Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2013-01-17 06:47 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2013-01-17 06:47 pm
[ SECRET POST #2207 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2207 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 023 secrets from Secret Submission Post #315.
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.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-01-18 10:11 am (UTC)(link)The internet is constantly whining about how trigger warnings are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY and how it's cruel and thoughtless not to "warn" for the content of your fiction beyond a basic G/PG/PG-13/R/NC-17 rating.
Here's the thing though:
I have never seen one single published book do this. I have never known one single high school or middle school English/Lit class that didn't study SOME material that contained depictions or mentions of violence, rape, abuse, neglect, racism, sexism, foul language, and any number of other horrible things... and students do not get "warned." There is no age restriction on buying or reading books in any country I know about. There is no requirement for books to be rated like movies or to contain content warnings.
If everyone who whines and moans and bitches and SJW's about this on the internet GENUINELY has as much of a problem with it as they claim, how the holy FUCK did any of them get past 7th grade? Do any of them read ANYTHING other than fanfiction and street signs?
I've had a panic disorder for the entirety of my life that I can remember. I do actually have some "triggers" which, under the right circumstances, can give me a panic attack just by reading about them. They're not things commonly considered things people ive trigger warnings for. Know how I've dealt with that? By fucking SKIMMING OVER IT. See things leading somewhere that makes you uncomfortable? Skip ahead. I was in goddamn KINDERGARTEN when I figured that out. I do not believe that there is a significant number of people IN THE WORLD who are old enough and have the resources to read fanfic and contribute to fandom on the internet who are so incapable of skipping over content they find disagreeable that there is any real reason to "warn" for anything, ever.
Yeah, I'm going there. ANYTHING. EVER.
If you can buy a book from a bookstore or go to the movies or watch TV without having every word, every shot, and every commercial screened for you, you can fucking flip ahead a page or two or close the tab if something bothers you.
The exception to this is incredibly graphic depictions of sex or violence, especially under circumstances that would be illegal in real life. Books in the library DO normally tend to include some kind of description or review quote that makes it clear that the book is full of blood, gore, genitals, and all of the above in connection to children, or something. Those are extremes, and it's fair to include in a story description that that's what people are about to get into. And some people are LOOKING for that, as much as anyone is looking to AVOID it, so that's just basic advertising sense. You write something for a certain audience, you want them to find it. The way your audience finds you is the same way people who don't want to read the kind of stuff you're writing about avoid you. It's pretty straightforward, really.
So basically... yeah, I don't think most people know the difference between a "trigger" and a "squick." Most people I know have only ever had a panic attack once in their lives, if ever. I think that's the basis for the rampant misuse of the term "trigger." Most people have never had a panic attack, or even seen anyone have one, so they extrapolate meaning from descriptions until the word "trigger" has started to mean what people used to describe as "squick" except people attribute FAR more extreme mental and/or physical distress to the repercussions than actually exist in probably 99% of cases.
Here's a very, very basic guide:
If a piece of writing frightens you, makes you cry, gives you nightmares for a little while, makes you leery of certain places or people for a bit, makes you feel sick, depressed, unable to sleep, lonely, empty, etc... You haven't been triggered. You have been affected. Good writing does that. You run the risk of that happening to you every tim you open a book. Congratulations, you are a human being with a healthy sense of sympathy and empathy and emotional depth. You might also be a bit of a pussy, depending on the source material, but whatever.... everyone is affected by SOMETHING.
If you have been triggered, you are probably doing some combination of the following things: puking; struggling to breathe; trying to shut out all light/sound; trying to FILTER light and sound to habitually theraputic levels which you have learned, consciously or unconsciously, alleviate symptoms; sobbing uncontrollably; pacing, fidgeting, shaking, twitching, or showing other physical tics; drinking; taking drugs; becoming increasingly convinced that you are either going insane or literally dying or both; experiencing distorted senses which may extend as far as auditory and visual hallucinations, vertigo, and blurred or tunnel vision; inability to speak or think clearly; severe decrease in dexterity or sense of balance or distance; the list goes on.
There is a MASSIVE goddamn difference. Panic attacks aren't generally life-threatening (barring cases where other physical issues are at platy, or if they occur at a time and place that causes a person to become endangered due to lack of control over themselves), but they sure as HELL are not a joke. Mine, when I get them, last anywhere from several hours to SEVERAL DAYS. A fully developed panic attack is absolutely debilitating. It robs you of your senses, your logic... all ability to function goes flying out the door for a while. Most people can still function to some degree through a panic attack except at the most extreme level -- at least function well enough to communicate that something is wrong with them or to seek help. The kind of panic attacks that launch people into complete blackout-crazy mode are so incredibly rare and usually beyond the control of the person suffering from them to a point where it's an issue that is almost always observed and dealt with BY NECESSITY relatively quickly after a person develops those kinds of episodes.
If you have never experienced a kind of all-encompassing largely irrational TERROR that swallows the universe and robs you of your ability to think, move, breathe... if you have never felt the perpetual motion machine of fear that makes your body switch into fight-or-flight mode, which makes you feel ill and breathless and physically helpless, which then increases the fear, which increases the physical symptoms, which... and on and on and on... if you have never sat in a dark, quiet place huddled in a ball rocking back and forth trying to simultaneously take a breath deep enough to register as an intake of oxygen and not throw up while rocking back and forth and shaking so hard you're also afraid you might be epileptic... if you have never been frightened to the point of screaming (if you could scream) by the sound and the speed of your own heartbeat, the feeling of your hair, the shape of your shadow, or the inability to tell which direction is UP.... you have never fucking been triggered.
Lucky you.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-01-18 11:00 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-01-18 12:00 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-01-18 02:08 pm (UTC)(link)Yes, the difference between squicks and triggers is not at all understood. Yes, people should probably own up to things being squicks and not triggers (not least because being squicked is entirely legitimate and most of the suite of things people are squicked by are things that most media attempt to warn for anyway).
However, I'm still firmly behind warning, even for things that mainstream books don't (though most visual media do). In part because my triggers in fic are particularly likely (though not guaranteed) to come up in depictions of certain things, including non-con and some graphic descriptions, so even as a squick warning they serve to warn me in many cases.
And in part because fanfic is ... a significant degree more likely to randomly deal with those things? At least, it seems so. I've never come across the frequency of completely random sex and non-con scenes in literature that I do in fanfic (well, outside of certain genres - supernatural romance and crime romance have a higher tendency towards it too?). I've never come across the kind of random 'oh, by the way, the protagonist totally just got roofied by alien spores' in books that I do in fanfic. Fanfic, because of the unmoderated nature of what you can post, when and where, is much more likely (or feels so) to include many random elements of things which in books are largely limited to genres and often built up ahead of time. Plus, there are a whole suite of specifically fanfic tropes that regularly stray into troublesome depictions that just don't show up with the same kind of frequency in mainstream literature (a/b/o, aliens made them do it, the frequency of non-con fantasies in ways that mainstream literature doesn't allow, a suite of vaguely aphrodisiac style plots that hit people with drug-related triggers or squicks).
Fanfic is actually a different media, with different demands and frequencies of events, and because of that frequency I really would much prefer warnings, though correctly labelled as squicks, to continue to be very much a thing. I know what genres of fics to avoid to keep from pressing on my triggers (sort of, mostly, now, and there's always little things that no-one can warn for and that just happen if you're risking any media), but having warnings in existence, particularly when fanfic as a medium is much more prone to random elements, really really helps with that.
And people who are squicked, not triggered, probably feel much the same way. There are days when you don't put R rated movies in the player, there are days when you avoid genres of books that are likely to just distress you, there are days when you just don't want to deal with a random rape scene or child abuse scenario in your fic. I don't particularly see anything wrong with that. As you said, most forms of media warn for most of those things, and fair enough.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-01-18 11:24 pm (UTC)(link)In IB (AP) English in high school we read Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon," except for 5 or 6 kids whose parents signed a waiver, and they read Wurthering Heights instead, and they were sent off to the library during discussion time. A couple of us in one breakout group were talking about them (because 17 year olds are assholes and gossips). Anyway, I knew one of the people wasn't reading because it was "too sexy" and someone else just rolled their eyes at that, because all the "sexy" parts were rape and incest, and the point was that it was horrific and terrible, and yet we weren't given the options for books like Heart of Darkness, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Brave New World...