Poll: phobias and triggers

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:20:51 GMT

Concept borrowed from dingsi. Data collected from this poll is available only to me, and will be used only to inform my posting and interactions to avoid harming people who read my journal.

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On warning for triggers.

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:20:11 GMT

I don't write fic, so my personal warnings policy is kind of pointless.

But I do write fiction not immediately traceable to a source canon, and my current publishing plan should I ever actually finish anything is "on my website with a virtual tip jar" - you bet your ass I'm warning for shit, because that's the standard of the community that taught me to write and to love writing.

I don't write rape scenes - I can't bring myself to do it and I don't really want to anyway. But in the story I'm working on right now, two characters discuss and enact a rape fantasy in a minimally skeevy way,* and I have restructured the story such that a reader could skip that entire section and only miss out on a bit of character development.

My purposes in writing that scene are:
1. examine my own issues with rape fantasies, based on my personal history,
2. emotionally affect readers who choose to read that scene without causing them harm,
3. demonstrate the characters' trust and ability to communicate,
4. possibly comment upon noncon/dubcon tropes - depends on how the scene goes and how meta I get.

( * Potentially triggering footnote about my past abusive relationship and rape. )

***

• kalpurna: ways to hide your warnings, if you're worried about spoilers
• blackboggart: on artistic integrity and artistic responsibility

tangential to the warnings issue: terminology
• were_lemur: discussing terminology: rape/non-con/dub-con
• solarcat: defining dub-con and non-con, also available on LiveJournal. Comments and good discussion on both entries.

I'm so used to encountering the terms "non-con" and "dub-con" in fandom that I don't have any trouble parsing them in fannish contexts like headers. But I do find them troubling - each term is vague enough to encompass a pretty huge range of situations (see above links), and I don't like the way they tend to sanitize rape-in-fiction. I don't dislike it enough to get very upset about it, though.

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picked a handful of violets in my name

Poll: phobias and triggers

On warning for triggers.