[ 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

[(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.