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➡️ Content warnings on fiction are a courtesy.
➡️ Not every medium of fiction and storytelling has or is expected to have content warnings or extensive tagging.
➡️ Print novels do not traditionally warn for content in any way.
➡️ Until AO3 came along, fanfiction did not traditionally warn for content in any significant way.
➡️ An author is only obligated to warn for content to the degree mandated by the format they publish their fiction on.
➡️ Content warnings beyond the minimum are a courtesy, not an obligation.
➡️ ‘Creator chose not to warn’ is a valid tag that authors are allowed to use on AO3. It means there could be anything in there and you have accepted the risk. ‘May contain peanuts!’
➡️ Writers are allowed to use ‘Creator chose not to warn’ for any reason, including to maintain surprise and avoid spoilers.
➡️ ‘Creator chose not to warn’ is not the same thing as ‘no archive warnings apply’.
➡️ It is your responsibility to protect yourself and close a book, or hit the back button if you find something in fiction that you’re reading that upsets you.
➡️ You are responsible for protecting yourself from fiction that causes you discomfort.
Counter point: do it anyway and be nice to strangers on the Internet? And not make someone feel shitty because you wanted to keep your super special plot twist a secret? Typing a sentence at the start of a paragraph doesn’t fucking ruin a story bro, meanwhile if I wrote fanfic I’d rather not risk causing an episode in my potential audience.
“Creator chose not to warn” IS a warning all by itself.
It is a warning that anything could be in the story and if you don’t accept that risk the author doesn’t want you to read it.
Some authors value maintaining the surprise in their work over making the work accessible to absolutely everyone who might be comfortable with its contents.
And that’s a valid choice to make on AO3.
It kinda sounds like you’re defending authors who don’t care about the people who read their stories, but hey if you want to say with your whole chest that your epic plot twist that the blue crewmate from among us fucked and orphan to death is more important than the people who read your story then please have fun interacting with a significantly smaller audience than other writers
maximizing the size of your audience is the goal of capitalism, not the goal of art.
Arts meant to be shared and experienced, why shouldn’t more people experience it?
You (general you) are not the target audience for every piece of media ever created.
Of course not, but why not try and make something the most amount of people enjoy rather than letting your art be seen by, like, two people because you want to preserve whatever integrity it’s given by hiding important information
Let me try to explain this to you in small words.
If I write a piece of fiction where it’s important to me, the author, that the audience is surprised that the apparent “main character” dies partway through the story and is replaced by a different character–
–i want my audience to consist only of people who were willing to be surprised by that, and accepted the risk in reading my work that something like that could happen.
I don’t want people in my audience who did not sign up to be surprised.
“Author chose not to warn.”
Fuckin what?
So, in this hypothetical situation, less people are going to be able to enjoy the thing you did because you didn’t want to spoil an element of your story?
Like, back to what I said, saying that something happens doesn’t say when or where or how it happens, you can still have a twist that impacts the audience. Hell, if you do it right instead of a surprise you can get suspense.
Like, there’s this old Alfred Hitchcock story, where if you show an audience a room of people and blow it up after ten minutes, they’ll be surprised for a few seconds, but if you tell them there’s a bomb under the table, you’ll give them ten minutes of suspense.
There was a show I watched where I was spoiled that specifically one of the main characters was going to die. I didn’t know how or when or why, I just knew they were gonna die. The HOURS of suspense I had until they did die were almost magical, then when after they died and the story began moving along, I noticed more and more small details about the other characters, it was great.
Anyway, back to hypothetical situation. I want to write a story where the main character dies, say, by getting shot by some mook halfway through some random fight, really just brutally kill them and move on to establish vibes or whatever. Just saying “the main character dies” doesn’t tell the audience anything else other than “shit, this guys gonna die”. They won’t know it’s halfway through the story, they won’t know it’ll be some random grunt that exists for two minutes in story time, all they really have is “this guy could die at any moment”.
But wait, I should tag this without telling my audience the main character that they’re going to get attached to is gonna die! But if I say “author chooses not to warn” then readers who might have liked a story where the main character dies halfway through might be too scared to read it because they’re worried that the unrelated dog my character has will die, or that the child orphan I made the main character’s friend will get horribly dismembered.
Feel free to keep your wall of mysticism up and not tell the read what’s going to happen, but you’re losing a large chunk of your audience that might really like your story.
Danganronpa V3 went to hell and back to keep its audience from the twist that the “main character” dies after the first case and you play somebody else.
If you’re gonna get fucked up about this, you need to just only engage in fiction that comes with big bright warnings and not complain when most authors don’t cater to this need you have.
“Author chose not to warn” means the author wants an audience who consents to be surprised.
Just want to point out there is an entire genre of Theatre that’s strictly about eliciting a response from their audience, whether that be shock, awe, disgust, horror, etc. They don’t care how you are moved, only that you ARE moved beyond your everyday experiences and confronted with something that requires brain power to process.
To love art is to understand that it’s not all to your taste and that’s ok. I hated No Country for Old Men by Cormac MacCarthy, and if I didn’t have to read it for a class I would have put it down after the second page. Does that mean the author was remiss to not include a wall of CW before the first chapter? No, because part of the intensity of the book is the sudden and pervasive violence, right out of the gate. Art is about connecting and sometimes the places that occurs will surprise you if you let it.
That’s all. I agree with the OP that Trigger warnings etc. are nice but not necessary. If you chose to read something that hasn’t got warnings on it, part of the risk you are accepting is that it might go somewhere you don’t want to follow. That’s ok. The author is allowed and you have permission to stop reading stuff that doesn’t align with your tastes. If you want to leave in the middle of a comedian’s set because you don’t like the jokes, you can. They don’t enforce people to stay and be miserable. Trying to force everyone around you to comply with your particular set of triggers or cater to you is demanding they alter their art and choices to suit YOUR tastes and that level of entitlement is wild. I’m sure that’s not what the person arguing for CW means, but that’s what it boils down to, essentially.
(Unless it’s for a University course – tough titty in that case. I got a B if anyone was wondering.)
Begging fanfic writers to get out of the Number Go Uppiiiie Serotonin Uwu approach to their work
Good authors write for themselves first. Simple as that. Especially when we’re talking unpaid writing. Either as a reader, you are on board with what they want to do (which can include surprising you, disgusting you, putting you in a chokehold of emotion etc) or it wasn’t for you in the first place.
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