genre and warnings in professional literature

So this just occurred to me--and this is not to reopen the warning debates--but something I realized posting comments in a friend's DW today about warnings and genre.

Warning: Could potentially be triggering, as while it's a theoretical discussion of professional fiction and warnings, comments do mention specific instances, novels, and authors with triggering content.



Right, so we say the jacket summary will tell you sometimes, and recs, on if something is going to trigger you--examples rape, pedophilia, incest, eating disorders, self-harm, et al. I've never entirely been sure of that because a.) I rarely read reviews and b.) dust jackets/summaries are just as misleading in professional fic as fanfic.

I was trying to think of the times profic surprised me with something really unpleasant in the family of potential triggers (other people's common triggers) and it was maybe a handful of times at most, and it's not like I don't also read blind either, where to challenge myself I'll buy books in genre sight unseen and read them. (Don't ask. It's like paying to be stupid, to be honest.) Thing is--and please correct me if I'm wrong--ballpark, what are the chances of hitting a sci-fi fic that involves a character with an eating disorder?

Again, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I'm going to tentatively state there's not a lot of books about space ships that also linger on the character's eating disorder and treatment, for example. In general, sci fi, for example, doesn't have a huge market share with rape, outside of the John Norman school of what the fuck, in which wtf, that's not even sci-fi; fantasy is more likely to have it, almost guaranteed if a major female protagonist is involved, either Far in the Past or mostly off-screen. In fact, outside a few exceptions, when reading in any genre (non contemporary literature, non issue literature, non YA issue literature), it's not going to show up as more than a Far in the Past or Well Off-Screen.

If you're a regular reader of romance, and I am, I can spot whether the story will be seduction or rape by publisher and summary, even if it never mentions rape (which you know, it won't). Mysteries, same deal. In general--again with some exceptoins--genre telegraphs concept.

Fanfic for the most part has no concept of genre whatsoever; I'm wondering now if that's a reason it's more complicated in fandom. More or less, if you're used to genre giving you some kind of warning by being genre, then fandom's mix and match would confuse the issue. It occurs to me that very few professional works try to handle a serious trigger issue and do anything else in a story; that seems to be the story's center. Which--am I missing something?

I wish I could survey for this. Hmm. Feel free to correct me; my experience in reading is definitely not everyone's.

Comments

[aella_irene]

fantasy is more likely to have it, almost guaranteed if a major female protagonist is involved, either Far in the Past or mostly off-screen.

There are some authors where this doesn't happen: Mary Gentle's Ash has the five year old protagonist raped on page 3 or so. There are some authors who are much more in your face about it-- I think Diana Gabaldon counts as a fantasy author for this.

[seperis]

I was thinking of two that had semi- or explicit rape in fantasy; one was male, and it definitely came out of the blue, though not to anyone who had read the author's earlier work; the other I don't remmber specifically enough if it surprised me.

[concinnity]

Imo (and I think about this stuff a lot), the primary difference is that in profic you can generally tell what genre you're getting into. Mystery, fantasy, etc., and subgenres beyond that - so YA female protagonist fantasy fiction vs YA female protagonist romance and so on. You get the cues from where they are in the bookstore, what the cover tells you and son on. Beyond that, opening paragraphs and chapters follow generic conventions quite heavily. Even if you open a book "blind," as it were, if you are an experienced reader, you'll sort it out fairly quickly.

This is why fanfic has titling sequences and warnings. Imo. They operate as covers & bookstores do. See also: my dissertation in progress. *shrug*

[snakeling]

there's not a lot of books about space ships that also linger on the character's eating disorder and treatment
*cough* Mark in the Vorkosigan saga?

Anyway, I think that one of the differences is that we're emotionally attached to the characters in a way that's more difficult to achieve with profic, which makes it hit closer to home.

I've been surprised by rape in profic (the child molestation in The God of Small Things comes to mind), and I'm not sure how those scenes would go across for someone who is triggered by that kind of thing.

[niqaeli]

*cough* Mark in the Vorkosigan saga?

Yes, and I have known people to be triggered by the book that delves into the fracturing of his psyche and the development of his eating disorder -- not least because, hey, genre isn't much of a warning here. Even the previous books aren't that much of a warning; Miles's ongoing identity crisis is fairly nasty and arguably trauma-induced as well, but still is not at all similar to Mark's.

I was pleased that LMB didn't flinch away from Mark before, during, or after that mess but it's an incredibly harrowing read and not one that people go in expecting.

[mrshamill]

Triggers are VERY prevalent in the sort of SF that I read, because I read authors who give a damn about their characters and make their characters three-dimensional. Jonathan Carroll, James Tiptree, Jr., Sherri Tepper (well, okay, used to be Sherri Tepper, sigh), Dan Simmons, Diana Wynne Jones, et al. If I could think coherently, I could come up with a few other hard-SF authors, but at present, my mind is pretty much mush due to my circumstances. But they ARE out there, you just have to look.

It boils down to who treats their characters well, those are the ones you have to look out for. They'll drag your heart through the mud and stomp on it for good measure.

[green_grrl]

Yes, this. The first one that came to mind for me was Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow/Children of God, which invests you completely in the very three-dimensional main character who gets fucked over (literally) and fucked over again. Literature as much as science fiction, but oh my god OUCH HEART SHREDDED.

[out_there]

More or less, if you're used to genre giving you some kind of warning by being genre, then fandom's mix and match would confuse the issue.

Hmmmm. I think you're right, to a good extent. I read based on other recs because a certain reccer will give certain warnings (i.e. you can tell the difference between a story that's basically a romcom and one that will rip your heart out) but reading blind... that could easily lead to those moments of being halfway through a story and being stunned by the sudden triggers.

(Mind you, I also wonder if it's something to do with fandom as a community. We have more than a few community members who have triggers, and a lot of the community is based around friendship, around the idea of sharing glee and encouraging all to feel good, to feel excited, to feel safe. I think in general when someone says, "hey, this thing here caused me distress, I just wanted you to know," fandom will discuss it and come up with ideas/conventions to minimise harm.

I don't think professional publishing would. For bottom-line sales and a much wider buying audience, the distress of a few readers wouldn't be an issue. I think those with triggers are probably a lot more wary of picking books and -- to an extent -- find ways of working around the risk of triggers.

In fandom, people can have a say and at least some of the community will go, "Huh, you know what, we could do x without it really impacting our fun times, so let's try that".)

[kickair8p]

"I'm going to tentatively state there's not a lot of books about space ships that also linger on the character's eating disorder and treatment"

I'm another one who had Mark Vorkosigan spring to mind . . . but pretty much only him. After some brain-wracking, I remembered a character in the Wild Card saga that might qualify, assuming you put urban fantasy on the same shelf as space ships. No women. Huh.


A bit ago I was reading a recently-published profic book, and when I came across something triggering my first reaction was an indignant "she didn't warn for that!" (Don't remember what it was, sorry.) Took me a moment to remember that warnings are a fanfic convention, I'd gotten so used to it. Makes me wonder if it's going to spill over into the pro market -- I doubt publishers will start including non-con warnings on the flap, but maybe a third-party site like an imdb.com for books might start up.

~

[malkingrey]

Fanfic for the most part has no concept of genre whatsoever; I'm wondering now if that's a reason it's more complicated in fandom.

I think you have a point there. Which is why I'm increasingly in favor of "cover art" for fanfic, at least on those occasions when it's well done and appropriate -- because one of the functions of cover art is to give indicators of genre. (Though I am seeing some fanfic these days using "horror" as a content descriptor -- to use a less loaded term than "warning" -- which strikes me as being useful without being spoilerishly explicit. Given that horror as a genre exists, to quote a writer friend of mine, "to scare the bejeezus out of the reader," there's a certain expectation that anybody willingly going through that particular funhouse door has less than the usual grounds for complaint if they don't like what's inside. This wouldn't work as well for some fandoms as for others, though -- it's practically made-to-order for Supernatural, but might be less than useful for something like Glee.)

Also, profic in general is much less about creating a shared safe space than fanfic is; in fact, the explicit intent of a work may be to disturb the audience. (To switch mediums for a minute, one only has to consider something like Picasso's Guernica.)

[lotesse]

One of the most horrible trigger-related experiences I've ever had was at the hands of pro sff - I picked up Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books unwarned, and I was maybe fourteen? and still riding high on a Tolkien-and-Lewis based wave of sff-is-my-safe-happy-place, and oh man the explicit rape was bad, but the exoneration of the rapist was what sent me into wallbanging and bad-poetry-writing and other trauma responses.

[torachan]

Another of his series has fairly graphic sexual child abuse, too.

[minim_calibre]

I used to find a lot of rape scenes in sci-fi, but the genre may have changed since I stopped reading a lot of it.

I think you are onto something though. Most accidental common trigger content I find in profic is in the general fiction category, rather than in genre.

(I did get triggered by Rose Madder. Which was my own damn fault. I can't say it didn't say what it was right in the package. I just didn't expect it to portray the mindset of some who had suffered from IPV with such accuracy.)

[aka]

Off the top of my head, I was completely blindsided by the assault and rape in Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs. The only other books of hers that I've read are the two previous in the series, so I don't know if that's a thing with her or not. But it was also a case where the female protagonist (and I) thought interactions with Male Character A were friendly, where the other male characters thought she was flirting and leading him on. So I guess that should have been my warning? It certainly will be from now on.

Also, someone mentioned God of Small Things. I didn't see that one coming until the start of the chapter, and then only because a friend had recently been assaulted and I was hyper-vigilant about the warning signs in media.

[sorrel]

That book made me cry. (Iron Kissed.) Not so much from the assault itself, but from her response afterward and her talk with Ben. I was sobbing. I agree that it was extremely sudden and I would have liked to have been warned for it- but I think the way she handled it during and after was pretty brilliant, too.

[laurajv]

Hm.

I feel like -- you are right, and you are wrong, perhaps in a weird way.

One of my objections to the fandom convention of warnings is that you often have a set list of warnings to choose from, and if your totally gross thing isn't on the list, your obligation is discharged. It's like it says "only these 10 things need to be warned for, and if none of them apply, this story is Safe". (I'm still kind of mentally sorting out how generic warnings and trigger warnings differ. I like trigger warnings on meta, links, etc. but not particularly on fiction. But trigger warnings are often very different in content from the traditional kind, too -- like ED trigger warnings, for example. Anyway.)

And it's just not the case that something is Safe if it doesn't hit any of the warnings in the list, but the very existence of the lists changes the entire dialogue and...I'm not explaining myself well, I feel. Maybe I should use a vegetable metaphor.

In profic, by contrast, I go in assuming that anything goes. I might run into something really gross. I might run into something triggering. But since I don't know, and don't really have the option of knowing, I have a different mindset (and a different set of coping mechanisms) going in.

Like. Soup. Vegetable soup, OK? In fandom you get vegetable soup, and the soup has boxes checked off saying what vegetables are in. Corn, peas, celery, carrots, potatoes. That's all you can have in the soup. Except sometimes there are turnips or cauliflower and it never occurred to anyone to think about that so it's like, wtf turnips? This is fandom soup, there are no turnips.

Whereas with profic, I order vegetable soup and all I know is, there are some vegetables up in there. I don't know what they might be. Maybe I will hate them. Maybe not. Maybe, in this soup, those vegetables will be fine.

So I approach the soups differently. Fandom soup claims it is going to tell me about its vegetables, and so I tend to approach it like a familiar soup that is always the same. Profic soup doesn't, so I am more open about what I will accept from it.

I think my metaphor makes less sense than my actual feelings about this but then again, maybe not. Maybe it is the delicious broccoli meta in fandom soup.

Here via metafandom

[charamei]

This makes perfect sense.

I'm on the finishing stretches of a 20k-word fanfic in which the characters are toddlers. It's babyfic! Light and fluffy and - in chapter one, there are no adults and there's a monster chasing them. In chapter two, the monster starts eating people. In chapter three, the monster kills a baby and one of the characters carries its bloody, broken body around for a thousand words or so until he can work out how to 'bury' it; this is the same character who was recently dying horribly while trapped in an overheating piece of machinery. In chapter four, there's some quicksand...

Nobody's raped or cuts themselves or develops an eating disorder, but I'm sure I should be warning for something in that mess (Lord knows I squicked myself enough times while writing). Just... turnips aren't on the list of checkboxes, so if I do put a warning on it, it has to be of the 'may also contain unlisted vegetables' type.

If we want to keeo our safe space safe, the solution isn't so much 'more checkboxes' as 'ditch the checkboxes and just tell me which parts of the soup you think I might be allergic to'.

[revanchist]

Here from metafandom. :)

Just wanted to say that Neal Stephenson, who I consider, at least, to be a pretty prolific/popular scifi writer, has included triggery content in several of his novels.

Unfortunately, I feel as though the correlation is actually that scifi novels are less likely to have prominent heroines as opposed to fantasy and romance. And whenever there is a prominent heroine, I am always on edge, just kind of waiting for it to pop out of the story.

Which sucks, because there's little enough good science fiction, even less that centers on women. So trying to find a female protagonist in an untriggery plotline is a little like the needle in the proverbial haystack. But maybe that's just been my experience.

I do like the vegetable soup metaphor suggested by above comment, though.

[mswyrr]

This is interesting to me, because I somehow lack the ability to detect the clues you mention being present. Which is why I've often thought that I'd love to see fanfic like warnings on published books.

[torachan]

I read mostly literary fiction, so the idea of published fiction having warnings doesn't jibe with my experience at all, since literary fiction has surprise pretty much everything, including character death. (So maybe literary fiction is the "choose not to warn" genre.) But I know most people in fandom read more genre stuff, so it may be different. Still, a lot of the fantasy and sci-fi I read back in the day had surprise rape (as, of course, did romance novels).

[mercredigirl]

I don't know, sometimes I wish profic came with warnings on.

I don't think it has so much to do with the genre conventions or lack thereof in fanfic, more that TWs are part of internet courtesy (someone, I cannot remember who, once explained that this is because of the interactivity and immediacy that hypertext brings). =/

Dubcon is reaaally unsettling/triggery for me, which is one reason I don't really read mainstream SFF anymore -- it seems very prevalent in that genre.

also, is it possible to not use phrases like 'go into X blind'? tq.

[nic]

(here via MF)

Very interesting post. Two things spring to mind:

- When I graduated from teen fantasy to adult fantasy novels, I was shocked and horrified at the rape scenes.

- These days, I'm a reader who will read the last page (or chapter) first, if I suspect the story has major character death. This has served me well. If a chapter is heading in a direction I don't like, I'll start skimming or skip ahead.

Using these methods, I generally manage to warn myself.

(I just finised reading "The Lies of Locke Lamora" - AWESOME fantasy novel, but so very graphic/dark/triggery. It would need an entire page of warnings if it was fanfic)

[sgrio]

I just read Game of Thrones and I was horrified at all of the causal rape and assault in it. I won't be reading the rest of the series, that's for sure.

[sgrio]

*casual

Steven King: Gerald's Game

[ariadne83]

I was taken completely off-guard by the flashback incestuous pedophilia

[forked.livejournal.com]

I suspect YA has lots of triggery stuff- more or less front and center. Not the kind of stuff I read- but the more 'emo' teen girl stuff? I was dying about a write up someone linked to about a boy with 'HOOKS FOR HANDS'- it... kinda reminded me of fanfic and likely was triggery cause it sounded like thy just piled on the angst. 'Flowers in the Attic'? Man- I'd bet Judy Blume was triggery. And I'd bet you get more in Suspense type stories where folks have a dark/tragic/troubled past.

Man- I just read what I thought was a cozy mystery w/an animated Dachshund on the cover that I thought would be a cute/funny/cozy and ended up w/dead families and kitties and monkeys and.... jeebus. Not what I was expecting from the cover. They start killing kitties, it's really not something I want to read. But I'd agree- it was unusual for the type of mysteries I usually pick up. Genre probably is often a good hint, but I think some (YA, Suspense/Thriller) are more likely to get more books w/triggery issues (vs. say your typical cozy or classic sf).

[mardia.livejournal.com]

You make a really interesting point about expectations based on the genre/summary. To me, YA fiction is where a lot of potential triggers are--I remember reading Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak in junior high/high school and loving it to pieces, but I remember reading it for the first time and knowing something awful had happened to the protagonist, but I had no idea that it was rape, and there was nothing in the summary to give me a warning either. I also find it interesting how my judgment on adult mysteries/thrillers has shifted in the wake of all the TV crime procedurals--I remember picking up one of the Rizzoli and Isles novels to try it out, and being really shocked by the graphic nature of some of the killings.

[welfycat.livejournal.com]

I remember the one that caught me off guard was a fantasy novel by Juliet Marillier called Daughter of the Forest. I read it a couple of years ago and had to put it down for a couple of days, not because the rape was horribly graphic, but it was very onscreen and very present and very out of the blue. Mostly, it was just that I wasn't expecting it. I read plenty of stories that involve rape, but I usually prefer to be warned in someway in advanced. Someone else mentioned Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, which I adore, and even though there wasn't any kind of outright warning, you still knew from when you picked up the book that something bad had happened.

Same thing applies to fic, mostly. I'm okay reading most triggers, but I really prefer to know in advanced.

[elaran.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I did enjoy the Sevenwaters series you mentioned but when I first read it really threw me off because I wasn't expecting it at all.

[reddwarfer.livejournal.com]

I've never been caught off guard by profic. I can tell by the genre, author, and/or synopsis what sort of things will happen.

Detective novels=may be triggery.
Fantasy novels focused on the long ago past=triggery.
Sci-fi=may have bugs.

But I've never read a profic and then was caught by a out of the blue scene I wasn't expecting.

I don't count character death in that score cause I generally assume that someone may die in any profic.

In fanfic, there's a lot of unexpected things. I've read scenes where the author intended to write bdsm or sex and instead wrote rape. There are times when there are extremely horrible things happening in a Prince of Tennis fic. (Hey, the manga's about tennis. Srsly, why is there surprise rape and torture?)

I tend to think it's because the shows/books we're basing fanfic on belong to a genre already. People sometimes take that and spin it on its head. Taking the characters out of one situ and putting them in another.

I also think that fanfic writers tend to try to generate maximum angst in a shorter span of words and tend to use things that are sure to deliver that.

A book generally has thousands and thousands of words to do a slow build if you're not relying on those old standbys.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

I've read scenes where the author intended to write bdsm or sex and instead wrote rape.

SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WITH THAT????? That freaks me right out. (And makes me worry about if the author is OK, and in a safe relationship, frankly.)

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

In general, sci fi, for example, doesn't have a huge market share with rape

This is not my reading experience, actually. Scifi, fantasy, and horror alike have tons of rape or metaphorical rape. Some of the three volume fantasies I ate up as a kid didn't seem to think their plot had enough zest without at least one scene where a nubile young woman got menaced by a hulking guardsman. And let's not even get started on Piers Anthony. *facepalm*

Outside of romance, it's not always luridly described w/r/t sexual acts, but then that's not necessarily the triggery part of reading when you've got a trigger, as I understand it. The "bad shit is going down, but I'll just leave the details to your imagination" could be pretty unpleasant if you can fill in the blanks all too easily. And of course, our culture isn't always great at distinguishing that yes, certain situations may be rape or dubcon at the very least.

And even if you're not dealing with a straight up case of Clueless Author Fap Fantasy, there are still plenty of "what the shit? where did that come from?" moments out there in popular fiction: there's that one scene in Stephen King's It that leaps to mind.

[eponymousanon.livejournal.com]

Yeah I've read plenty of fantasy novels with non-con of some variety-- rape, possession, mind-rape, dub-con, etc. Also I read a lot of those books starting when I was in 5th grade, which I think says a lot about how much warning I had of the contents. Arthurian/medieval fantasy novels especially seemed rife with the noncon--I'm currently reading the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by George R. R. Martin and my god, every other chapter seems to have noncon, especially of barely pubescent girls. Some of it can be explained as "the reality of medieval warfare" in context, but a lot more seems to be his id showing.

And then there are books where there aren't internal issues, but external ones-- like, in the universe as created by the author it ISN'T non-con/dub-con/creepy but then you sit back (sometimes years later) and go "oh, wait...". Like, I just did that with Pern. It's essentially AMTDI (well, Dragons MTDI but it's a fantasy series in the sci-fi genre) but the very first Pern novel has a girl (16?) who doesn't know what she's been inducted into, in a closed society with little information, whose first sexual experience is DMTDI, and then her new hierarchically determined partner has sex with her again before realizing that wait, she wasn't all that into it and actually seemed to be more enduring it (power and consent issues much?). And of course they turn into an epic romance relationship. Of course.

[eponymousanon.livejournal.com]

Also, don't even get me started on John Ringo or on Heinlein's later novels.

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

When I read The Clan of the Cave Bear as a kid I was pretty shocked that the main character is raped repeatedly (everyone else just ignores it because it's the male character's right) when she is a girl of 11 or 12 (?), has a son, and then later is forced to leave her clan but she is not allowed to take her son with her. She never sees him again! D: I wish there had been a warning for all that. :/

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

now I am super-glad I thought the cover of that book was stupid and never read it because leaving the kid behind would have given me nightmares. :(