draw the line -- personally it seems reasonable to me to say, "by the way, there is sexual abuse of minors here, in case you want to just move along" but tedious and pedantic to warn for "character death" -- and not just because of any "surprise" issues: it really seems to narrow and constrain how a reader reads a particular fic if one aspect like that is singled out for labelling. It primes them too much for a particular kind of reading. But that particular example/distinction is probably just about my own mental landscape and others would react differently.
Again, I like your suggestion that "warnings" basically serve the role of advertisements. People certainly are going to be more likely to invest time in reading stories if they have some way of sorting and filtering all the potential links that are out there, so they have some idea of what they want or don't want to read. Ratings, genre labels (which can after all be very complex in fandom, even to the point of suggesting specific story tropes) are all helpful. And the "therapeutic" nature of some fandom writing means there are going to be highly charged works that specifically explore certain kinds of button pushing, so people should be able to decide if that's for them. At the same time, fanfics, except the most popular ones, don't have any real equivalent to the jacket comments or reviews that can steer you to books you might like, so again some kind of labelling is useful. Still, I'd prefer a more neutral term than "warning," and perhaps a less reductionist way of describing the motivations/territory explored by the writer. (But what I'd like most of all is a warning for bad writing!)
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Date: 2009-06-24 09:18 am (UTC)I'm wondering now if there is a way to be respectful of that, to give different readers the information that they need, without normalizing a standard of excessively cautious labelling, which seems a bit inhibiting, reductionist, etc. Not sure where to draw the line -- personally it seems reasonable to me to say, "by the way, there is sexual abuse of minors here, in case you want to just move along" but tedious and pedantic to warn for "character death" -- and not just because of any "surprise" issues: it really seems to narrow and constrain how a reader reads a particular fic if one aspect like that is singled out for labelling. It primes them too much for a particular kind of reading. But that particular example/distinction is probably just about my own mental landscape and others would react differently.
Again, I like your suggestion that "warnings" basically serve the role of advertisements. People certainly are going to be more likely to invest time in reading stories if they have some way of sorting and filtering all the potential links that are out there, so they have some idea of what they want or don't want to read. Ratings, genre labels (which can after all be very complex in fandom, even to the point of suggesting specific story tropes) are all helpful. And the "therapeutic" nature of some fandom writing means there are going to be highly charged works that specifically explore certain kinds of button pushing, so people should be able to decide if that's for them. At the same time, fanfics, except the most popular ones, don't have any real equivalent to the jacket comments or reviews that can steer you to books you might like, so again some kind of labelling is useful. Still, I'd prefer a more neutral term than "warning," and perhaps a less reductionist way of describing the motivations/territory explored by the writer. (But what I'd like most of all is a warning for bad writing!)