#this was admittedly mostly inspired by that “warnings didn't exist before AO3” line

[kalinara]

Oh for fuck's sake. Please don't tell me "warning" discourse is coming back.

Look guys, I don't fucking care if you decide to use warnings or not. If you're an author who chooses not to use warnings, I may or may not read your fic, depending on my mood at any given time, but that's not a value judgment.

But can you not be a pretentious asshole about it?

"Books and movies don't have warnings!"

Really? Movies don't have warnings? What do you think that big "R" is on the advertisement there (if you're American, anyway, but as far as I know, most other countries use rating systems.) It might not be an explicit, spell-it-all out warning, but you're generally not going to see a graphic rape scene in a fucking PG movie.

Books? Generally no. Though there are exceptions. And many bloggers or goodreads reviewers will happily warn for readers who are concerned. That said, you can draw some conclusions based on genre, publisher and imprint. A romance reader generally knows where to find the really hard shit. You're not generally going to find a lot of strap ons or ball gags in Harlequin.

"Warnings didn't exist/weren't common practice before AO3!"

That's a fucking lie. I started reading fanfic on the internet in 1997, when I was young enough that I had to lie about my age to get onto the good mailing lists. And you know why they were the good mailing lists? Because they had explicit stuff. Because they had passwords to the best archives.

And those archives generally did have warnings! At least for the really big shit. Rape? Torture? The phrase "non-con" existed long before fanfiction.net, let alone AO3 was a twinkling in anyone's eye.

Because here's the thing, it's common courtesy. Fandom is a community experience. Isn't that what everyone always says when the topic of negative reviews come up? We can't make the author feel bad! Traumatizing a reader though with something that they don't know to avoid though, that's perfectly fine.

What AO3 DID invent, as far as I know, is the brilliant "Author chooses not to warn" tag. That's a great idea. It means that a concerned reader can go through the no warnings needed tag with reasonable confidence that they won't be hit with the most common triggering subjects. And if they go into a "chooses not to warn" fic, then that's their risk to take.

(Personally, I've never read a "choose not to warn" fic and thought "god, I'm so glad the author didn't spoil this rape scene in the warnings, losing the element of surprise would have ruined the story!" but that's just me. There might well be one out there, and even if not, it's the author's call.)

I don't really have a point to this rant. I just really dislike people who decide to raise their lack of consideration for others into some sort of intellectual high ground while touting blatant misinformation to support it. I also never get tired of ranting about fandom hypocrisy, so there we go.

TLDR: do what you want, but don't be a self-congratulatory dick about it.