On warnings

[sistermagpie]

Having just read a bunch of posts on warnings in fics that didn't actually cover my own feelings about them? I thought I would share them!

A lot of the discussion has centered around triggers, which I think is important, but even as someone who doesn't think of herself as really having any triggers, warnings are still important to me.

There's very few movies or books I've read or seen IRL that I didn't feel warned me in some way, usually through advertising. I've read some concern that warnings about serious subjects says something troubling about handling serious subjects, but here's where I think the fanfic part is really important. Something like Harry Potter, for instance, is warned. I mean, the canon. There are plenty of things we know we won't get in HP canon. And I know that people will point out that there are actually a lot of "warnable" things in HP--rape, bestiality, murder, torture, alcoholism. Those things happen in the books, but we know how they're going to happen. Implied suggestions of Aberforth Dumbledore having an unnatural relationship with his goat are funny and fit the book. If Harry had walked in on Aberforth doing his goat like in an NC-17 Aberforth/goat fic that warned of bestiality? Not so much. Even in scenes that get close to the line they don't cross it. Sectumsempra is bloody, but not in the way it would be in an adult true crime novel.

In fanfic we lose all the warnings that HP the canon comes with. Everything you know about HP gets thrown out once you're in fanfic, so warnings will describe what kind of story we're going to read. For me this isn't about triggers so much as advertising. Generally when I look for fanfic I do it by the warnings. I can skip over pairings I don't like, kinks I don't like. I won't read fluff if I want angst. That's probably good for the author too, actually. If somebody's looking for fluff they probably are not going to appreciate stumbling into a fic about anorexia.

Now, I should say I'm also pretty blase about surprise. Maybe it's because "big surprise" seems like it's so overused in the media nowadays, where things are often a surprise because they literally didn't exist until the ep when they appear and retcon what we've seen before. That's maybe why I actually don't even really understand a lot of complaints about warnings. I understand not wanting to spoil plot points, but most of the things I see warned don't seem like plot points except character death, which I'm not sure always gets warned for anyway.

I don't, btw, think that this confines fanfic writers to particular genres. As I said, I think warnings are more like advertisements. A lot of beginning writers assume their work can't or shouldn't be categorized and they're usuallly wrong. There are stories that do cross lines--I don't think combining genres is really that unusual. But I don't think that necessarily connects to warnings since warnings don't confine an author to a genre, they just say certain things that will happen. Fanfic readers are pretty used to stories veering all over the place from one chapter to another (whether that's good or not) since we read wips, and different chapters can just contain different warnings. I don't know...I guess like I said I just put little value on surprise and have never really felt like it confined authors. Basically, I think it's a system that exists because it's grown organically because it works for readers and writers as a way of finding the fics they want to read/getting their fics to people who want to read them.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

And when professional fiction crosses over those warnings in ways that don't work, it pretty much gets clobbered for it.

The vast majority of stories are not actually "spoiled" when you have some idea of what happens in them (let alone learning the minor details that many people consider spoilers!).

Truly if the main draw is the surprise, it's not much of a draw. Even for stories where a twist ending means something. For instance, I've never liked M Night Shamalayan, and the one movie where people tend to think the twist really works of his is the Sixth Sense. But even there I just don't think the big surprise adds anything. As opposed to one of my favorite movies, The Others, which has a similar surprise ending, but in that movie the surprise ending adds to it, both making sense of things that were mysteries before and adding more mystery that makes it more interesting imo.

[pauraque]

I have not seen The Others, but when watching The Sixth Sense I figured out the ending partway through the movie. Perhaps I wouldn't have if I hadn't been previously told there was a surprise, but in any case I did, and wasn't bothered by it. I enjoyed the movie but I don't think I'd have liked it less if the story had been what it pretends to be at the beginning, which is a sign of a problem!

I like some of MNS's movies -- I liked Signs okay, and Unbreakable a lot. But when I like them, I like the realistic, human elements much more than any weird "surprises". As a director he seems to bring out very good performances, but sometimes the script is so weighed down by OMG WHAT A TWIST (arrrgh, The Village) that it's annoying.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

That is totally how I feel about 6N. It would work just as well if Bruce Willis was just estranged from his life and they got back on the same page at the end. In fact, it's a lot less emotional for him to learn that he's not estranged from his wife like he thought, he's just invisible. And The Village is ridiculous because it's like everyone does everything to fool the audience. Their behavior makes little sense except as a way to fool us, so what's the point?

[pauraque]

Yeah, it might have been more interesting for it to be figurative... Bruce being emotionally separated from the world is LIKE the separation suffered by the restless spirits the kid sees. And more satisfying, because there's an opportunity for him to change things, unlike those who are already dead?

The Village, omg. When we saw the movie, very_improbable and I agreed it sucked for that reason, and then talked a bit about how from a fanfic writer's perspective (ie, making sense of nonsense), you'd have to conclude that the ~Village Elders~ were acting that way to fool *themselves*, and that perhaps an interesting story could be written about why a group of people would do that. That, however, was not the totally uninteresting story MNS decided to make a film of.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I love trying to imagine them all forcing each other to talk in that stilted language. Which you can maybe imagine for some of them who are nerdy enough to want to do that, but why would ordinary people agree to talk like that for the rest of their lives? Really they all should have seemed like they were stuck in the 1970s, not the 1670s.

[franzeska]

I guessed the twist to The Others long before it was made explicit, but it didn't feel like a spoiler. I think you could figure out what's going on at a number of points in the film without changing its impact.

That said, the movie I really felt was effective was Tesis because it did the tired thriller thing, but I honestly couldn't figure out if the leads were going to survive, which basically never happens with cheesy thrillers. I think I would have been annoyed if someone had told me who gets killed ahead of time. (Of course I've rewatched it like a trillion times, so...)