FicWad

WARNING: what you are about to read will contain words, statements or phrases that will not be censored and may be upsetting to you. The English language has billions of words that I could use, along with adopted foreign words or phrases at my disposal, so there is no way for me to know what word will trigger you, like “cake.” I may even make up a word or two in the article. Who fleugelflaggel knows?

If the usage of capital letters, periods, exclamation points, other types of punctuation (officially recognized [or otherwise.~]), italics, or the liberal usage of ellipsis offends you . . . leave. NOW! If you think basic English grammar in any context is considered a microaggression, I’m not giving you the time of day or night. You can fuck right off with that nonsense. And you can consider that last statement a macro-aggression from me to you.

Finally, if reading the words of an opinion that differs from yours makes you:

foam at the mouth, burst blood vessels, relive the trauma of your parents refusing to buy you a toy when you were four, or thirty-four, roll your eyes so far back they get stuck, have heart palpitations, insomnia, hair loss, indigestion, heartburn, upset stomach, explosive diarrhea with rectal bleeding, violent outbursts, projectile vomiting, brain aneurysms, atrophy to your one brain cell, epileptic or conniption fits, paralysis from the brain down, develop cancer or tumor-like growths, teeth grinding, alters your menstrual cycle or causes one despite not having a uterus, this article is also not for you.

Read at your own risk.

Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.

I am fed up with “cancel culture,” “woke culture,” and people being gate-keeping “fiction police,” disguising their censorship as concern for people, when in reality, they simply found a story they didn’t like and treated it like a bug crawled up their ass, and blaming the writer for wasting their time reading such drivel or “disturbing” content. They then turn it around to make it seem like the writer doesn’t care about their readers’ well-being if they wrote certain tropes or subjects, and supposedly didn’t warn them of the content. I’ve seen the disclaimers of depictions of flashing lights to protect those who suffer from seizures, and the content warnings for violent imagery, containing profanity, and other warnings on TV shows and movies, but what first gripped my attention on “trigger warnings” for literature were college campuses. In 2014, in the Oberlin’s Sexual Offense Resource Guide, it stated:

“A trigger is something that recalls a traumatic event to an individual. Reactions to triggers can take many different forms; individuals may feel any range of emotion during and after a trigger.”

“Understand triggers, avoid unnecessary triggers, and provide trigger warnings.”

“Anything could be a trigger—a smell, song, scene, phrase, place, person, and so on. Some triggers cannot be anticipated, but many can.”

“Remove triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.”

“Sometimes a work is too important to avoid.”

Oberlin even advised saying this simple phrase “This work contains sensitive material” wasn’t enough, and leaving the statement as is would be considered patronizing to the students. With these sets of conflicting parameters, of course, the faculty (who are the least trained to handle cases where a student survived being assaulted, being in a war zone, or was racially or physically discriminated against, and can only help the student by listening to them and report to Title IX if the assaulted student decided to) would feel like they were being hog-tied with a gag. Telling professors to determine which work can or cannot be removed from the course material based on the level of triggering content, by the same token to provide trigger warnings, but avoiding “unnecessary” warnings, all the while keeping in mind that triggers could be anything, may as well be telling them to go ride a roller-coaster without any safety harnesses and try to hang on to the two feet of dental floss they were given and tied themselves down with.

Professors didn’t argue against providing content warnings in the course material and syllabus. What they took issue with was how extensive, stifling and contradictory these recommendations were and how it could affect academic freedom. It’s hard enough to get a class to focus on one subject at a time, but recommending alternative assignments for those who were uncomfortable with a book, movie, a piece of history or what-have-you, and trying to teach two (or more) ideas at once to a group of at least thirty individuals who may have fifty different triggers? Impossible!

It may also bring in the notion that framing a piece of work around triggers brings up the question of its validity and existence. Does Lolita need to exist? What about Mark Twain novels? Meine Kampf? Gone With the Wind. Technically, nothing needs to exist, but we have them to study the themes, the time period, social and cultural norms, and to teach different perspectives and develop differing interpretations and critical thinking skills. This helps expand creative minds and why these works are still significant today, even if only one person sees the value in them.

Students protested a sculpture of a man in his underwear, saying that it puts sexual assault in the forefront of the survivors’ minds, but the artist said it was about sleepwalking, and the stresses that causes it, and students still insisted it be moved indoors. Who’s at fault? The artist, or those who had interpreted it as something completely different?

Instead of using trigger warnings as a way for college students—adults who are old enough to vote and go to war—to prepare themselves for some difficult material, and to have some form of coping strategy in order to process said material, the students accused their teachers and professors of unfair treatment if they needed to leave the room, or their requests for alternate assignments were denied, and still wanted passing grades despite not being present or failing to complete assignments.

These professors’ jobs were to prepare these students for their choice in professions and life beyond the school system, of which comes without any warnings, and to promote critical thinking and to consider difficult subjects that may differ from their own perspective or experiences, but these students didn’t want sections of history taught and they wanted certain books to be completely taken off of the syllabus despite the relevancy or importance to the course. Having a safe classroom doesn’t mean avoiding or censoring difficult or controversial subject matter, it means not being abused by teachers or students and earning a grade equal to the effort put in. How do people expect to pass a class if they have to keep leaving the room because of their specific triggers, which professors have no way of predicting one person’s trigger, let alone every student’s trigger.

If college professors can’t cater to a hundred students per semester, how does anyone expect a random person writing fictional stories on online platforms, open to millions of people worldwide to read, be able to cater to them all? For the record, I’m talking about all sorts of content creators and creations, but for simplicity’s sake, and because I have seen such contention on fictional stories, specifically, I’m just going to continue saying “writers.”

Content warnings and maturity ratings are a feasible compromise, but people have mistaken content warnings for trigger warnings and continue to demand for more specificity. Most content warnings cover broad subject matters, such as profanity, violence, and sexual themes; and the rating hints at the extremity and detail of what is being warned. Where “sexual themes” could include consensual sex, underage sex, kinks, or sexual assault, people want the more specific words or phrases tagged. What people have failed to realize is that triggers aren’t just the terrible acts themselves. As Oberlin stated, it could be anything from the color of the shirt their attacker was wearing, hearing a baby cry, a certain smell, the texture of something, and so on, so it would be impossible to tag for everything. And if someone tried? Guess what? No reader would read that huge wall of random words you call “tags.”

They would either skip the story altogether, or skip the tags, read the story, and then take out their upset on the writer in the comment section for not “tagging appropriately” because their specific trigger wasn’t in bold, underline, italicized, quoted with extra spaces or line breaks, or in some mysterious way to make their ultra-specific trigger stand out from everyone else’s ultra-specific trigger that they would also like to be made to stand out in bold, underline, italicized, quoted, extra spaces or line breaks.

To be clear, I’m not arguing against books having some sort of content warnings, but I despise being told how to do it, how specific would be “appropriate” or mandatory, and where to place them in what size, color or font that isn’t already covered by the website’s built-in function. If these demands for specific content/trigger warnings are enforced by websites hosting creative works, writers would have to spoil their story, which may ruin the writer’s vision, and the reader’s experience. Goddammit, it’s OK to be upset, surprised, angry, fearful, or recognizing characters as toxic or abusive in a story, especially if that’s what I want you to feel by writing it! Fiction lets us feel shit in a safe, non-judgmental way, on our own terms and in our own space and time with our own level of comfort.

If something gets to be too much, if you sense you are about to be triggered (and I do sincerely mean this, not the “triggered” that has become the buzzword to mean “I don’t like this” or “this is gross and icky, why is this out in public?”), or if you think a story is going in a direction you don’t like, stop. Put it down, go back, go brew some tea and give yourself a bubble bath. When you’re in a better mental state, you can decide whether or not you’d like to continue reading the story. No one is forcing readers to read these stories. Not online, or at your own leisure, anyway.

In fact, therapists say that trigger warnings don’t help. In a 2018 study in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry by Benjamin W. Bellet, Payton J. Jones, and Richard J. McNally, experts conducted a study and found that trigger warnings tended to make people without any history of trauma or loss feel vulnerable and heightened their anxiety, which is the exact opposite of what these warnings were intending to do for those who had suffered from trauma, and another study in 2021, also by Payton J. Jones, stated that trigger warnings may prolong the negative impact because readers are more likely to avoid the subject matter altogether, or they prepare to shield themselves from a mental attack instead of learning to manage their reactions when encountering triggering material. Therapists agree that avoidance doesn’t help, and encourage steadily exposing themselves to triggering material, little by little, until their trigger becomes manageable or they are no longer triggered, using “exposure therapy.”

Exposure therapy isn’t just used for people with a traumatic history, suffering from PTSD or triggers. It works for all sorts of physical, mental, emotional or personal issues.

Children born during the height of the pandemic and growing up breathing filtered air are more susceptible to getting sick, with worse symptoms, because they didn’t get enough germs to help their immune system practice fighting viruses, bacteria, and infections.

Anxiety levels is like a person’s social immune system. A person with social anxiety and extreme shyness doesn’t just “get over it” by sitting alone in a room, breathing filtered air, forever; they have to put themselves out there, trying new experiences and talking with more people. Will they still have social anxiety and shyness? Yes, but with time and more exposure, they won’t let it hold them back from pursuing what they want out of life anymore. Anxiety and shyness doesn’t have to be their core identity.

Readers that do suffer from PTSD and have triggers don’t need to be babied or be in padded rooms in order to read stories. Their choice to not let their trauma become their identity, to seek help and how they thrive in the world and online, is no one’s business but their own. The internet was never a safe space, nor was it ever meant to be one. You will come across content that disgusts you or triggers you, just as a casual stranger on a bus might decide to talk to you and say something that you don’t like. You can state that you would rather not continue the conversation and distance yourself from the stranger, but you can’t stop the stranger from continuing the conversation with someone else, even if they continue to talk about it loudly, reminding you that this kind of person still exists.

Writers aren’t responsible for other people’s mental state, but, unlike the world off-line, that doesn’t mean there aren’t features already built into the websites to help viewers cater their online experience, and taking the guess-work out of posting and advertising their content for writers. Here are some examples of what I’ve seen on websites that hosts creative writing:

Category Most fiction hosting websites that I’ve signed up to have this at the very least, usually in the form of a movie-esque maturity rating scale, ranging from K to MA, E, or NC-17, and these sites usually describe what kind of content is allowed and how detailed or graphic you can be under these ratings. Not every M-rated story may check off every single box for profanity, violence, sexual themes and death, but if a story is rated M, you can safely assume it might and make a decision if you’d like to read it.

There are a few websites, such as FanFiction.Net and FictionPress.Com (FFNet and FPCom) that has forbidden MA, E, or NC-17 content on their platform, so if you don’t like extreme content, you should be safe from gratuitous or graphic content on these sites. Unfortunately, in FFNet’s/FPCom’s case, there are only a few people moderating both of these sites, so extreme-rated stories sit on these sites until the moderator decides another mass purge is in order.

When was the last one? We are probably due for another one soon. Who knows?

Genre and Type You will get wildly different tones and verbiage depending on the genre, or even between two sub-genres of the main genre. For example, you’re probably not going to read thorough descriptions of a male ejaculating in a harlequine romance like you might in erotica. And kissing? A shower scene kiss would be tonally different between a couple taking a romantic shower together, knowing of the possibility of having the rest of their lives together in that same romance story, rather than taking a shower together, kissing, because it might be the last time they get to do it in an apocalyptic horror story. Could it still be romantic, in a way? Yes, but the undertone would shift the scene to a darker light.

If you know you don’t like horror or “Ew! They had sex!” then don’t read horror or M-rated romance.

Summaries After noting the category and genre, the summaries can also hint at what might be in the story, if the writer writes a decent summary at all, and didn’t just put “Summary sucks, story is better.” Most story-hosting websites give you a large amount of space to include an engaging summary, but upon searching through a list of stories, may only show you one or two tweets worth of the summary. That’s why I advise to write a one or two sentence summary that punches right to the point, and if you want to give readers the full summary, either add that below the short version, or add it above the first chapter.

What I look for is what the conflict is and the tone the summary sets, and if it’s not there, or if it doesn’t appeal to me, I don’t read it.

Content Warnings Some sites have a set of warnings that writers have to check off if it applies to their stories, and some don’t. Most have the generalized warnings, such as profanity, violence, sexual themes, or death, and some may add more specific warnings, like on Ghosts of the Vanguard with lemon, lime, mild adult situations, descriptive blanks, drugs, spoilers, and more. Archive of Our Own (AO3) also has “Chose Not to Warn” (CNTW) which means if an author, for whatever reason, wishes to not warn their readers in any way, they have the option to check this instead of the four archive warnings.

So if you ran into some disturbing content that totally squicked you out—we totally need to bring this word back—or you found extremely, graphic content, but the author checked CNTW, that’s on you for not paying close enough attention, or, knowing that you weren’t going to get any warning, chose to read it anyway.

Additional Tags As much as I love tags and how they can help me find stories I want to read (or determine if it doesn’t exist so I would have to write my own), tags have become the problem children for some writers to the point of either not posting their work, or not bothering to write the story in fear of “not tagging it appropriately.” If you haven’t guessed by now, they have become the focus of my ire in this article. And if you want even more specificity, I’m frustrated by AO3’s tagging complainers.

After choosing the category, the genre, and warnings, much like summaries, the sites that have a tagging system leave tags as an option at the writer’s discretion. Some sites only allow single-worded tags, so writers would have to hyphenate phrases, such as “mild-lemon”, and some can have entire sentences as tags. As for how many, or what to tag, that is ultimately the writer’s choice. Some writers are minimalists, and only tag the major components of their stories, and some can write a pre-saga in the tags, tagging as much as the site allows them to. For better or worse. Whether these tags are relevant to the story, or just the author’s comments directed towards the readers, such as “I wrote this at 3AM instead of sleeping.”

(I dare you to look up “Sexy Times with Wangxian” where the author had thousands of tags that they continued to add onto with every new chapter, ranging from warnings of objectionable content to “mangoes.” This story was the reason why AO3 put a limit to the amount of tags you could have on your story.)

Me? I’m more of a minimalist, tagging major character pairings, sub-genres, things I know readers would like to search for, and maybe, maybe an additional major warning for one or two things. It depends on the story, if I don’t mind spoiling this component, or what time of the month or what mood I’m in. It doesn’t matter because tagging isn’t mandatory, so the choice is mine, not my readers.

If no one reads my stories, oh well.

And if a reader found my story abhorrent because it had a graphic torture scene in an E-rated story with the Violence warning checked off, and the summary alluding a character facing a group of terrorists? Oh well. They were aptly warned with or without the “torture” tag.

As long as I have checked all of the boxes that the site requires of me, then I have done my due diligence and tagged “appropriately.” How I advertise my story is my business, and if I want a marketing manager, I’ll hire one, so there’s no need for anyone to volunteer for the gig in the commentary section.

If you think a story would benefit with another tag (for whatever reason), use your AO3 bookmark and add that tag for your own fans.

I have long given up on making readers happy, because no matter what I do, or how much I do, it will never be enough. If I don’t know where the goal posts are, I’m not moving, so let me be damned if my story “triggered” somebody by mentioning a sponge. . . . You think I’m joking, don’t you?

I posted “What Are Some of the Most Ridiculous Tags You’ve Been Requested (Commanded) to Add?” on Reddit, and I received some bizarre answers that goes way beyond being “triggered.”

knightofthecacti:

One of my readers on good old DA wanted me to add a trypophobia warning because a car wash scene had a sponge mentioned and apparently some people have a fear of sponges.

. . . .

It just irked me that I was commanded to add that warning just for using the word “sponge” 3 times in a 40k long story.

KurenaiTenka:

Though the most ridiculous one I saw people using/advocating for was a warning for capital letters.

. . . .

Like literally any capital letters included at all. The argument was that capital letters ‘sound’ like shouting, which can cause anxiety.

. . . .

Literally seen fics written in lapslock with this as the reason.

cthuluhooprises:

Someone wanted me to tag “social media use”. Apparently they were recovering from an addiction themselves, and while I’m sympathetic to that, I don’t think my characters briefly mentioning Twitter is cause to tag.

The kicker? They commented this on Tumblr.

Keksdepression:

Someone in my comment section completely lost it and called me disgusting and an animal murderer because the characters in my fanfiction eat meat – just like in canon. Apparently, this particular commenter was somewhat of a hardcore vegan and couldn’t stand the idea that anyone would eat fictional alien “cattle”. I mean I understand why people refuse to eat animals but this? Seriously? It’s not like I hurt any living being with it (besides this readers feelings apparently) but according to them I am promoting violence and animal abuse. So basically they wanted a tag saying something along the lines of: “Characters are eating meat.” “Not vegan friendly."

shnuffeluv:

Not on a fic recently, but I have been asked to warn for ellipses before...I use ellipses rather liberally and think anyone who’s triggered by ellipses should not be reading books/fanfic.

uncannycoriander:

I was asked to tag for smoking cigarettes in a fic once? Which this fic already had a lot of tags for like ‘drinking’ and ‘recreational drug use’ and ‘suicidal ideation’ and ‘depression’ and a good amount of the story had the characters at college town bars so it really threw me that like, smoking nicotine was the nitpick.

trouble_walking:

One time I wrote a scene where a character was playing a song on guitar beside someone else, and one of the strings snapped. It was supposed to be a rather comedic scene, but I received a comment saying I should’ve added a “warning” because apparently the idea of a string snapping is something the reader finds “physically painful.” They said it’s triggering for people who play guitar and have snapped strings.

I have played guitar for years, and think most people who play guitar could agree that there is no warning needed, especially with the context.

CarnivorousXmasTree:

This isn’t mine, but I don’t see it here so I’ll repeat what I read in this sub the other month. Apparently, someone was told to tag for unprotected sex.

Yes, you read that right—unprotected sex.

. . . .

. . . condoms aren’t exactly a common occurrence in smut, so if sex without a condom is a personal problem, then even a marginally savvy reader should be smart enough to practice self-control and back out when condoms aren’t mentioned. It’s not the author’s job to promote safe sex practices if they are not inclined to do so.

Blackjackgabbiani

I was told I needed to add a Major Character Death tag...to a fic that already had it.

Some of these demands came from people who clearly didn’t receive the message that their sense of morality or personal ethics weren’t better or purer than other people’s, and should really get off their high horse before demanding for a tag that /didn’t even fit the story/.

Kukapetal:

Didn’t happen to me, but this entire thread reminds me of that time somebody got chewed out on Tumblr (I think) for not having a gore warning on a picture of a /pomegranate/.

SeaworthySwarth:

One of my RL friends who is also in fandom vented to me a few years ago because she had multiple readers ask her to tag infidelity on a story with no infidelity.

The issue was that the OTP got together, then they broke up. One of them dated someone else while they were broken up. Then they got back together. A few readers insisted that this was cheating because the other half of the ship waited for the person to come back and didn’t try to move on.

gnomelover3000:

I was commanded (off-site, at least) to use the “underage” warning for a pairing I write with a 10-20 year age gap… However, the younger person in the pairing is early 20s at the youngest, and I usually write a point in canon where they’re both pretty old and the age gap is negligible. Plus, there are much wider age gaps for some of the popular canon pairings, and no one cares about them. But apparently early 20s—the age I was at the time of this person scolding me—is no different from 14 or 15 developmentally, legally, and morally, and I should have misused the tagging system for this person’s comfort. Shrugs wildly.

About_Unbecoming:

Not me but a fic that I was reading featured a character that was explicitly explained to be in an OPEN relationship, but there were people in the comments pushing her to tag for “cheating.”

Korrin:

I wrote a story in which a gay guy’s best female friend offered to be a surrogate for him and his husband. I had a reader tell me I should put a warning up, not for pregnancy, but specifically for surrogacy. They told me I needed to add a warning, not because sometimes wealthy people take advantage of women in impoverished situations (which they do), but because their culture looks down on women who become surrogates and refer to them as incubators. To me that just sounded like they hated women who don’t live in the way they think they should, so I was not willing to add the tag, especially not when it was only mentioned in a conversation in the fic.

EzzyRebel:

I once had a reader ask (demand) me to tag a character a/character b on a fic that focused on character a and his mentor while character b was only mentioned.

JoBeWriting:

I was asked to remove a ship tag. Even though… the ship was featured in the fic…

mushroompone:

Wrote a story about aging gracefully and finding new passions as you get older. The story is not, in any way, about death. It does not mention death. It is an upbeat, very positive and wholesome genfic about living life to the fullest in advanced age.

Had a reader comment that it triggered their thanatophobia (fear of death/dying) and that is should be tagged as major character death.

That’s all well and good except no one died!!! Pretty sure that’s a prereq for the death tag!!

Sure_Sundae_5047

Not on my fic, but on one I read. It was somewhat violent hate sex with a dom/sub dynamic going on, but it was explicitly mentioned twice in the fic that both parties had agreed to it and that it was fully consensual. Someone in the comments asked the author to add a noncon warning with zero explanation as to why they thought it needed it. It wasn’t even like there was room for misinterpretation, I guess they just thought that inflicting pain = automatically noncon?

. . . .

Nope, it wasn’t even consensual nonconsent, just sadomasochism type stuff, degradation and insults. I was honestly so confused to see the comment, the author’s response was pretty much “no, I’m not doing that, this is very explicitly consensual”. I think people just don’t understand what they actually want to see when they talk about wanting clear consent, and what they actually mean is 100% vanilla sex with no kink, which is totally fine, but then don’t come to fics that clearly aren’t that to complain!

JohnBloodborne21:

Spanking a cat girl’s ass during sex is not classified as animal abuse.

Reinakun:

1. Nonconsensual kissing. Because Char A hadn’t asked permission before kissing Char B. Even though Char A had made his intentions super clear and Char B as 1000% on board.

2. I used to get a lot of requests to tag who bottoms or tops in my fics, which I always refused. I don’t even like seeing such things tagged unless it’s a PWP/kink fic.

MooshAro:

I was once told to add a ‘graphic depictions of violence’ tag because a character tripped and fell down. There was no blood, nothing was broken, it was just me playing up a clumsy character for some good ole slapstick. Needless to say, I did not follow that request.

And then there were plain pricks being pricks.

365iwannadrinkwine:

I got asked to remove a pairing because it was clear they weren’t going to be endgame – just because they don’t last doesn’t mean the relationship isn’t in the fic people!

X23onastarship:

I’ve been asked twice for ending tags on my long fics. These can be pretty depressing reads and one person asking said: “does this have a happy or sad ending? Please tag which one so I know if I’m wasting my time or not”.

If that’s your thing, fine, but why not just filter for completed fics? I’m not the one wasting their time.

. . . .

I don’t like to put in ending tags for a couple of reasons. 1, because I want the freedom to change the ending before publishing and 2, because I don’t want any harassment because someone disagrees on it being happy/sad. A lot of my endings don’t fit neatly into either category.

There are more on other Reddit threads with more bizarre complaints as well, like someone demanding a diabetes warning for the mention of a sugar-free yogurt because their /mother/—not them—suffered from diabetes (“Please stop getting ‘triggered’ at everything you see.”)!

“Seriously, Reader, how do you consume any media at all?” is pretty wild! And with the comments I posted above with the outlandish demands, I’m not convinced this was a troll. Talosbronze started his post with:

I woke to a rather mind-boggling set of long comments from a reader of my current HP longfic. I would write it off as an obvious troll, but the reader has commented seriously (if a bit oddly) once or twice before.

The comments were three, all-caps lists of more than a hundred tags I “SHOULD ADD IF [I’m] A DECENT [sic] PERSON”.

AO3 limits the additional tags to 75, which I find is already a ridiculous amount, so I don’t know how this reader expected Talosbronze to fit more than a hundred tags. Keeping in mind that this particular M-rated fan fiction was for the Harry Potter fandom, and complied with most of the canon material, here are some of the ridiculous proposed tags this reader suggested:

“Author is disturbed” in regards to some torture, gore and violence which the writer already had those warnings checked, but this is purely just an insult aimed at the writer.

“Animal abuse, animal deaths, pet abuse, and PETA violations” in regards to Hedwig’s death that was in the movie and the books. First off, “PETA violations.” That’s rich considering they are a horrible organization and kills puppies. And second—and you’ll see this in the rest of the list—that many of these could have been condensed to one tag, if the story truly warranted it or if the writer gave enough of a damn to even consider it. To which, I would certainly not give a damn to this wilted pansy of a demanding commentator.

“Pedophilia, pedophilia tendencies, sexualization of minors, minor sex, minor sexualization, adults behaving badly, underage, and severely underage” in regards to a drunkard hitting on a 17-year-old Hermione. There was no history of child grooming, child abuse, or even on-page sex with Hermione or any other character. To include this would be watering down what pedophilia or childhood sexual abuse entails, and is grossly misleading, not to mention not needed for this particular story.

“Pregnancy, pregnancy squick, pregnant characters, pregnancy kink, birth, age-gap, age-gap relationship, and big age-gap” in regards to Tonks and Lupin who were both adults at the time of starting their relationship, to which the writer explains is mostly off screen and is only mentioned. The pregnancy isn’t even treated as a kink. And “squick”? Really? For something that was only mentioned? The birth wasn’t even described.

“Not always canon”. No shit. It’s /fan fiction/. If I wanted something that didn’t deviate from the canon, I would just reread the books. “Queers, gays, queer-bashing, and slash relationships” mostly in regards to Dumbledore canonically being gay, who is dead when the fan fiction starts. As for “queer-bashing,” the writer explains it as Ron simply questioning Dumbledore’s decisions for Harry. It had nothing to do with Dumbledore being gay.

“Author is sorry for killing X, author doesn’t care, and author is disturbed” in regards to the death of their favorite character. And, again, more insults aimed at the writer. That’ll surely convince him to add these tags.~

It’s not even whether or not the author included specific tags in the tagging section anymore. Readers want the tags in specific parts of the story now. I might add “sexual assault” in the tags even though I already checked the sexual themes box in the warnings if it’s a major component to my story instead of a blink-and-you-miss-it mention somewhere—I’m not that heartless, I swear—but to want me to tag the specific chapter as having the sexual assault scene? No! I’ve already told you the story would have it in the first place, I’m not telling you when it happens because it cheapens it and dulls the engagement.

I want you to be angry, disgusted and fearful, if you can handle it, of which I would have already provided ample warnings. And if you thought you could, but couldn’t, stop reading and take a break! Don’t torture yourself over a bunch of words on a screen.

Fuck, apparently, even putting “sexual assault” in the tags might trigger someone nowadays. I’ve been seeing people substituting letters for punctuation and symbols like it’s some sort of puzzle. Some of the blame could possibly be on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram for having stricter content guidelines, but the fact that the writing websites I frequent don’t have this sort of limitation, or restriction for just mentioning the words, I don’t know why this trend had spread to other sites. I don’t even know if people get triggered by the words; I always thought it was more about the context and situation of the word, i.e. describing the actual abuse. The hitting, the insults, character assassinations and put-downs, the bruising, the emotional neglect, and everything else that comes with it. These are some of what I’ve seen:

Sch//l (o, o) for school or p@rents for parents. No, seriously, I saw these once on someone’s tagline on /QuoteV/, and they were serious about it. The horror. . . .~` S..c.d. (u, i, i, e) for suicide. R/p/ (a, e) for rape. M/rd/r (u, e) for murder. Try this one: s/lf-m/t/l/t//n. Here are the vowels: e, u, i, a, i, o. If you still can’t figure it out, it’s “self-mutilation.”

Now, instead of letting the eyes skim over the words, readers have to solve the puzzle to figure out what they are supposedly being warned about, bringing more attention to the word itself. The whole point of censoring the trigger warning was to not trigger someone who gets triggered by the words of suicide, rape, murder or self-mutilation, which makes these mini-puzzles redundant.

Let’s not even forget about people with reading disorders who may not be able to solve the puzzle, and click on the thread to engage in the discussion anyway, only to be triggered by the discussion. Some people don’t even bother to list the missing vowels/letters next to the censored word, so that last one may be impossible for some people to solve. I’m including myself in that one.

Additionally, this will be a pain for people who primarily use screen readers. Do you really think hearing “’R’ asterisk ‘P’ asterisk parenthesis ‘A’, ‘E’ end parenthesis” is an adequate way to warn people? Not to mention, people aren’t going to censor the trigger word when they’re trying to exclude it from their search, so your story containing “r/p/” would still show up alongside other stories as if it doesn’t include rape.

There has also been some friction as to what certain tags mean.

If you discovered AO3 after having written on other writing sites, you might not know that “&” and “/” between two or more characters, such as Character&Character or Character/Character, aren’t interchangeable symbols, particularly because other sites tend to not define these sorts of symbols or how a writer tags a pairing, so writers from these other sites might not know to look for tag definitions and requirements. I always thought tags should be intuitive, but I guess not anymore.

On AO3, “&” refers to platonic, non-sexual, relationships, where as “/” refer to romantic or sexual couples; however, AO3 has not clarified if “X” or name-smooshing, such as “SasukeXSakura” or “SasuSaku”, has any significance in regards to character pairings. I never tag platonic relationships, so it never occurred to me before I stumbled on it in a Reddit thread, so let’s just politely inform these writers that AO3 has defined these symbols a certain way and this is what readers expect when they see these symbols in a relationship pairing on this site, instead of assuming the writer purposefully tagged their hardcore incest fan fiction as a platonic relationship just to get you to clutch your pearls, or your shriveling nut-sacks. If you don’t feel like leaving such a comment, you can also just report the story for mistagging, since pairings aren’t one of the miscellaneous, extra tags an author can add that could mean absolutely anything and would be unenforceable.

Another common theme I’ve run across, as far as sexual relationships are concerned, is who “tops” and “bottoms” during sex (usually in same-sex [male] relationships). Even if I ever get around to writing sex scenes, I’m not tagging that. Ever. People can switch it up in the bedroom, so it may not stay consistent during the story, but even if it did, or I only had one big sex scene in the entire story . . . it would tell me it may not have been a good story with an interesting relationship development if the only thing the reader focuses on is who’s-penetrating-who or whether or not there is penetration at all. Either that, or the readers’ OTP only has enough room for such a narrow field of what they deem is “acceptable” sex, and that is not my problem.

And just so we’re abundantly clear, I’m also not tagging if a relationship, whether it be platonic or sexual, is healthy or not. It’s not my job to provide you examples of what healthy relationships look like for you to model yourselves after, and it’s not my job to point out how something is healthy or unhealthy. That’s up to you to figure out, and to read psychological articles about relationships on your own because fan fiction should not be the source material for your relationship goals.

One tag that’s been up for debate is “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” (DD:DNE) and refers to an Arrested Development episode in which had a scene where Michael Bluth finds a paper bag that has the aforementioned phrase written on it, opens it, and, shocker, finds a dead dove in it. He then says, “I don’t know what I expected.”

This tag came about because readers weren’t taking the warnings (and the tags) seriously, so writers of explicit stories with torture, cannibalism, gang rape, and other gratuitously vile subject matter would often receive complaints from readers, even if the writer chose the correct rating, warnings, and added all of the specific tags. That being said, if DD:DNE came about from tags not being taken seriously to disclose what the story contains, then this tag could be used regardless of content, even if it isn’t explicit or violent in nature.

Beware, Warm and Fluffy Feelings (WAFF) ahead. If you can’t handle the cuteness and fluff overload, do not read. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.

While there have been reader complaints towards writers who write fluff stories for fandoms that are canonically extremely violent—stupid complaint, I know—I personally wouldn’t advise using this tag for any story milder than an explicit rating. Maybe the extreme end for a mature story, too. The only reason I say that is because it waters down the intention behind the tag when it was first used, that extremely graphic and violent content that was warned for lies ahead. People can exclude dead dove stories when searching and filtering story lists so they can avoid extremely graphic content. . . but, then again, people could just filter out M and E-rated stories, so. . . hm.

On second thought, I don’t think there would be any real harm in including the tag regardless of content. Except you might get less readers, and the few that do read may complain because they don’t find your story hard core enough to warrant the dead dove tag.

Apparently, people don’t read tags or take them seriously anyway, hence this tag’s existence, so why would they notice or take that tag seriously either? In any case, I’m probably never going to use that tag. If I selected the appropriate warnings and the correct rating, then that’s all that truly matters. And if I added a tag or two further warning of the content that lies within, and readers complain about not being warned, that’s still on them.

The mandatory Major Character Death (MCD) warning on AO3 (unless you checked the CNTW warning), has been a source of confusion for many people as well. This warning exists because a loss of a beloved character can be emotionally traumatic (I’ll never not cry reading about Rue’s death—damn you, Collins!); however, what if the character had survived, and we as readers wouldn’t find out that plot twist until the end? The character didn’t die, so does their fake death count? Should writers include the warning until that plot twist is published, or does it stay there, or not be warned for at all? If you have it, it would be false advertising because the character doesn’t die, even if the reader’s are left with emotional scars after the supposed event despite revealing the character lived in the next chapter, but if you don’t have it, then observant readers may suspect that the character actually survived because there’s no warning for it even though that warning was serious enough to be deemed mandatory on the site.

I’ve also seen writers question whether to check it because their original character (OC) is a main character in the fan fiction and dies, but wasn’t sure since they weren’t a canon character in the fandom. I’ve also seen writers wonder if they should check it because a canon minor character was a main character in their fan fiction, and dies. In either case, I would say, “Yes, check the warning box,” but “main character” apparently means different things to different people.

The most agreed upon answer on Reddit is to check the CNTW and be done with it. When a warning has so much gray area and blurry lines, I will opt for CNTW on AO3, but on other sites where there is no mandatory MCD warning? I’m not tagging it, and I’m not going to allude to anything about it, plot twist or no plot twist. I want you to feel the agony! Or joy if it was a despised character—I know everyone has a little inner psychopath in them!—and then feel the utter rage learning that the most hated character actually lived.

Another thing I refuse to tag/warn about is the ending to my stories. I agree with X23onastarship’s points on wanting freedom to explore the story that could end differently than what I had originally planned, and that the ending may not encompass just one tone or theme, or that readers may not have the same reaction to an ending, where one may find it a happy ending, but another may find it bittersweet at best. So, people not only want me to spoil when seriously fucked up shit happens in which chapter, now they want me to spoil the ending? If my story has a devastatingly sad ending, there’s a reason, and you’ll usually suspect which direction it goes as the story progresses. Perhaps some endings may be quite unexpected, but those kinds of stories are rare.

In Stephen King’s Pet Semetary, Louis brings the dead cat back to life at the suspiciously vague neighbor’s advice. Despite the cat’s severe personality change and violent behavior after being brought back from beyond the veil, Louis, out of pure desperation, then brings his son back to life, who had died after being hit by a truck. He had already been stitched back together, embalmed, and buried. In the end (if you don’t know what “in the end” means, spoiler! it means “spoiler,” so don’t read if you don’t want to be spoiled by the ending, but if you don’t read this, then you may not understand the point I’m trying to make, but if you can see the pattern, you may already suspect how this story ends anyway), his undead son had killed the neighbor and Louis’s wife. So, after Louis killed the undead cat and his undead son, he brings back his wife, flimsily justifying it as the first two had simply been dead too long.

If Louis didn’t learn the first two times, of course, he wouldn’t have learned the next time. Louis was a static character who hadn’t learned a single lesson for the first three quarters of the book, so why would anyone suspect that he would learn to let the dead stay dead, and learn to process his loss and grief like everyone else? Even his wife handled grief better, and she clearly hadn’t gotten over the loss of her sister, absolutely horrified at even the shadow of mentioning the word, “death.”

Beowulf, on the other hand, the great epic hero of myths and legends to the point of practical godhood, who held his breath for most of the day to kill Grendel’s mother underwater, with superhuman strength, dies in his story, but the overall theme was that Beowulf’s heroic deeds inspired more people to become heroes themselves afterwards, to continue the fight against evil.

So if anyone asks me how my stories will end, my answer will be, “I can’t wait to find out either,” and pretend I hadn’t already planned out how my story will go. And if that’s not a good enough answer, they can filter for completed works only from then on and leave my work in progress alone.

This had been brought up in Reddit threads as an idea, but I am horrified by the notion that tagging which person or tense the story is written in should be mandatory. If you don’t like a certain person or tense, fine, go elsewhere when you see “I/you/he/she/they” and “is/was”, but I am never going to agree that tagging which narration tool I use should be mandatory. You either like how I write, or you don’t. This just shows how inflexible readers are, and I’m not going to cater to that.

The closest I would tag something like this for any of my stories, is if I wrote a reader-insert or second-person story without the place-holder descriptor acronyms, such as “(Y/N)” for “your name,” tagging it as “no-blanks”, “no placeholder”, or “no acronyms” or something, but that is because I know there is an audience who would give reader-inserts/second-person stories a shot if they knew there weren’t any fill-in-the-blank placeholders. It’s not because I’ve read other people with the same sort of complaints, it’s also because I have the same personal complaint and would love to read more stories, but “(Y/N)” is just that automatic “no” for me. Plus, if you can’t get people to recognize the difference between “reader” and “OC”, then you’re fooling yourself to think that tagging which person or tense the story is written in will ever be fully implemented and correctly.

I’m tagging my stories with the major concepts and themes the story has and readers who would enjoy it in mind, instead of focusing on readers that wouldn’t for any microscopic reason. I understand the point that tags serve as a categorical and archival purposes, but I will not use tags as substitutes for trigger/content warnings. You already got plenty of information about that in regards to how I rate my story, what warnings (if any) I chose, what genre I chose, and the summary.

Oh my god! This story has pregnancy in it! I’m going through such body horror!

The story was rated M, categorized as romance with the sexual themes warning, and a summary that says that the forbidden couple between two feuding families wants to start their life away from this drama. There was an obvious risk that sex, pregnancy and birth might be in the story. People need to learn that tags aren’t supposed to do the heavy lifting in determining what could be in the story and whether or not one reads it.

This is all aside from writers asking “How do I tag for this thing that’s only mentioned once in the entire story?” or “What is the trope called even though it’s only a minor event and isn’t a major theme?” If writers want to tag everything under the sun, fine, but I’m not spoon feeding anyone my stories before they read a single word of them or holding their hand as they read it.

All in all, the discussion regarding the connection between tags and trigger warnings has devolved from readers being concerned citizens looking out for one another, to being entitled little shits because they read a story they ended up not liking, and think they should be compensated for the time they wasted. That’s called life. You may not win all of your games, but still enjoy playing it. You shouldn’t berate your opponent for not letting you get your way or throw up the board when you lose, and then blame your outburst on your autism, personality disorder, or some other thing, whether it’s a legitimate diagnosis or not. You don’t get free passes for that trite.

You don’t like a writer’s stories or tagging habits? Block them so you can’t see them or their content. A story existing and how it’s advertised (assuming they checked all of the mandatory boxes the site requires) isn’t hurting anyone, not even you, unless you go looking for it or allow it to.

How I advertise my stories is my business, and how readers react to them is theirs and, frankly, not my problem.

Fleugelflaggel hell, just block me, already!