welcome to downtown coolsville

(Please note that if you think this is a personal attack: it ain't. I promise.)

Re: warnings:

I don't have a hell of a lot of experience with fic that actually requires warnings- I never write it, and I rarely read it. I have very few triggers, and I don't expect to see many of those I do have in fic. And things like character death and violence don't bother me particularly. Rape, however, is a whole other ball game. impertinence wrote a post on the subject that explains why better than I ever could. Warning: Very explicit discussion of sexual assault and the nature, anatomy, cause & effect of triggers. Is itself triggery. If a story features one scene in which a person is hacked to death with a chainsaw and eaten and another is raped, I wouldn't expect a warning for the former, but it'd be great to have one for the latter.

Because the thing about getting hacked to death with a chainsaw and eaten is that it doesn't happen to one in four people.

Asking a writer to post warnings with their fic does not detract from their ~artistic integrity. It's not like anyone's asking you to go back and cut that scene entirely, or even say "this happens to so-and-so on page twenty when he goes to such-and-such." Nobody's asking you to be a babysitter. Nobody's asking you to be specific. Nobody's asking you to change the way you write. All you have to say is "warning for non-con." That's it. It takes ten seconds and helps people not get triggered by an unexpected rape scene and spend the next few hours freaking out and feeling like shit. Why the fuck wouldn't you do that? Why the fuck are we even still talking about this?

It's just... it's not fucking hard, and it helps. That's all.