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🖋 It’s okay to write about dark and evil topics without explicitly condemning them in the text.
🖋 It’s okay to write with an unreliable narrator who views their own evil actions as good or admirable.
🖋 It is not your responsibility to make sure your audience knows that war, torture, abuse, incest, rape, child molestation and so on are bad.
🖋 Not all fiction is about telling a moral lesson to the reader.
🖋 You are not obligated to be your reader’s moral teacher.
I feel as though puritanism has become so incredibly pervasive in the writing world lately, hidden under the guise of social justice. I swear more people would wake up and see it if they realized just how many people use the word “problematic” as a flowery way to say “sinful.”
Just always remember to properly tag your work!!!
“Choose not to warn” and “no rating” are valid and proper ways to tag a fic.
When I read mainstream fiction, there are no tags. No warnings. Science fiction, especially, is prone to all sorts of disturbing content that isn’t warned. (Horror has plenty of “unwarned” disturbing content, but if the book or magazine is labeled “horror,” that’s pretty solidly a warning in itself.)
Fanfic warnings came from two places:
- Help people find the stuff they wanted to read. People labeled fics “Dark!Harry” or “underage sex” or “plotty genfic” or “post-canon” or “hooker AU” or “Dr Who Crossover” or “Natasha’s backstory” because readers who liked those things were much more likely to read your fic if you told them about it.
- Help readers of this particular niche in this particular community avoid the content that they’d find deeply disturbing or even triggering. This was traditionally fandom-specific: SNK fics did not warn for “gore” because gore was built into the fandom; Supernatural fics did not warn for Christian imagery & themes or demonic magic; Silence of the Lambs did not warn for cannibalism; Buffy fics did not warn for vampires and blood and killing. Dr Who did not warn for “we broke the space-time continuum and everything you know about these characters is gone.” Almost nobody warned for incest because once it was common to mention the pairing… people figured you would see Fred/George or Sam/Dean and understand. Or that you’d see Batman/Robin and decide for yourself if that counted as incest.
We DID warn for things that the community disagreed about. “NoRomo” vs “shipping” fics in X-Files fandom, because people had strong opinions about which ones they wanted to see. Harry as teacher, quidditch star, or auror, because some people absolutely did not want to read some of those futures. The slash communities warned for het relationships, sometimes even in the background. Het communities warned for slash, even if it was “two guys who hold hands and hug sometimes.”
Everyone warned for polyamory. There were hardcore kink fics updated over years, that people loved… until a third person entered the relationship and then they screamed at the author about how this was “ruining” their beloved ship dynamic.
But warnings were not for “everyone in fandom.” They were for people who were into this fandom, who might read this pairing – so they were set with a community in mind.
You shouldn’t need to warn for cannibalism in a Hannibal fic. But you might mention it if it’s a major part of the story – because people who want that focus will seek it out. People who don’t want to read any stories with cannibalism… will find another fandom.
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