Read the replies re: het warning, and am actually fascinated by the idea that people in a slash fandom feel they need to warn for het? Is this some kind of pseudo-liberal slashy stance? I mean, guys, het is not evil or bad or anything...
Funny enough, it reminds me of the x-tube choice buttons where you click one button for male or female and click the ticky box for like: male, female, or both. It's like predefining a category.
Same in fanfic, and I get it for porn, possibly, when you want to read porn to get off you'd like to read what gets you off thank you very much, but there are stories where there is no sex ... would I still warn for het, like it's some kind of outrageous thing? Look at me calling heterophobia here. Frankly, if people call for 'no warning for slash' then there should also be a 'no warning for het' call. It's the same bloody thing.
...if people call for 'no warning for slash' then there should also be a 'no warning for het' call
Yeah, I think "warning" would be listing a warning, as you might for a kink or something like non-con. Informing people that there will be sexing involving x pairing in the fic is just basic info, like story length.
So if I see Jack/Rose/Nine and and adult rating, I'm assuming I'm getting het and slash action (Probably. Or it could be a tossup in that case.)
I feel like one of these film makers that, god, Swedish guy's name, because ideally to rate my own stories I'd give you a list of the characters and would not indicate if they are / or , simply because the boundary between the two is so thin sometimes, when does the , grow into a /? I think it's easy to classify PWPs but as soon as you have something ther than a PWP I feel the / is whittling it down to a over-simplified description that doesn't do a story justice. If Jack and Ianto interact on the background of their relationship without interacting in terms of a relationship is that /?
To answer your last question, yes. If by "interacting in terms of a relationship" you mean "having sex." Which you may not. I can be alarmingly obtuse at times.
But if the interaction is in any way in the context of a relationship, then yes. The / can still be present, even if it's not the sole point of the fic. However, I'd say that was entirely at the author's discretion. As is everything, really.
Well I mean, not having explicit sex, possibly not kissing, possibly only fighting without fighting about the relationship but that they are involved is there because a) it's canon and b) a relationship feeds the dynamic of, say, fighst even if those fights aren't relationship centred. Jack ticking out over Lisa can be fed by the relationship dynamic without that dynamic having ever been made explicit in the story.
ot's the grey area inbetween where Jack and Ianto are involved but for the scenes of a fic that involvement is in the background. Does that automatically make it gen?
Putting in a / rather than a , guarantees more readers. Just from a commercial standpoint (which would need to be evaluated, I'm just putting it out there as a hypothesis not as a statement of fact)
I have to disagree. A lot of people absolutely refuse to read het (like I presume people refuse to read slash, but I don't they are in the TW fandom). If 90% of the fic in a fandom is slash, then people might be shocked by a het story. Personally, I prefer slash, but I am not squicked by the evil het. If people are going to be offended by het, then I would want to warn them to pass on by.
However, the names should be enough, usually, so there should be no need of a het warning when you have pairing: Jack/Ianto/Gwen, for example.
I am re-thinking my stance on all of this, though.
But if you can see that it's Jack/Ianto/Gwen, would it be just as easy to see that a fic has "Ianto/Gwen" as a pairing, and would assume that the story would contain het, just as seeing "Jack/Ianto" as a pairing would lead you to assume the story has slash?
I've never liked the idea of warning people to "pass on by". Maybe I'm crazy in thinking that people can make up their own minds in what they want to read. There was a trend of fic containing non-J/I pairings telling J/I fans not to read it, and that bothered me. I love J/I, but I like other things too, and I'm willing to read them, but the author was telling me not to. Luckily, that trend seems to have passed. I think anyone is going to look at the pairings (and warnings in the case of kinkfic or fic containing excessive violence, for example) listed on a story and be able to determine for themselves if it's something they want to read.
I know it was defensive mechanism against receiving flames, but anyone who isn't just going to pass on a story with pairings they don't like and stop and flame is clearly not worth the minuscule time and effort it takes to type "if you don't like my pairing, don't read it".
No no no! Sorry, I expressed myself poorly there. I didn't mean to tell people "pass on by" - I meant that I would generally put the warning there AS A WAY to let people know what it was, so they could make the decision to skip the fic if it wasn't to their taste.
As you can see, I do think the pairing should be enough warning, too.
I understand what you are saying, because from a preferences standpoint I see why a note for het may be helpful to people. But from a meta standpoint, I pretty much refuse to give that kind of statement. Treating all sexual orientations equally in fandom means treating the notes/warnings equally for me, and that means there is no het note (just like in "straight" fandoms I wouldn't leave a slash-note). This inches the discussion into, 'who is the header for?' And quite possibly in fandom technically the header is for the reader as a source of information about the story. For me as a writer, the header is the space (like the blurb on a book) where I'm willing to give a certain amount of information to a) entice but b) leave it open enough. I will likely always err on the side of way too little information in headers because I don't believe in giving away that much about a story. As I said above, I'm not even a fan of having a / in there to denote ... something. A relationship? How is that defined? I'm not a fan of having gen be separate from pairing fic because it limits both. I'm anti-categorizations in short and I think it shows in my stance on het-warnings, among other things. I believe that there are stories that can be easily categorized (PWPs, for the most part). But anything that isn't a PWP... dude, murky waters there if you try to slap a header tgether that actually represents the story.
Again, I think part of it depends on targeting an audience and if you want to target a specific audience with your story and therefore have a header that suits their tastes (eg. a note abut het if they possibly don't like het). I get why, for example, someone writing a shit load of J/I would end up having a note and a more extensive header when suddenly Gwen pops up in a /-setting. But for people that write to broad tastes, in a variety of settings with different plot twists anyway in their stories, I then don't expect much of anything in terms of notes and warnings and just let the story sweep me up.
I know there is meta somewhere about the parallels and non-parallels between book blurbs and Fic headers (mostly in terms of consume and the internet being a faster medium and you wanting to know what you spend your 10 min reading rather than just starting a story and then realizing you hate it), and I probably prefer the blurbs to the headers.
Is this a pseudo-elitist-artsy "I want people to see my stories for themselves etc etc" stance? Quite possibly. I'm just speaking from experience that I find stries hard to categorize when they are not clear /-PWPs, and I feel the / descriptor limits a story.
That said, I drew this fairly OT from your comment, apologies.
I do understand you point (I think). It *is* rather ridiculous to try to "slap a header together" for a story that has any kind of depth to it (unlike mine, which are pretty much all PWP, so...).
On the other hand, if you want to, you can probably find a summary for most traditionally published fiction somewhere, no matter how complicated. I'm probably dating myself (not that way) here, but, for example, something like a Cliff's Notes version of War and Peace is what I mean. (Or, much more frightening, Ulysses.) So, really, if you didn't want to invest all that time in reading a book you would hate, you could read the summary. There seems to be a similar idea at Shelfari, which I never visit anymore, but I'm always getting "should I read this book" emails from them. Of course, this is what friends used to be for, before we had the Internet.
So, yeah, the header is there to give people an idea of what they can expect to find and what they can expect to spend their time on. I think a lot of people do use them that way. If a writer doesn't abide by the norms of a community, he or she may be overlooked or even condemned.
And here's another question. Is it a good thing to limit oneself to only a specific pairing, or a particular kink, or whatever? Maybe, maybe not. For me, personally, it's probably not a good thing. The headers let me feed my sometimes overwhelming obsession with very little effort, which is great. Except when it's not. Which is like, right now, when I've been on LJ all fucking day, rather than doing research or cleaning my sand-filled house, or something. Nonetheless, like with many other things, I continue to over-indulge.
I think, and I said this over at Vera's, warning is really the wrong word - labels like slash or het, or even listing the exciting kinks contained within, it should be more like a statement of genre, or an ingredients list. "Warning" presupposes a lot of bad stuff; plenty of people might be actively searching for kink X or slash or het. Certainly that's how I'm most likely to be found using the "Warning" header. The only genuine warnings I feel the need to note would be the inclusion of something potentially triggering like rape, or strong violence.
I do usually think of labeling for darker content or kinks or character death as a warning since some people are triggered negatively by these things.
Warnings = a guide, in the vein of: "Hey, if noncon bothers you, you might want to skip this one", just like "if you suffer from heart problems, Viagra might not be for you".
If headings are standardised in a comm or for an awards submission, the term "warnings" will probably stay in general use, but I don't have a problem with using "genre" instead - or something else.
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51stcenturyfox) wrote2009-04-13 07:51 pm
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Funny enough, it reminds me of the x-tube choice buttons where you click one button for male or female and click the ticky box for like: male, female, or both. It's like predefining a category.
Same in fanfic, and I get it for porn, possibly, when you want to read porn to get off you'd like to read what gets you off thank you very much, but there are stories where there is no sex ... would I still warn for het, like it's some kind of outrageous thing? Look at me calling heterophobia here. Frankly, if people call for 'no warning for slash' then there should also be a 'no warning for het' call. It's the same bloody thing.
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Yeah, I think "warning" would be listing a warning, as you might for a kink or something like non-con. Informing people that there will be sexing involving x pairing in the fic is just basic info, like story length.
So if I see Jack/Rose/Nine and and adult rating, I'm assuming I'm getting het and slash action (Probably. Or it could be a tossup in that case.)
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But if the interaction is in any way in the context of a relationship, then yes. The / can still be present, even if it's not the sole point of the fic. However, I'd say that was entirely at the author's discretion. As is everything, really.
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ot's the grey area inbetween where Jack and Ianto are involved but for the scenes of a fic that involvement is in the background. Does that automatically make it gen?
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If 90% of the fic in a fandom is slash, then people might be shocked by a het story. Personally, I prefer slash, but I am not squicked by the evil het. If people are going to be offended by het, then I would want to warn them to pass on by.
However, the names should be enough, usually, so there should be no need of a het warning when you have pairing: Jack/Ianto/Gwen, for example.
I am re-thinking my stance on all of this, though.
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I've never liked the idea of warning people to "pass on by". Maybe I'm crazy in thinking that people can make up their own minds in what they want to read. There was a trend of fic containing non-J/I pairings telling J/I fans not to read it, and that bothered me. I love J/I, but I like other things too, and I'm willing to read them, but the author was telling me not to. Luckily, that trend seems to have passed. I think anyone is going to look at the pairings (and warnings in the case of kinkfic or fic containing excessive violence, for example) listed on a story and be able to determine for themselves if it's something they want to read.
I know it was defensive mechanism against receiving flames, but anyone who isn't just going to pass on a story with pairings they don't like and stop and flame is clearly not worth the minuscule time and effort it takes to type "if you don't like my pairing, don't read it".
My bad
As you can see, I do think the pairing should be enough warning, too.
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Again, I think part of it depends on targeting an audience and if you want to target a specific audience with your story and therefore have a header that suits their tastes (eg. a note abut het if they possibly don't like het). I get why, for example, someone writing a shit load of J/I would end up having a note and a more extensive header when suddenly Gwen pops up in a /-setting. But for people that write to broad tastes, in a variety of settings with different plot twists anyway in their stories, I then don't expect much of anything in terms of notes and warnings and just let the story sweep me up.
I know there is meta somewhere about the parallels and non-parallels between book blurbs and Fic headers (mostly in terms of consume and the internet being a faster medium and you wanting to know what you spend your 10 min reading rather than just starting a story and then realizing you hate it), and I probably prefer the blurbs to the headers.
Is this a pseudo-elitist-artsy "I want people to see my stories for themselves etc etc" stance? Quite possibly. I'm just speaking from experience that I find stries hard to categorize when they are not clear /-PWPs, and I feel the / descriptor limits a story.
That said, I drew this fairly OT from your comment, apologies.
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I do understand you point (I think). It *is* rather ridiculous to try to "slap a header together" for a story that has any kind of depth to it (unlike mine, which are pretty much all PWP, so...).
On the other hand, if you want to, you can probably find a summary for most traditionally published fiction somewhere, no matter how complicated. I'm probably dating myself (not that way) here, but, for example, something like a Cliff's Notes version of War and Peace is what I mean. (Or, much more frightening, Ulysses.) So, really, if you didn't want to invest all that time in reading a book you would hate, you could read the summary. There seems to be a similar idea at Shelfari, which I never visit anymore, but I'm always getting "should I read this book" emails from them. Of course, this is what friends used to be for, before we had the Internet.
So, yeah, the header is there to give people an idea of what they can expect to find and what they can expect to spend their time on. I think a lot of people do use them that way. If a writer doesn't abide by the norms of a community, he or she may be overlooked or even condemned.
And here's another question. Is it a good thing to limit oneself to only a specific pairing, or a particular kink, or whatever? Maybe, maybe not. For me, personally, it's probably not a good thing. The headers let me feed my sometimes overwhelming obsession with very little effort, which is great. Except when it's not. Which is like, right now, when I've been on LJ all fucking day, rather than doing research or cleaning my sand-filled house, or something. Nonetheless, like with many other things, I continue to over-indulge.
And now my own OT apology.
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This! I hate warnings for het and slash alike.
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I do usually think of labeling for darker content or kinks or character death as a warning since some people are triggered negatively by these things.
Warnings = a guide, in the vein of: "Hey, if noncon bothers you, you might want to skip this one", just like "if you suffer from heart problems, Viagra might not be for you".
If headings are standardised in a comm or for an awards submission, the term "warnings" will probably stay in general use, but I don't have a problem with using "genre" instead - or something else.