"if you have had warnings explained to you, and think it's unreasonable to expect you to bother, just to prevent other people being harmed, I think you are a bad person."
I know it's wrong of me to judge people, but IMO, the "I want my art to create a certain effect in the reader" argument is special snowflakism at its finest. You don't get to have control over how a reader reacts to you fiction/art/vid/whatever, because you *can't* control that. You can control how you present your work, and at the very least I think people should try to achieve some kind of balance between "I want to achieve a specific emotional impact on the reader" and "I want to avoid inflicting that emotional impact on people who don't want it or (worse) causing an entirely different and possibly dangerous emotional response that I didn't intend," (because with the exception of one appalling little brat who deliberate wrote a holiday gif exchange fic containing all her recipient's listed squicks a coupe years ago, I doubt writers actually *want* to give readers flashbacks or cause acute emotional distress).
I'm not all that fond of "this fic *might* contain any of the following [X, Y, Z bad or squicky things here]"/"warning; I don't warn" because, to quote Willow from Buffy, "A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend,"* but it's better than nothing.
*It does at least let people avoid fics that might contain triggering things, which is the important part and makes fandom a better place all around, but as a reader I prefer specific warnings -- I don't want to know that a fic *might* contain something bad. I want to know *for certain* whether it does or doesn't, so I can either read it without having to brace myself for impact, as it were, or be emotionally prepared for whatever the bad thing is. Rape/abuse/torture/incest/chan don't trigger me (and character death is often only a issue if I don't know about it in advance - hence my watching TV dramas on DVD rather than as they air so that I can be spoiled for them), but I generally have to know they're coming and be in the right mood in order to enjoy reading about them. Unwarned for stuff might not ruin my day, but it can ruin a fic that I might have liked if I'd been in the right frame of mind for it.
no subject
I know it's wrong of me to judge people, but IMO, the "I want my art to create a certain effect in the reader" argument is special snowflakism at its finest. You don't get to have control over how a reader reacts to you fiction/art/vid/whatever, because you *can't* control that. You can control how you present your work, and at the very least I think people should try to achieve some kind of balance between "I want to achieve a specific emotional impact on the reader" and "I want to avoid inflicting that emotional impact on people who don't want it or (worse) causing an entirely different and possibly dangerous emotional response that I didn't intend," (because with the exception of one appalling little brat who deliberate wrote a holiday gif exchange fic containing all her recipient's listed squicks a coupe years ago, I doubt writers actually *want* to give readers flashbacks or cause acute emotional distress).
I'm not all that fond of "this fic *might* contain any of the following [X, Y, Z bad or squicky things here]"/"warning; I don't warn" because, to quote Willow from Buffy, "A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend,"* but it's better than nothing.
*It does at least let people avoid fics that might contain triggering things, which is the important part and makes fandom a better place all around, but as a reader I prefer specific warnings -- I don't want to know that a fic *might* contain something bad. I want to know *for certain* whether it does or doesn't, so I can either read it without having to brace myself for impact, as it were, or be emotionally prepared for whatever the bad thing is. Rape/abuse/torture/incest/chan don't trigger me (and character death is often only a issue if I don't know about it in advance - hence my watching TV dramas on DVD rather than as they air so that I can be spoiled for them), but I generally have to know they're coming and be in the right mood in order to enjoy reading about them. Unwarned for stuff might not ruin my day, but it can ruin a fic that I might have liked if I'd been in the right frame of mind for it.