[ SECRET POST #2207 ]

[case]

⌈ 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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Speaking as someone who has been triggered, and by fanfic (and hated it in part because I've been reading fanfic for ten fucking years, and hearing about triggers, but it wasn't until after a series of events around three years ago that this started happening, this whole ... the breathing and the unreasoning terror and the coming back to yourself in a ball on the floor remembering how to breathe and pacing fucking circles for the next five hours waiting for the jitters to stop and trying to keep your thoughts firmly away from what ... and this was a fanfic, I've been reading fanfic for a fucking decade, what the hell, why is this) ...

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.