olderthannetfic: mapleowl18:elfwreck:olderthannetfic: olderthan…
Warnings in general weren’t a thing in a lot of these spaces. Sometimes, people would be mad about things that were permanent like character death, but trauma followed by a happy ending just wouldn’t have made that list a lot of the time. I don’t believe romance novels were relevant. The lack of a concept of trigger warnings was. (The actual term seems to hail from the mid 00s, for example, though obviously, warnings existed prior to that.)
The biggest change was the advent of tags existing.
Technologically, they’re not a thing on the old internet, and metadata tends to just be sparser in general. Some fic archives did start to have some filtering, but it was pretty basic and varied a lot by space.
Keep in mind that for much of the 90s, the shape of a fic archive was a hard-coded html page or maaaaybe that X-Files FTP site. They looked fundamentally different from the more recent type where you upload things yourself and you can edit in a WYSIWYG interface.
I think the main driver of internet metadata is generally porn, and I don’t mean fandom. I mean commercial porn. This is likely a big driver for being able to sort anything at all by tropes. I couldn’t point you to exact moments that moved tech forward though.
#it tended to be ‘don’t read if being gay is illegal where you are’#‘I make no profit please don’t sue me’#and if you were unfortunate enough to be in the Sentinel fandom ‘Blair gets his hair cut’
Hahaha. Yes, okay, the notorious “Please warn for hair cutting” thing.
From what I’ve heard, people mostly didn’t actually do this, but it’s actually less nutty than it sounds because it’s actually the equivalent of “not epilogue compliant”.
I gather Blair does actually cut his hair at the very end of the show in preparation for going to the police academy? This is after he ruins his own academic career to protect Jim’s secret.
(The more popular fanon ending is, of course, for his name to get cleared, sentinel stuff to become public, and everyone to grovel. Also for his pretty hair to stay.)
At least, that’s how the background behind the “Warning: hair cutting” was explained to me.
Aside from “warnings in general were just less common” and “tags basically didn’t exist before Del.icio.us” (2003, folks… tags are RECENT), there was the issue of “fanfic was a community activity.”
You wrote on a mailing list or a forum or a livejournal community or in paper zines. Or whatever. You wrote for a limited, more-or-less known set of readers. You didn’t know them all personally, but you knew they had specifically come to this place looking for fic.
And you knew what kind of fics people expected. You warned if your fic was outside the normal range… and if the “normal range” included “some fics have rape,” you might not warn.
If the fic archive was large – Noire Sensus, Walking the Plank – the archive itself was likely to have some warnings, something like: Note that some of the fic here deals with dark topics, including [rape, death, drug abuse, incest, underage sexuality], etc. So authors might not feel compelled to warn for each specific fic. Readers had a warning that those topics existed in the archive.
Harry Potter fics in slash communities rarely warned for Fred/George incest. Because the readers were already assuming that was common – not in every fic, but common enough that you didn’t warn for it, any more than you warned for “Dumbledore dies in the war” or “Harry gets severely injured.”
If your pairing-of-choice was Snape/Harry and you went looking for Snarry fic exchanges, you just kind of assumed that a great many fics would involve dubious consent and some would involve no consent whatsoever. If your OTP was Harry/Draco and you hung out in those spaces, you didn’t expect warnings for “underage” because hey, obvs this was teenage boys getting it on.
And so on. You only warned for things that were non-standard in the community where you posted your writing. (Slash communities often warned for het.) (…everywhere warned for polyamory.)
An expectation for warnings for readers from other communities came much, much later.
And there was the rather confusing lime, lemon system, with higher levels of dubcon being bigger the larger the citrus. Which wasn’t usually that consistent. Apparently there was hypothetical orange and grapefruit. I think the language actually shifted over the years because it also used to indicate level of consent. If it was explicit sex it was just labeled NC-17, before fanfiction.net purged everything, although someone might need to double check me on that.
It was more you learned the pairings occasionally had dubcon and you clicked back fast if it got to much. Or you just avoided all a particular pairing if it was labeled lemon. But sometimes they looked really interesting and or you were bored so buyer beware. And like I said it wasn’t always consistent so sometimes it was more what we’d label as mildly dubious consent, sometimes it definitely wasn’t, and then you clicked back fast. (Source: many Gundam Wing and Sailor Moon fanfics in the late 90s, early 2000s.)
Originally, there was only “lemon” and it just meant “porny”. Then “lime” was added for softcore.
Ad hoc terms like “hints of citrus” or joke terms like “kumquat” were used here and there, but there wasn’t really a scale.
It never indicated level of consent… Gundam Wing was just wall-to-wall rape.
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