BlackHeart Biohazards

The trouble with fiction is that you can’t just do a comprehensive list of all the ingredients like you can for allergen info on food. Just like anything can be an allergen, anything can be a trigger, but fiction isn’t easy to break down into its composite parts so you can warn for literally everything that it contains on the off chance someone might be triggered by it. I and a lot of other fic writers tend to just warn for the most obvious things, the stuff that gets included in age ratings for published fiction. We can’t catch absolutely everything, and especially when a writer’s catalogue is mostly “dead dove” anyway, there’s a point where warning for that kind of thing becomes redundant. Like, “you’re telling me this mature-rated horror story has gore in it?” Being triggered sucks, but it’s one of those things you have to live with and learn to deal with in ways that work best for you. Saying it’s every writer’s responsibility to tag all triggers is ignorant of how triggers work at best and entitled at worst. Sure, I can warn for things like gore, sex, or even abuse situations. But what if one of my characters’ NAMES is a trigger? What if a line of dialogue I think is perfectly innocent drags up bad memories for someone else? And hell, what if someone misinterprets something I wrote to be triggering (say, confuses a friendly dynamic as abusive, or misreads a word as a slur?) I can do some things to mitigate the risk, yes, but readers getting triggered by my writing is still very much out of my hands. (And let’s not forget readers who see warnings for their triggers and continue reading anyway either out of a compulsion to self-harm or just sheer overwhelming curiosity)Conclusion: Trigger warning is damage control, not defusing a story entirely, and it’s far from foolproof. Not putting warnings on your story does not make you evil or selfish.