mad_maudlin: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] mad_maudlin at 03:11am on 03/03/2011
Fandom Is Different, sure, but I think there's two more specific factors at work. One, victims of trauma have more social capital to push for trigger warnings, and a pre-existing mechanism with which to express them (since warnings for spoilers and squicks are already well-established and supported by an even wider segment of the fandom). In contrast, real-world media aimed at a wider audience--well, there's no ratings system for books at all, and movie and TV ratings are vague, so there's no mechanism for it, and campaigning for one would be a zillion times harder.

There's also differences in terms of what, in the wider culture, we warn for/censor, depending on the medium. What's acceptable in a book is a no-no on film, movies can get away with more than TV (with a very vague rating off a single scale), a cable channel can show stuff that would never air on broadcast TV (but in the US, at least, TV has a richer rating system), etc. etc. How we as a culture relate to different media seems to dictate how tightly it's controlled, and fanfic seems to be in the same category as broadcast TV or radio--something that somebody could stumble into uninformed (or underinformed) and be surprised. Which is technically true of books and movies, of course, but we don't seem to find that fact as salient for those media--in fact, people tend to gravitate to the opposite assumption, that by making a choice to read/watch something you take a certain amount of responsibility for what you end up reading/seeing, so caveat lector. Does that say more about the nature of the medium or its place in the culture? I dunno.

Wow. Um, that was probably brainier than you wanted. Sorry.
[parent entry] [link] [parent] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] drusillas-rain.livejournal.com at 03:45am on 03/03/2011
Not at all! And it's very true that I don't expect to be warned for anything that isn't fandom. But, I also tend to steer away from certain types of dramas, for example, because they're likely to contain certain content that I don't necessarily want to watch.
[link] [parent] [reply]
mad_maudlin: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] mad_maudlin at 04:57am on 03/03/2011
Right, and fanfic is simultaneously more constrained (since it's within the 'verse of a particular text) and less constrained (because there's really no censorship in fandom, just our self-policed warning culture). Because I like Fandom X, I can usually be reasonably sure that fic for that fandom is something I'll like...unless I'm warned off it. (Same logic applies to characters/pairing tags, I guess.) Whereas just because I like Genre Y, it doesn't follow that I'll like everything that's in Genre Y, so there's not the assumption that I'm going to read everything unless warned away from it. This is similar to how television is often characterized: there's this assumption that the TV is just on, and viewers are passively consuming whatever's broadcast, and so we have to be very careful with what we allow on the air (especially in times where children might possibly see, omg.)
[link] [parent] [reply]
innerslytherin: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] innerslytherin at 04:32am on 03/03/2011
depending on the medium

Oh, that's for sure! I've sweated over this a lot when trying to figure out how to rate fics, and I know I haven't managed to be consistent when it comes to where I draw the line between PG-13 and R, and where I draw the line between R and NC-17. It's difficult. And of course there's also the way people talk about men being more visually inclined than women, and I suspect that also plays into how ratings are established. *cough*

I will definitely say that being part of fandom and learning the conventions of fic warnings, and the reasons for those conventions, has definitely educated me in a lot of ways. Of course, one of the other things fandom has educated me about is the vast edges of the realm of sexuality, both consensual and non-consensual (if you would even call that sexuality as opposed to...well, I don't know a better term, but there must be one). Until the Harry Potter fandom, I always thought golden showers would be, like, sunshine and blessings. :D

But in all seriousness, not at ALL brainier than I wanted. This is an interesting discussion, and for all that my default approach was from the other direction than Dru's, I also find a LOT of merit in the idea of warnings. I confess that I often dislike having to warn for things that I think will "spoil" the plot for people, but I also hate the idea of springing something on people who aren't prepared for it, so I think (I hope) I tend to err on the side of spoiling rather than surprising.

In any event, this is a very interesting discussion.
[link] [parent] [reply]
mad_maudlin: (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] mad_maudlin at 05:14am on 03/03/2011
There is ZERO consistency in how lines are drawn. The 1999 South Park movie was, on some level, a meta-commentary on just how vile a movie had to be to get an NC-17 rating without including any graphic sex. You're probably doing better than the MPAA. :-)

I think HTML is a gift for spoilery warnings--lets you set some parts of your header to black-on-black or white-on-white so that it's up to the readers--which goes back to the caveat-lector philosophy, that you're taking responsibility for reading something without looking at the header first.
[link] [parent] [reply]

August

SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
        1
1
 2
 
 3
 
4
 
 5
 
 6
 
 7
 
 8
 
 9
 
 10
 
11
 
 12
 
 13
 
 14
 
 15
 
 16
 
 17
 
18
 
 19
 
 20
 
 21
 
 22
 
 23
 
 24
 
25
 
 26
 
 27
 
 28
 
 29
 
 30
 
 31