Fan creators are allowed to have boundaries.

[laurajv]

 (Originally posted to my Tumblr.)

The discussion about Choose Not To Warn has me thinking about a lot of aspects of CNtW. 

I want to talk about....a lot of those aspects, but right now, this instant, I want to talk about boundaries. 

In the context of fandom, we understand that fanwork creators are permitted to have boundaries. Some creators do not want to be exposed to criticism of their work (and so readers who want to engage in that criticism will have crit-friendly spaces, or will refrain from tagging the author in discussions). Some do not want their work to be remixed -- at all, or without explicit permission -- so people who want to do that should ask; others issue blanket permissions. Creators draw boundaries about putting their work on Goodreads; they place it on certain websites or do not; they lock it to Archive readers or leave it public; they orphan the work; they take it down from places they no longer want it.

We understand all these boundaries and generally acknowledge that creators are allowed to have them and that disrespecting them is a jerk move.

And yet, when a creator draws the very particular boundary of “Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings”, this is suddenly “rude” and “vaguewarning” and “asshole behavior”? 

No. 

This is not different from any other boundary a creator places on their work.

Fan creators are human beings who are allowed to have boundaries on their work. You might think their boundaries are dumb, but you aren’t allowed to violate them. There’s a fan creator I ran into back in the 1990s who had, I thought, incredibly annoying and dumb boundaries. You had to email her with proof of age to get a password to her stories on her own personal website. You were not allowed to link to her work, or pass on the links, or share the password, or anything. It’s been 20+ years and I still think this was a stupid as fuck boundary. I still respected it: I never read her work from her website, only when she posted it to mailing lists. I never asked anyone to link me to it or share the password with me. She was allowed to have these boundaries, even though I thought they were dumb and made my eyes roll right out of my head. I had no right to violate her boundaries, and I had no right to access to her work.

When I put work on the Archive, I need to be comfortable doing so. Anything other than “Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings” is uncomfortable and upsetting for me, and I won’t do it. I never liked archiving anywhere that required warnings, although I did it because I believed that the existence of comprehensive archives was more important than my personal comfort. I shouldn’t’ve had to do it then, and I’m relieved I no longer have to do it. It made sharing my work with others more difficult and less joyful. 

Readers are allowed to have a boundary of not reading work without warnings. What they do not get to do is alter my boundaries because they don’t like that they can’t read my work with my boundaries in place. 

 *  *  * 
edit: a followup post: Compromise is not always workable.
edit: another followup: Sometimes people make art for an audience that isn't you.

Comments

[are_youready]

It's really interesting that a lot of "anti" stuff your seeing is against CNtW. I've never seen stuff against it, but then I don't tend to participate in anti vs anti-anti shit.

I use CNtW on my work often, partially to avoid the attention of antis and those who would call me out. I feel that using a searchable tag of Stuff People Get Mad At You For Writing About is asking for trouble, and I've also seen authors called out using screenshots of their AO3 page once too often, so I prefer not to make it that easy.

The other reason I tend to use CNtW is because while I myself like reading fic with warnings, I find AO3's archive warnings uniquely unhelpful in avoiding fic I'd rather not read (not moral judgements on said fic, just stuff I don't tend to enjoy). Is this fic with the underage warning about two seventeen year olds experimenting, or an adult graphically raping a child? Is this one with a rape/non-con warning about rape equals love, or about people having Bad Decision Sex while too drunk to consent? Is the graphic depiction of violence just canon typical monster hunting, or is it 6000 words of lavishly detailed torture porn? We Just Don't Know.

It's even harder to tag my own fic. Should I tag canon-typical violence with graphic depictions of violence or not? What about telepathic violence, where no real-world-possible violence is mentioned even in allegory but one person is clearly harming another? What about a fic I worked on a few years back which describes a consensual sexual encounter, but characterization implies that if one party had not consented, the other might have raped him anyway?

These are things that I would prefer to warn for, because I like warnings. (No shade if you don't, I just do. This is partly because I prefer to read some spoilers for a story - any story, fanfic, tv, movie, book, whatever - before I go in, as I find I enjoy the piece more). But I would rather put the warnings in the author's note - both so that they are non-searchable and not visible to people simply glancing at my page, and because the author's note allows me to be clear and nuanced in explaining the thing I'm warning for.

It makes no sense to me to be against CNtW when AO3's warnings are so hamfisted and easily misused.

[laurajv]

Yeah, a certain set of antis was beating a drum at that particular time about how selfish and mean and gross it was not to use warnings.

I think people have really complex interactions with warnings in general. I mean, for example, I dislike it very much when people use the Notes field to warn, because I have warnings turned off on AO3 on purpose -- for me, warnings make the reading experience MUCH less pleasurable, so I want them to be located somewhere I can easily and consistently avoid. But as your own experience points out, that doesn't work for some people. The thing I like about AO3's system is that it's flexible enough to be used in multiple ways -- people can warn or not, turn off seeing the main warnings or not, tag extensively or not, etc. and most people can find a way to make it work for them.

Once, in a warnings debate years and years ago, I mentioned that the only thing I'd ever read that viscerally squicked me to a level I didn't know I could be squicked to wasn't something covered by any warning I'd ever seen. It *technically* kind of would fit under "major character death" but the character death wasn't the issue. It is, as you point out, hard to know whether one of the large umbrella warnings is A Thing You Hate or A Thing That Is Actually Fine, because the devil is in the details.

Tagging can be really hard, I agree. I personally tend to use minimal tags. Sometimes I use tags that add details that I think are of specific interest -- I usually tag my outsider POV fic, for instance, or explicitly bisexual or asexual characters. But again, because I'm generally looking for readers willing to come with the story on a voyage, very little of what I tag could be considered warning-adjacent.

[laurajv]

oh -- if you are interested in seeing what people were going on about, if you follow the link to my tumblr & click on the "choose not to warn" tag or the "fandom meta" tag, a lot of it comes up!