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mesitka:

jumpingjacktrash:

sptrashcan:

tyrannosaurus-trainwreck:

The one thing that hit me when I got back into fandom was reading original fiction and running into shit like animal abuse or super-casual sexual violence and being like “Well, if this had been tagged properly, I’d have noped out after the first lackluster chapter.” Fucking tags, man.

And it’d be one thing if mainstream fiction was more or less predictable, but there’s so much of that sort of thing out there.  Everybody’s a fucking edgelord.  I signed on to read about a homicide detective with PTSD from ‘Nam trying to find a murderous group of bank-robbers who met in-country, why am I now reading two in-your-face pages about an underage street-kid’s side-job of subsistence prostitution?  That wasn’t part of the deal, book.

I mean, the point of tagging is filtering out just as much as it is filtering for, and the fact that everything’s covered if the writer has done their job means that it works for everyone.  People who are absolutely Not Down with whatever can avoid it.  People who aren’t thrilled about it but are willing to trust the author if everything else seems to line up with what they want can bail if that’s not the case.  People who live for it know to shuffle it to the front of the line.

But books and stories out in the wild don’t come with tags.  You know how Julie of the Wolves is summarized? “When her life in the village becomes dangerous, Miyax runs away, only to find herself lost in the Alaskan wilderness.” You know what actually happens? The protagonist is married off at the age of 13, on the condition that the relationship remain platonic until she and her husband–I think he’s 14 or 15?–are of a suitable age to consummate the marriage. She runs away after he tries to rape her.

Like, it’s a good book.  Adult-me is glad I read it.   But if the description on the back had been any shade of accurate about why the protagonist flees into the fucking wilderness, child-me would definitely have waited until I was on the older edge of the 8- to 12-year-old “recommended for” spread.  And it definitely colored how I approached books after that.  I mean, I was a prolific reader as a kid.  That didn’t change.  But most of the books I wanted to read weren’t something my friends had read, and I’m one of those impossibly-old thirty-somethings who’re still somehow at large instead of being packed off to the old folks’ home, so I couldn’t even check online.  There wound up being an extra layer of caution–especially around books with female protagonists–about whether or not the book was going to pull the rug out from under me.

Now, with fanfic, there are several apps and scripts and widgets that will let you wave a digital wand and stuff everything you don’t want to read right down the internet oubliette and slap a “This work is hidden!” sticker over the hole.  I know this because I’ve grown up to be an incredibly picky reader, and there are a couple of fandoms and ships where I’ll run a search and 90% the results field will be happy little “You don’t even have to read the fucking description, because you already know you’ll hate it!” buttons instead of works.

Regular novels, even now?  Good fucking luck.  Maybe if the book’s been popular enough and you’re down with spoilers, you can find a detailed synopsis or two out there that will tell you if there’s a gratuitous chapter on bear-baiting or the least-necessary rape scene of all time. Most of the time you’re on your own, and even fairly well-reviewed novels will contain a surprise B Plot revolving around child sex abuse that the rest of the book doesn’t even come close to earning, justifying, or dealing with appropriately.  The last book I picked up without vetting first had a chapter-two rape scene that I don’t even think the author understood was a rape scene.

And obviously this is a thing that’s been happening since I got old enough to start reading YA books where the dog dies and everyone has TB and the real monster was the patriarchy all along, but it wasn’t something I’d been able to articulate until presented with a solid alternative.  Having a pile of fiction that I could pre-sort to be incest-free (looking at you, Flowers in the Attic), CSA-free (I skipped Gentlehands; turns out Grampa was a Nazi, not a child-molester), and rape-free (just so many fucking books, you guys) was like this literally impossible dream.

Which, you know, you can talk about how much of fanfiction is or isn’t garbage, either in content or execution, but it’s at least well-labeled garbage by people who overwhelmingly seem considerate of their readership.

This has been one of the reasons TVTropes has been a useful thing for me: quite incidentally to its original purpose, it has come to serve as an ad-hoc tagging system for non-fan media. That said, there’s room for a site which has content tagging as its explicit purpose.

(I’m aware that content review sites exist already but they tend to be built around a value system not compatible with my own.)

god, if non-fandom works came with tags, i wouldn’t have to get every single piece of media with potential queer representation completely spoilered to avoid getting a Kill Your Gays trope upside the head. and don’t even talk to me about autistic characters. i just generally avoid any mainstream depiction, because they’re nearly all offensively bad and that legit triggers me.

fandom kiddies whining about how they found some properly tagged dead dove and ate it anyway honestly have no case.

oh man yes, if tags would be a thing in literature outside of fandoms it would make things so much easier in terms of searching for new yummy stuff and avoiding what you can’t handle. I works just fine with reasonable people in fandom.

And man, I could stop worrying about stumbling into shit like that one book last month: it presented a blurb suggesting a dude wooing a shy guy, but instead it featured child abuse + incest + drill sergeant type of an abusive father + homophobia + rape combo that nicely puts my worst squicks and triggers into a special kind of package I just can’t deal with. Were it tagged, I could’ve cheerfully avoided it and wouldn’t have to suffer all the stomach issues, helpless rages and having lost the time it took to read those one hundred pages leading to that big NOPE.

At least goodreads do tag a few things and when combined with some responsive publishers (like LT3 press - bless their faces - who tag orientations of characters in the books and incest), it can really help avoid the worst landmines. Checking tvtropes sounds like a great idea, the problem is that it usually features only the more known creations.