I’m not sure how labeling the contents of something is censorship? Are ingredients labels censoring the food in their packages? In my opinion, tags are there for consumer awareness. They let people know what they’re getting into. If you publish original fiction, you have a dust jacket and a book cover so that people know what sort of book they’re buying. In fanfic, we have content tagging.
I’m a Gen Xer and I definitely expect people to tag their work. And if an author can’t go to the “trouble” of letting me know what their fic is about, then I’m afraid I won’t go to the “bother” of reading it.
The term “trigger warning” gets played fast and loose, but if you’ve ever seen someone get triggered you wouldn’t treat it so lightly. It doesn’t mean “oh, this upsets me. I don’t like this.” It means, “this triggers my PTSD and sends me back to relive a horrible moment in my life.” If my tags can save someone from experiencing that, I’ll tag the shit out of everything.
This is about age and it isn’t about censorship. It’s about being polite.
You know what I would like to be separate again?
Squicks from triggers.
I do like that the most controversial stuffs are tagged, but I beg for the term ‘squick’ to come back from war…
I swear, right now the most ridiculous things tend to be tagged as a ‘trigger warning’ – while I cannot be the judge what is or isn’t a trigger, more than half of those “triggers” seem to be just a thing you are uncomfortable with (=squick). This ‘everything is a trigger, must tag every little thing or You Are Evil and Not Empathetic How Dare You’ thing is harmful in multiple ways:
One, it sometimes causes a situation when actual triggers are lost in the sea of “tw: sandwich” or similar tags. This is especially noticeable in Tumblr, where tags are sometimes displayed in order and 6th (I think) and further tags might not show up at all – so if, for example, someone first tags sandwiches, bread, butter, meat, lettuce, these “trigger warnings” might not help at all if their sandwich is from an imaginary show “Guns & Buns” and guns are tagged at the very end.
For another, if someone is uncomfortable with something and thinks it’s a trigger (because Tumblr shouts left and right how everything is a trigger), they might disregard other people’s experiences – ie I have a sandwich “trigger” but I saw a photo of one and nothing happened, that what must be like for everyone else with their triggers. The circle of triggers, flashbacks and PTSD comes back around – only soon all of them will be disregarded as not real because “everyone experiences that”.
So tl;dr: let’s bring back squicks and stop diminishing the usefulness of trigger warnings.
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#bringbacksquick2K18
I think the trigger warnings debate is most definitely a generational thing. Gen Xers would never have expected a trigger warning on things. Gen Z seems to want everything labeled with them. Millennials seem to be somewhere in between. It is simply censorship with a different name because some people can’t handle subjects they don’t agree with so they choose to ruin things for everyone. DLDW. DLDR. No one is forcing you to watch or read something so if you don’t like it don’t watch or read it!
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