[ SECRET POST #4644 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4644 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #665.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

03. https://i.imgur.com/onkpTql.jpg

[kaijinscendre]

Also, why would it need to be in the book? It is 2019. I can guarantee there is some site or group you can search to find out the triggering content in books.

[feotakahari]

https://www.doesthedogdie.com/ seems relevant here.

[bur]

I go to that place before any movie, specifically for dogs dying. I ain’t down with that.

[sparklywalls]

I can sort of see this point of view but at the same time I've read some books where there has been a scene or scenes that has unexpectedly fucked me up and I can't stop thinking about it. Usually I see it coming though from the genre or reviews etc that there might be some disturbing content so I personally am not too bothered. I recognise that there are personal thresholds of tolerance with this stuff however.

[(Anonymous)]

Same! I go into a book with some basic expectations, because I read a lot of horror/thriller stuff, and I know I can handle a lot of darker content, and I know if I don't feel like it's a good day to read about torture or sexual assault or murder, then I won't read those books until I think I can handle what they're going to throw at me. But there are triggers I have that aren't related to staples of the genres I read, and I've legit thrown a book cross the room just as a REFLEX because I wasn't expecting something to actually fuck me up.


With popular books, you can get a lot of information out of reviews, but if you have triggers that are less standard but still the kind of thing that doesthedogdie would list, it's a little harder-- not every book gets a review that goes into all those things.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed. I could certainly have done with a trigger warning on Deerskin. I'm still inclined to shudder at that one and it's been twenty years.

[(Anonymous)]

Very fair, and very true.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't really understand where your skepticism is coming from?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm that sensitive on some topics. But, it's not hard for me to find good reviews that cover what I need, or pick up spoilers from trusted friends.

[(Anonymous)]

SA: Also there are authors I trust, and authors I don't trust anymore, so it's not hard to find stuff that works for me.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd like trigger warnings. Not because I might be triggered but because I'd like to know if there's rape, underage or graphic violence. I might still chose to read it but I'd like to be warned.

[(Anonymous)]

If I read the summary and see that there's something that might be a trigger under the subjects on the inside of the book, then I'll google a more in-depth summary. I have read books where author wrote a sentence or two saying that this book contains _____ and may be triggering for some readers. A sentence or two like that would be nice, but I wouldn't want a whole AO3-style tagging system.

[(Anonymous)]

We should put trigger warnings on everything about everything. Life should just be plastered with trigger warnings. All TV shows should have huge lists of trigger warnings that play before each episode. Same with movies. Books should come with whole chapters of things that MIGHT trigger someone. Maybe we should even put trigger warnings on people too. But of course we would have to put trigger warnings on the trigger warnings so not to trigger people who are triggered by triggered warnings. It's going to be a tough job.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, TV shows do already something similar to trigger warnings. That rating before it plays where it says, "Violence, Language, Nudity, Sexual violence" etc...

[(Anonymous)]

Those detailed warnings does not exist everywhere, though. There may be the generic "graphic content" and/or "sensitive viewers are warned/viewers discretion adviced".

[(Anonymous)]

People need to learn the difference between not liking something and something that is deeply psychologically troubling.

Like... I hate gore and try to avoid it if possible but I'm not gonna have an emotional break down if I end up seeing it.

Holy shit people, just bubble wrap yourself and stop trying to get the world to conform to make YOU, specifically, comfortable.

[(Anonymous)]

Exactly. And the thing is, books aren't like movies - they don't just suddenly spring scenes on you with no real leadup to them. You can generally tell where something is going before it gets to the actual disturbing part so you can stop reading in advance. I have NEVER had a book or a fic just leap right into graphic depictions of uncomfortable stuff that I couldn't see coming from several paragraphs away, which gave me plenty of time to stop reading/skim over that bit.

[(Anonymous)]

Like, wow. People get either hyper-protective or hyper-aggressive when it comes to people who, you know, actually benefit from warnings. Most of whom can get what we need from already published reviews and recaps.

[(Anonymous)]

You sound pretty triggered by the fact that some people find trigger warnings useful.

Hmm.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't have any triggers that I know of, but I think for some things (like graphic descriptions of sexual assault, torture, or other violence; or child or animal death), it would be nice to have content warnings for. I don't think they should be required or anything, but I don't think they would be a huge imposition. If they put them after the acknowledgements, people could choose to read them or not and it would be very hard to be accidentally spoiled by them.

[(Anonymous)]

The thing is, with books, they have editors. Most authors don't churn out a book and presto its available for sale the very next day. Books go through a lengthy editing process where, for the most part, anything majorly triggering is likely removed or rewritten in such a way it isn't going to suddenly trigger the majority of the population.

And generally speaking, if the book is going to have rape or a character death or something "triggering", it's usually part of the central plot. So you know going in that there might be something trigging in the story. You aren't usually going to find unexpected rape or major character death in a romance novel, for example.

But even if all that wasn't a consideration, you aren't going to find a list of triggers for the simple reason that it probably doesn't sell books. If you pick up a book flip to the front pages and see a list of triggers, you may not buy the book. If you have to buy the book first and start reading it to find out, then hey, that's a sale. They care less about your triggers than they do about their sales.

[(Anonymous)]

Quite clearly, mainstream audiences don't have a big problem with rape and murder in their media. But a majority of the mainstream audience doesn't have triggers either.

I think there was a time when a lot of writers with literary pretensions seemed to have a bad case of Nabokov-envy and would do gratuitously squicky sex stuff in order to be "real." And that's apparently not a problem for general audiences who will argue how stuff like The World According to Garp is a great American novel. I prefer to be forewarned about that kind of thing.

[erinptah]

I mean, something doesn't have to be OTT graphic to be triggering. (In the real sense, not in the sense of "I'm upset, and I want to make it sound fancier." The majority of the population doesn't have triggers in the first place.) A general reference to an off-page sexual assault could still hit a reader right in the trauma, if the circumstances are close enough or they're really invested in the character or they just happen to read it on a bad day.

Someone who's read a hundred romance novels (or whatever other category) will have a good idea of the formula, but there's always somebody who just picked up their first book in the genre. So "readers will just know" isn't a good thing to count on.

Plus, there's always genre-bending exceptions! I'd already read a whole lot of sci-fi by the first time I picked up an SF novel that threw in a random scene of Surprise Graphic Bestiality. (Not, like, animalistic aliens or enhanced-to-be-sentient creatures! Just a regular old leopard.)

It wasn't a personally traumatic experience, or anything -- OP is right that most readers don't "need" warnings -- but nobody's claiming "people with severe triggers" are the only group the content warnings would be helpful for.

[(Anonymous)]

I don’t know... I’ve never experienced sexual assault, but last year a very positive seeming book was on the bestseller list in my country (something along the lines of ‘the boy made of sunshine’ or something, I can’t remember) and everyone was talking about it and loving it. It had a really nasty scene where a girl is brutally raped. And it got me physically sick, maybe because I wasn’t expecting it. I usually have no problems with reading horror books, or those thriller books where intestines are thrown everywhere and women are glued to chairs, but in that case... I thought of the women I know who were assaulted and recommended them to not read this book. It would’ve been nice to know. (And no, as it was a plot point it was not mentioned in reviews or anything.)