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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.
Here’s the thing. You’re both right.
These are two different philosophies when it comes to writing/publishing. They both have their advantages and disadvantages.
You have different ideas about how stories should be told, and that’s okay. You gotta recognize that and like… chill out with eachother. This is actually one scenario where “agree to disagree” works because it’s about artistic intent.
Exactly.
And that’s why nobody’s forcing anyone to read stories that are marked “creator chose not to warn.”
and why creators are allowed to use “chose not to warn.”
So those philosophies can happily co-exist.
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