When I first started reading metafandom I fell on my head a lot when there were debates about warnings. My background in fandom was low-porn, high-plot, and my experiences with warnings were not with these kinds of 'trigger' issues so much as "If I'd known this pairing was going to be in the background of your fic I wouldn't have read it!" or "You labelled this Naruto/Sasuke when it's really Sasuke/Naruto!" (Good old Naruto fandom.)
I realised that often when I was arguing with people about warnings, we were doing it in such an abstract way that we didn't realise we were talking about different things. What I was talking about were more often than not 'labels' - markers like pairing or genre to tell the prospective reader what the story is about. (I've written some fics that I didn't want to put pairing labels on, which is where I started having conflict with people who advocated warnings for everything.)
When discussions got a bit more explicit I started to get a better picture. When people started talking about 'triggers' I realised that as attached as people can be to OTPs, reading Sasuke/Naruto when you thought you were getting Naruto/Sasuke isn't likely to be a traumatic experience.
Basically what I'm getting at is that I think there needs to be a distinction between 'warnings', which alert the reader to potentially disturbing or upsetting content, and 'labels', which hint at what the story is about. Or to put it even more simply, labels are there to attract readers and warnings are there to, in a sense, turn them away.
no subject
I realised that often when I was arguing with people about warnings, we were doing it in such an abstract way that we didn't realise we were talking about different things. What I was talking about were more often than not 'labels' - markers like pairing or genre to tell the prospective reader what the story is about. (I've written some fics that I didn't want to put pairing labels on, which is where I started having conflict with people who advocated warnings for everything.)
When discussions got a bit more explicit I started to get a better picture. When people started talking about 'triggers' I realised that as attached as people can be to OTPs, reading Sasuke/Naruto when you thought you were getting Naruto/Sasuke isn't likely to be a traumatic experience.
Basically what I'm getting at is that I think there needs to be a distinction between 'warnings', which alert the reader to potentially disturbing or upsetting content, and 'labels', which hint at what the story is about. Or to put it even more simply, labels are there to attract readers and warnings are there to, in a sense, turn them away.