![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major cauliflower death
Mar. 11th, 2012 10:54 pmSo kinda serious question?
I don't wanna be a dick or an irresponsible author but it turns out that when a fic gets really long, stuff I'd normally throw in a warning along the lines of "oh yeah, this is there for a second but the fic's not all about it or anything but yeah, it's there in case you can't deal with even a passing reference" is suddenly like an entire paragraph.
And okay, I'm being a little bit of a dick here because I'm afraid that having a swathe of greyed-out text that wide in the warnings section is going to make people go holy shit, this must be full of bloodletting and torture and horrible things *backbutton.*
I don't really read warnings, because the stuff that bothers me the most is generally someone else's kink and it's advertised all over the place, and/or it's MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH RAPEY SUICIDE CODE RED BLEEP BLEEP but I've been blindsided by eating disorders and self-injury and was Not Pleased. Then again, I read a thing with some unexpected watersports and it was actually generally awesome and I probably wouldn't have bothered with it if it'd had a big blinking THIS HAS PEE IN IT sign.
I'm not even talking about pee and major kinks and awful things happening to people in terms of my warnings, I'm talking about like oh, there's minor character with a drug problem, and oh, this one character who's a jerkface says something homophobic, and there's a fairly ignorant portrayal of gay clubs that's based on me having been to like, three of them ever in my life and having watched the whole run of Queer as Folk.
I guess I just don't want to screw myself out of readers because I'm being maybe-oversensitive, but I also don't want to ruin anybody's day.
Most of you guys write or least read quite a bit-- can you weigh in on your fic-warning experiences?
I don't wanna be a dick or an irresponsible author but it turns out that when a fic gets really long, stuff I'd normally throw in a warning along the lines of "oh yeah, this is there for a second but the fic's not all about it or anything but yeah, it's there in case you can't deal with even a passing reference" is suddenly like an entire paragraph.
And okay, I'm being a little bit of a dick here because I'm afraid that having a swathe of greyed-out text that wide in the warnings section is going to make people go holy shit, this must be full of bloodletting and torture and horrible things *backbutton.*
I don't really read warnings, because the stuff that bothers me the most is generally someone else's kink and it's advertised all over the place, and/or it's MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH RAPEY SUICIDE CODE RED BLEEP BLEEP but I've been blindsided by eating disorders and self-injury and was Not Pleased. Then again, I read a thing with some unexpected watersports and it was actually generally awesome and I probably wouldn't have bothered with it if it'd had a big blinking THIS HAS PEE IN IT sign.
I'm not even talking about pee and major kinks and awful things happening to people in terms of my warnings, I'm talking about like oh, there's minor character with a drug problem, and oh, this one character who's a jerkface says something homophobic, and there's a fairly ignorant portrayal of gay clubs that's based on me having been to like, three of them ever in my life and having watched the whole run of Queer as Folk.
I guess I just don't want to screw myself out of readers because I'm being maybe-oversensitive, but I also don't want to ruin anybody's day.
Most of you guys write or least read quite a bit-- can you weigh in on your fic-warning experiences?
