so a few weeks ago, i had stumbled into a choose not to warn (CNTW) that was sparsely tagged and had a surprise major character death. and i didn't react well! MCD is a hard, hard no for me on fic but i couldn't complain (other than to tell my person how badly i reacted to it) because the writer didn't do anything wrong. in theory it's a risk you always take opening up a CNTW fic! but as far as i can remember, this is the first time after reading thousands of stories, that i ran into it. i didn't want to accidentally read their stuff again and end up getting my feelings hurt like that again so i blocked them on ao3 (i'll get to this in a second).
so some weeks later, i see a quite long fic with CNTW and very minimal tags and while the username is familiar, it didn't ring any particular bells so i read the first chapter and change. but i was like, hmmm. maybe i should actually skip to the last chapter to see if anyone is dead. no, no one is dead! but the comments would indicate there's some things in here that i really would not enjoy investing 150k+ of my time reading. i click through the user and oh. right. i blocked this user of the surprise MCD, not mute. so their stuff still shows up. oops. that has been remedied.
tl;dr having your block function not hide stuff from view like every other thing that blocks people, in my opinion, is very counterintuitive. i sort of understand that it's functionality geared toward the writer blocking users from interacting with their work, so it's not aimed at the reader's expectations of a block function, but i still think it's odd.
i like having block and mute as an option, and like, i wish tumblr had a true mute option! i wish bluesky had a mute retweets like twitter does! but i also think it's a peculiar choice to have block not also mute.
double bonus tl;dr i'm patting myself on the back for choosing to investigate the minimally tagged CNTW longfic before i started to get my feelings hurt 🤪
Seeing more discourse around the 'Chose Not to Warn' (CNTW) archive warning on AO3 again and I feel the need to add a few extra points about it.
I won't rehash the long analyses people have given before: CNTW is a valid warning on its own merit (I have always interpreted it as 'could possibly contain any of the above' with regards to the other major warnings), and even if it for some reason were not, it is the default warning given by the archive. It's a warning on it's own. If you worry about triggers, don't read fics tagged with CNTW.
But, ignoring all of the valid points about author discretion as to tagging and warning, two more points came to mind when reading over some of the arguments about CNTW I've seen lately that I think need to be considered more.
First and foremost is the actual utility of tagging every trigger: you do not know what could possibly trigger every single reader, and more importantly, it is impossible to tag to full scope anyway. As we all know, AO3 implemented a 75-tag limit on new works posted after September of 2021. Sometimes, especially when a fic covers a wide scope of different content, not only is it hard to tag for every possible trigger, it sometimes also becomes impossible.
Secondly, the utility of tagging everything becomes even less possible when you're considering long fics. I don't mean fics of 100k or more. I'm talking 300-400k or more. Stories that contain so much content it again becomes impossible to tag everything. And what about when an author hasn't fully decided on plot points as they start posting? What if they change their mind and include scenes that are triggering, 80% of the way through a fic? Even if they do tag it, there will be detractors angry it wasn't posted from the start. It's certainly happened before.
I have a work that will easily surpass a million words at completion. I am hard-pressed to tag just all the major, overarching content and themes, much less tag every single trigger it might contain. There is not way for me to do such unless we want a repeat of Sexy Times with Wangxian. So, in case authors know their story might evolve to have content that upsets people, CNTW is a neat little option. "This might have stuff that will upset you. It might contain stuff from the other archive warnings". In what sense is that not a valid warning?
CNTW is not a 'rude' tag. It is not lazy or wrong or an incorrect way to tag or use AO3. Some of you just haven't read the TOS.
Would you be willing to share any new Sins snippets? It's literally my favorite work on ao3 (I love your content in general, even the porn always has some kind of provocative angst or philosophical commentary on the Steve/Tony relationship) and I live for any updates/comments/discourse/fanart/fanworks that it spawns. <3
here you go, anon. thank you for appreciating my provocative angst.
Tony can no longer fantasize about a first time with Steve, so he fabricates Steves. He is obsessed with their skin, with the way they style their hair, with all the things that differentiate them from K’arr’n. The false axis of K’arr’n-Steve. The way Steve is when America is absent from him.
The rancid thrill of knowing that Steve has mastered his study of all structural defects in Tony’s chassis.
Steve would not be precious about putting his hands in Tony’s body. Tony doesn’t allow him a great deal of time to explore. He is thrilled at Steve’s initiative, his fingers are deft and sure and careful, like a mechanic. Steve can be a mechanic. Tony is in his office, maybe, an office, all of them run together, he could kneel on the floor -
Steve comes by after an Avengers meeting. They are in the West Coast office, because he and Steve were never there together, so it is untouched imaginary ground. Steve isn’t wearing his gloves and he has the top two clasps on the scale undone. He has his arms crossed, he’s at the window. He’s unhappy about something. Walk with me, Shellhead, Steve says, and they walk into Iron Man’s bungalow which is Steve’s bungalow because Tony’s chest aches less when he cedes everything he has to Steve.
Steve locks the door behind them and crowds Tony up against the wall facing the pool. The amber glass wall, where anyone could look in and see. Sun-warm. There was no sun in New York after the weird particulate cloud went up-
Tony, are you paying attention? Steve touches Tony’s bottom lip with his thumb and Tony goes still and wonders if he will ever feel fear and shame and arousal as separate items ever again and Steve pushes his hand into Tony’s mouth, up to the big joint in his thumb, and Steve looks at Tony’s eyes very seriously and waits to see if Tony’s response will be appropriate and Tony sucks on Steve’s big thumb that tastes like leather.
Why don’t you fix it, Shellhead, Steve says, and he pulls out with a gossamer string of Tony’s saliva and wipes his hand on Tony’s cheek. It’s going to be flaking off his stubble all day.
Keep up, Steve says, and he pushes Tony down with one hand and undoes his belt with the other.
Steve rubs his cock over Tony’s face, just slides it over his slightly parted lips, against his nose. Accept it, Tony thinks. Wear it. Your job is to wear it.
Steve grabs his chin, clamps two fingers on either side of Tony’s jaw like he is prepared to break it. Open, he hisses, and Tony does. Steve spits in his mouth. Coffee, mint. Show me, he says, like it’s come, like it’s an audition. The carpet presses marks into Tony’s knees and Tony thinks Steve could come on the floor and tell Tony to clean it up with his mouth and he would, he would hold Steve’s balls in his mouth for hours if he asked for it, he sticks out his tongue and lets himself drool and he thinks about how fucking hungry he is and how thoroughly he will beg when instructed.
I don’t think you want it, Steve tells him, and green runs up his hand to curl around his bare bicep.
Tony pulls his hand out of his briefs. Barely a trickle. He wipes it on his pubes, then on his stomach, under his shirt. He hurts. Not even hard, not even for a moment. His muscles spasm. His balls are a dull mass of pain. He forces his body to uncurl.
He is so tired of smelling stale, of the cast of arousal. He is so tired of trying to outrun the fucking damage.
But it’s his. Something just his, that he can take to his grave with him.
That post you reblogged from me is super old and long, and you didn’t really engage with anything I said there, so if you want to discuss anything I’d rather start a new thing. Like, here. One thing I never brought up in that post is how people, myself included, will search for specific content by their tags. As in, tagging allows everyone to find things they are interested in more easily in addition to other discussed benefits. It’s also easy and quick to tag. I don’t get the hostility to it?
Sure, we can thread from here.
You didn't really engage with anything I said there
In responding to your original post, I singled out what I saw as the main source of communication failure: your incredulity that authors could ever want to restrict their readership. "[A]re you really saying," you asked, "[that] you want to limit your audience for this thing you put online for people to read?" The reasoning behind that rhetorical question appears to be: "If you make something available to everybody, you want it to be consumed by everybody"; or perhaps: "If you want any readers, you must want as many readers as possible."
Neither of those is true. People choose their audience all the time. You really can't not do it, because nothing is interesting to everybody, but even if you could, it should be pretty clear that lots of people will make a cost-benefit analysis that prefers a smaller audience to a large one simply from the fact that the most popular genres aren't the only ones that get written.
The "new" point in this ask, about tags as SEO, is driven by the same misapprehension. Sorry for the scare quotes: I'm not trying to be catty, but it is a bit like asking someone with a shaved head if they're aware their hair is short.
Authors understand that people search for stories using the tags, and that tagging specific content therefore makes their story easier to find and drives more traffic to it, especially long-term traffic. That's how we get stories tagged for pairings referenced once in a throwaway line (if that), and all the resultant complaints: authors are so aware of this that many of them tag-spam in the hope of garnering more engagement. We know that tagging widens reach.
So I say again:
Yes. I am really saying that sometimes I want to limit my audience to readers who are prepared to read at their own risk, and who have consented to seeing material that may surprise, offend, discomfit, disappoint, or indeed trigger them. I want readers who are not prepared to do that to take care of themselves by skipping the story. I want readers who click through on that warning even though they are not prepared to assume the risk and then lose their damn minds about what's on the other side to stop involving me in their self-harm.
By tagging CNtW, authors accept a trade-off. Why they consider the trade a net positive can vary. Some reasons might be excellent; some might be dumb. You don't seem likely to grant merit in any of them. But you don't have to endorse an author's motivations for opting for the blanket warning—not that anyone other than that author will truly know what those are—because…
(drum roll)
The "author chose not to use warnings" isn't helpful to someone like me at all.
Yes, it is. It helps you avoid harmful content.
What it does not help you do is assess and manage risks posed by a pool of potentially harmful content that you still want to engage with. It gives you what you need to protect yourself, but it doesn't give you what you need to access every piece of art you possibly could.
The first one is required by the social contract and common courtesy. The second one really has nothing to do with either of those.
Put another way:
If you try to hand us your chocolate chip cookie with peanuts in it and just say, "Yeah, this contains allergens," that's simply not enough info and we risk poisoning ourselves if we want to eat this cookie you're offering.
I'm not handing you the cookie. The cookie's sitting on a table in a box that says I make no assurances as to its safety, and I don't really care whether you eat it or not.
You're not obligated to tag appropriately [specific content] to the best of your ability, but you're also not obligated to be kind to people in general.
First off, tagging CNtW is, in 100% of cases, tagging appropriately. No other warning available on the Archive can boast that success rate. Now that's out of the way, you're looking for #9.
"But CNtW exposes people to all manner of things they never signed up for!" No, it doesn't. It couldn't, because they signed up for it by clicking through on the tag. (That's a draw for some of us, by the way.)
"But readers can't avoid what they don't know is present!" Yes, as a matter of fact, they can. This tag makes it possible. That is half the point of this tag.
So: we've established that CNtW does not expose the unwilling to content, but rather restricts content to the willing. By clicking through, you consent to the possibility of encountering anything that might otherwise be warned for. What, then, is the issue with it? Since it's not "inconsiderate and rude" on account of violating anybody's boundaries, I presume you're saying it's rude because it creates one. But if tagging CNtW is rude simply because not everyone can engage with it, why isn't tagging Rape/Non-Con equally rude? Not everyone can engage with that content, either. In fact, if not everybody can engage with it, isn't it rude for the content to exist in a public space at all? Isn't the only considerate and kind way to tell stories to tell ones that everyone can hear?
I understand that that's not what you're advocating. But CNtW content is already 100% avoidable, because it's tagged, so that can't be the problem with it. If the problem with it is instead that a subset of readers end up excluded, then trying to fix that problem goes bad places fast.
Back to the food allergy analogy
Must we?
[I]n this scenario, it's like there's a whole community of people who bake cookies and then offer them to strangers.
It really isn't.
I detest this food analogy. I am going to talk about why. Before that, though, I'm going to give it credit for getting one part of the analysis correct.
When fandom has tagging debates, it tends to conflate two distinct questions. With subtitles, or a ramp, or screen-reader compatible websites, what is at issue is whether someone can access the thing. All those provisions are means of access. This is what is usually meant when we ask about accessibility: how does someone access the thing? With food allergens, what is at issue is whether the thing is a thing someone can access. Or, really, not access, but consume. Can someone consume this without acute adverse consequences?
What "fic content = food allergens!" gets correct is that with fic, the question is whether the thing considered for consumption is a thing a given person can consume.* It's not whether they can access it. It's whether it has potential to harm them. People tend to ask these questions as if they were interchangeable in tagging debates, and they're not. They might be equally important, but they're not the same.
Regardless, the analogy between allergens and content is of limited utility, because fiction isn't food. Acting as though people's needs, desires, and behaviors around stories are comparable to those around food is disingenuous at best. We could tweak the metaphor to make it more apt: leaving cookies out on a table (in boxes! With warning labels!) is not the same as walking up to someone and urging them to eat one; your participation in the community is not contingent on eating any particular cookie (except perhaps the factory-brand ones that brought you all together in the first place—which are themselves being sold in supermarkets with deliberately incomplete information on the boxes). But ultimately, this exercise ends up not being very illuminating, because the things compared in it just aren't that similar in composition or consequence.
Fiction isn't food. We don't make it the same. We don't need it the same. We don't process it the same.
Fiction isn't food. Very few people would consider surprise or suspense essential to the experience of eating a cookie; very, very many do consider both of those essential to the experience of reading a story. Just because it's an element you're personally indifferent toward doesn't mean people who value it don't get to do the baking to meet their own needs.
Fiction isn't food. It's communication, and motivation for attempting this particular form of communication comes in a big, beautiful, unruly spectrum—even after you take money out of the equation by restricting this to fanfic. Some posters' uppermost priority is indeed reach and engagement. I've heard tell of authors who will go so far as to calculate their rate of kudos to hits and whatnot. That wouldn't be fun to me, but evidently for those folks it is fun, and I don't get to decide who's Doing Fandom Right. At the opposite end are people who aren't just indifferent to response, but inimical: these are the folks who celebrated when the feature to turn off comments completely went live on AO3, because they want no part of how others experience their work whatsoever.
In between, probably closer to the latter extreme than the first, you have a bunch of authors for whom any reader response is a (potentially) felicitous side-effect rather than the point. I'm somewhere in here. @lovetincture described posting fic in a way I liked very much: "Here is a thing that came out of my brain. You can look at it if you want."
For me personally, I think I take that second step—"You can look at it if you want"—in large part because my fic does reflect pieces of who I am that do not find expression in other parts of life, and I hope to feel seen. But I don't get any guarantees. Sometimes readers will comment in a way that makes me go, "Yes, that—you, too?" But sometimes I might get the dead opposite, even from readers who enjoyed their experience very much. The first outcome is of course more satisfying; but at the same time, part of the reward of posting a story for me lies in accepting that people will take different things from it, seeing the different things people take from it, watching the fact play out, over and over again, that human communication is so much more complicated than binary success or failure.
Granola bars seldom do any of that.
[Tagging specific content] takes a matter of seconds and no effort from you…. It's… easy and quick to tag.
Sometimes that will be true. Sometimes it won't. If it's true for you and tagging is compatible with your reasons for writing and posting, then knock yourself out. Any time tagging is a net positive for you, obviously tag. If tagging presents equal cost and advantage, flip a coin. But it is not correct that tagging is "easy and quick" for everyone or reliably requires "no effort."
Here is a non-exhaustive list of costs fanfic authors on AO3 might see in tagging specific content:
tags are reductive
author wants story to unfold for readers with as few externally generated expectations as possible (whether or not any "twists" are involved); tagging necessarily undermines this
author doesn't trust their own judgment of which tags best apply or what content needs tagging in the first place (because although you assert that everybody knows "what people are commonly triggered by just like you know what people are commonly allergic to," a) not everyone actually does agree on what topics are taboo or generally distressing; b) as tends to happen with racism and dubcon, even when people do agree on what categories are distressing, it's quite possible for authors not to notice they've written something that belongs in one of those categories; and c) personally, I wouldn't place too much confidence in the general public's familiarity with allergens either)
author genuinely has not a damn clue how to tag something
author doesn't want to get bitched out if people decide they tagged something wrong
author has a lot of inhibitions around creating and sharing work generally and wants posting to be absolutely as easy as possible to get themselves over that threshold; has perhaps selected AO3 as an archive whose terms of service are suitable to their needs in this direction
author knows antis sometimes trawl tags in search of controversial content specifically in order to harass the authors
author straight-up doesn't want to fuck with it
author considers that tagging extensively creates a fiduciary duty of which they want no goddamned part, and does not want to be perceived as offering a guarantee of safety with regard to this thing that came out of their brain
Et cetera.
And maybe a lot of the time the cost of comprehensive tagging will be small, even negligible. I get the temptation to dismiss balking at such a cost as pettiness or self-importance. But you don't get to call any reason, however slight, a fic author chooses to opt out of comprehensive tags "making a fuss" while calling anything less than maximal access to all fic you might want to read "inconsiderate and rude."
What I infer, from your readiness to equate marking fanfiction "read at your own risk" with criminally negligent poisoning, is that you are less attached to the contention that tagging costs nothing than you are to the belief that it doesn't matter how much it costs. Explaining all the ways tagging the way you want might cost someone something is pointless if you don't actually care. And of course you're not going to care if you're operating on the assumption that your needs are more important than anyone else's.
Either fic is important enough that it's a genuine bummer to have to miss some of it or fic is too trivial for any of this to matter. Pick one.
[P]eople, myself included, will search for specific content by their tags. As in, tagging allows everyone to find things they are interested in more easily in addition to other discussed benefits.
And as noted up top, this is a major reason why many authors cheerfully elect to do it. Which is great. If you want people to be able to find your stories more easily and you perceive no costs that outweigh that benefit, then this is the way to go.
But costs can be significant. I'm not going to repeat the whole list I just made, but I do want to emphasize that discoverability is itself double-edged. Yes, good SEO means more interested readers can find your story. However, sometimes authors actively prefer that their content be harder to find. This is because antis will pore over tags they find objectionable so that they can harass people for writing the content. It gets nasty sometimes; there was some college kid a few months back whom antis outed to her family for writing Wincest. Fortunately the family member didn't care, but the girl still ended up in the fucking hospital over it. The anti that doxxed her gloated. So not everybody wants their shit to be easy to find, and I don't blame them.
"Oh, but I wanted the peanuts to be a surprise." Yeah, thanks, now I can't breathe.
And when I pry your jaws open and cram the cookie down your gullet, that will be my fault.
(Fic still won’t be a fucking cookie, though.)
The contempt that expressing any kind of desire to surprise an audience can earn you lately is… well, it's really something. The demonization of surprise, suspense, and subverted expectations within fandom is fascinating to me, and will eventually get its own post; but as far as its bearing on CNtW/read at your own risk, the root issue is that arguments against CNtW are grounded in the assumption that everybody Does Fandom the same way. That's the assumption that says that everybody obviously must need x, because nobody could possibly need y.
"Nobody reads fanfic to be surprised, or discomfited, or to have their expectations violated. Well, they do, but only because they have execrable taste. If they were as refined as I am, they'd understand that watching a story unfold without knowing what's going to happen is but a low pleasure for the intellectually inferior. If they were as morally educated as I am, they'd understand that certain topics are too serious to be 'sprung on readers' for 'shock value.' They'd understand that what they want out of fandom not only doesn't deserve to have provision made for it with a compromise that takes the form of an easily filterable tag, but actually makes them assholes."
Well, like it or not, everybody doesn't Do Fandom the same way. People don't all read or write for the same reasons. Most individuals don't read or write for the same reasons from one day to the next, for that matter. For some fans, knowing exactly what they're getting into is vital; for others, not knowing is equally vital. The latter really do prefer reading with as little information as possible. They absolutely do consider specific tags to be spoilers and dislike comprehensive tagging for this reason. I've seen people complain of as much. What I haven't seen is those readers harassing authors who elect to tag or leveling accusations of "poisoning" or "anti-vaxxing" at anyone for failing to cater to them.
It's almost like they recognize that it's the author's right to present this thing that came out of their brain the way they want, or something.
I don't get the hostility to it?
The hostility is not to anybody tagging comprehensively if it suits them. The hostility is to anybody it doesn't suit getting harassed. The hostility is to readers who can't handle the results ignoring the "read at your own risk" tag and then laying their trauma at authors' feet. The hostility is to getting told posting fanfiction with a clear and easily excludable warning on it is a crime on par with assault or poisoning.
I would even speculate that those experiences are occasionally triggering, and the people doing the harassing sure as hell aren't tagging their hate with something easy to filter.
————————————————————
*Most of the time (or at least, the vast majority of the debate is framed around this). In fact, sometimes content information about fiction can change whether someone is able to consume it. In that sense, it starts to look a bit more like subtitles or a ramp. But in order to treat tags as comparable to a ramp, a means by which you access the work, you have to separate them from the work. They are not separate. They're part of it. Presentation matters. If it didn't, no one would get reminded not to write their résumé in Comic Sans. If it didn't, no one would pay professionals to write blurbs on books. If it didn't, no one would be arguing about this in the first place.
Also, the fact that content information about fiction can change whether someone is able to consume it just further underscores that we're talking about a thing fundamentally dissimilar to food, inasmuch as mentally bracing yourself for peanuts won't take the edge off your anaphylactic shock.
Hello, I hope this is not a strange thing to say, but: I have been reading a lot of your spn fics, and I've been loving them it. Yesterday I tried to read some fic by other ppl, but it felt weirdly disappointing to go check a summary and see lots of tags basically outlining the contents of the fic...felt almost like spoilers? It was a funny feeling. Anyway this is not a big deal but I think Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings has become my default favorite tag/way to engage with a story now!
I have Thoughts I'm in the process of assembling about exploration, the deliberate assumption of risk, and seeking out surprise and suspense as an equally valid mode of engaging with fanworks and will be with you presently.
Sorry, I don't know who else to open up to. The talk surrounding CNTW feels very bizarre to me, since I've never had a problem with avoiding uncomfortable fics with it. Other tags and summaries (or the lack of) has always warned me enough. I actually get more nervous with "no warnings apply" 'cause "what if they think it doesn't need anything but actually does?" Idk that might be just me, but my impression is that authors using CNTW tag their stories more comprehensively.
I don't know that they're uniformly tagging more comprehensively, but CNtW does at least guarantee that the author has thought about warnings enough to realize that they want to opt out. That might be the best guarantee you can get, and "read at your own risk" is probably the most unambiguous warning an author can offer. Maybe that sounds onanistic sophistical, but truly, the only way to be sure there is no room for misinterpretation of a specific warning is not to offer any.
Mind, just because a specific warning could be misinterpreted, it doesn't follow that it's not worth providing it if that's how the author likes to share their stuff. I don't even think serious misunderstanding is that common; misunderstandings come to our attention because they cause friction, whereas when everything works as intended for everybody it's a non-event. But the risk is there, and if a fan creator—someone who is making shit as a hobby and sharing it for free—weighs the possibilities and their comfort level with same and decides that they don't want to feel responsible for guaranteeing anybody's safety through tags, that's a fine reason to CNtW. Not wanting to fuck with it is a fine reason to CNtW. Laziness is a fine reason to CNtW. Anxiety is a fine reason to CNtW. Indifference is a fine reason to CNtW. Literally anything is a fine reason to CNtW, because the tag is clear and nobody is trying to control the terms under which anybody else chooses to engage with content by using it.
Basically: the burden on prospective readers of a CNtW story who need more specific information (vetting the fic or skipping it) is, IMO, less than the burden of being forced to offer what might be construed as a guarantee of safety, and not adding to the inhibitions of creators in a space devoted to encouraging free expression is more important than everybody having access to a maximal quantity of fic.
This is the position from which I approach fanworks on Archive of Our Own, because I believe it is what is consistent with the site's TOS and mission statement. It would not apply in a fan space created with the intention of maximizing reader safety and comfort. If someone ever were to tackle the practical difficulties of creating such an archive, going in there and demanding exemption from requirements for specific tags because you find it burdensome or stifling would be a colossally dick move. It would be a dick move even if that archive were to grow to be the unrivaled pan-fandom hub with the most traffic, stability, and transparency on the internet.
I doubt it's coincidence that through as many years as people have been griping about CNtW on AO3, nobody's launched a no-CNtW option that does all that, though.
NHS Trust launches winter mental wellbeing campaign Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust (CNTW) is launching a campaign to raise awareness of mental wellbeing this winter. The Trust’s annual Winter Wellness campaign aims to reach those who may be struggling this festive season Full story: https://www.cumbriacrack.com/2020/11/30/nhs-trust-launches-winter-mental-wellbeing-campaign/
