Also, books are unusual in that regard - movies, TV shows and video games ALL come with "This Beautiful Unique Creative Snowflake has been rated Z for strong language, sexual situtions, and explicit use of the color orange" warnings on them.

I'm not sure where the line should be drawn re: fears of triggering. If you've got a scene of explicit nastiness, that's obvious, but if you're referring to nastiness in a character's past without anything explicit, is that something to be warned about? IE, if a character is being raped, put a warning. If a character has been raped before the story occurs, does that warrant a warning? Does it depend on how well the character is coping?

Yeah, with books, generally, one can glean the topics from either the back cover summary, or the blurbs from the folks recommending it.

"This Beautiful Unique Creative Snowflake has been rated Z for strong language, sexual situtions, and explicit use of the color orange"

NATLBSB!

NATLBSB!

Heh.

Yeah, with books, generally, one can glean the topics from either the back cover summary, or the blurbs from the folks recommending it.

And you still wind up with authors acting like complete asshats (Alice Hoffman, I'm looking at you) because they take exception that a reviewer didn't like their book and "spoiled the plot."

"This Beautiful Unique Creative Snowflake has been rated Z for strong language, sexual situtions, and explicit use of the color orange"

Yeah, I've never noticed Quentin Tarantino crying "But, but, MAH ARTISTIC INTEGRITEEEEEEEEE!!!!!"

Except then there are authors who feel that even the presence of a whitefonted warning gives something away.

I can see that too.

Personally, and granted I'm not dealing with personal trauma in this, there are things in RPF that I do not want to read because the RPs involved have expressed discomfort. With very few trusted-author exceptions, I don't read fic without the thumbs up from Cass. It's not that arduous when in fic-reading mode to ask your friends also in that mode (since we tend to run in packs on this), "Is this story alright for me?".

Yeah, I've never noticed Quentin Tarantino crying "But, but, MAH ARTISTIC INTEGRITEEEEEEEEE!!!!!"

That's because when he says it, it's MAH MOTHERFUCKING ARTISTIC INTEGRITEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

But, with books, someone with triggers can at least go to Amazon, and most of the time, the reviews will include vague allusions to (but also sometimes spoilery descriptions of) big ugly triggery stuff. So if that reader wanted info, they could get it. Fanfic doesn't have that equivalent.

Yes - but such is the extent of my privilege (this despite the fact that people I love have been assaulted) that it genuinely didn't occur to me that people had to interact with books like that, in that kind of defensive fashion.

I get it now.

And, I mean, I generally do provide adequate warnings on my fic headers posted to communities, or when I archive, and, hell, it's not like I'm mostly writing stuff that would be triggery. But I hadn't been cluesticked into thinking about whether scenes would be triggery for people prior to reading that essay. Now it's going to colour how I write and how I warn. Which is a good thing. (And, really, I don't think you need to be more explicit than 'deals with potentially triggery issues' in your warning - something generic and heads-up-ish would be fine, surely, without spoiling one's storytelling.)