I have not much to add to your trigger warning post except that sometimes just asking the author if this or that happens in a story is also an option. It’s easier and quicker done than having someone who will pre-read a fic for you. Of course, no one owes anyone an answer and it can happen that for whatever reason there will be no author or that the author doesn’t remember the story enough to have answer. But that has happened to me. In my fic tagged with non-explicit rape, a reader told me that they skipped a few chapters that were about the search for an abduction victim who would be raped. They asked if I could give them a short summary up until that point and I did for those chapters making sure to point out in which chapter sth about the rape was mentioned so they could either read the safe chapters or could read all of them with the appropriate prep.I was still writing the story then, so everything was fresh on my mind and I wasn’t bothered at all and in my experience, most other authors won’t be bothered either even when they chose CNTW. When your trigger is sth niche that even people who do tag extensively won’t tag for than asking the author directly is also the best way to navigate a fanfiction site as well.
Absolutely true, anon! In fandom, with recent fanworks, it is often possible to reach out to the author and ask them if certain material is in their fiction.
Sadly, with older fanfic, and with printed media the author might not be available to tell you.
In cases like that I really encourage people to ask a friend they know will be okay to preview the material for them and tell them if it’s safe.
But I definitely encourage fan writers to be kind and courteous if people do reach out to them with questions about if certain triggers are present in their work, especially if the person reaching out is being kind and courteous to them.
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