lizardlicks:

ciravaesthetic:

culljoy:

roachpatrol:

nianeyna:

ao3tagoftheday:

Ok, this isn’t a normal post, but I got this tag in my inbox today and I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that, as much time as I spend making fun of weird tags, tagging exists for a reason and it’s important. People use tags in order to filter and curate their experience of fanfiction, for reasons ranging from simple taste to significant trauma. Fandom should be fun for you, the author, and you shouldn’t have to feel responsible if someone has an adverse reaction to something you wrote. But it is your responsibility to help people figure out whether or not they want to read/should read/feel safe reading/are going to click on your fic. That’s what tags are for and blowing them off is a disservice to your readers and to fandom itself. We’re a community based on mutual love of our interests and the caring for each other that arises from that mutual love. It’s our job to protect our community together. So please, take a moment when you post a fic to tag it appropriately, so that people who want to read it will find it and people who don’t want to don’t end up reading it by accident. It’s the kind and respectful thing to do to protect our community.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this tag. I am baffled that anyone could be offended by this! Are you seriously saying authors have to list every specific sex act that occurs in their fic? That seems a little extreme even for the tag police.

Also like ~unpopular opinion~ but no you don’t have a responsibility to tag to some arbitrary standard of thoroughness. As long as you’re not LYING about what’s in the fic, or being misleading about it, you’ve done your job. Tagging is helpful and convenient but it’s a nice bonus extra, not some kind of moral imperative.

agreed, if you don’t want to tag, just say ‘i’m not tagging’. the reader assumes the risk when they decide to click on something without tags. if you have triggers that could ruin your day, it’s on you to avoid untagged and potentially triggering fic. ‘it’s just marked sex acts so i don’t know whether or not there’s choking!’ okay so don’t read it. or risk it knowing you’re the one making the choice to expose yourself to a bad time. putting the responsibility on total strangers to anticipate all your needs ahead of time is just asking for trouble.

A responsibility? I don’t think op meant it that literally, but maybe, maybe not.

A courteous, selfless act giving someone the chance to back out? Yes? Yes.

No one’s saying fics have to be labeled a million things, but that psuedo tag is unnecessarily vague as fuck and it literally takes a minute to tag any key/centric content to inform your potential readers if they’re about to read ddlg, violet knife play, verbal abuse, or noncon play in between other things; a basic ratings system.

There’s no gain playing russian roulette with people as to whether or not sex acts could involve something commonly winced at; no gain belittling decent consideration as a bother for the work you’re (presumably) wanting views for. The idea that unrewarded courtesy is overrated and that a content creator can’t spare a few seconds for the piece they publicly coax their audience toward is jarring.

I think personally that the disappointment vibe I get of that example tag is more like…you won’t take a few moments to tag the primary content of your fic, but you did take a few moments to write out an unnecessarily long and snobby tag?

Because the above doesn’t read like the author doing the shorthand of “too many to tag”, it reads like: “I specifically am taking the time to tell you I don’t give a fuck.” Which, depending on the situation, could be cruel at best and genuinely harmful at worst.

Also if it’s…really “overloading the tags” that turns some of you off when you’re posting your fics, quite frankly I still don’t see how that’s an excuse. Speaking in a general sense: if your complaint is that you can’t account for every single instance of something that may be triggering, here’s the secret. You can do that. Actually. When I post my works, when you read the main tags on my fics, I mostly constrain them to plot/AU-related things, and like…the big blanket content warnings of the stuff that will be most prominent. For smaller stuff that might happen only every once in a while? I put content warnings in the chapter notes, right at the top. I tell my readers that I do this at the beginning of every longfic I write.

I read the OP as less an urging for authors to be overprotective and more an encouragement to not go out of your way to deliberately be a jackass. Like, at the end of the day, if you don’t want to tag your fics, then that’s your personal decision and nobody can make you do the opposite. However, actively choosing to use tagging space to deliberately broadcast how much you hate tagging is like walking into a store and dumping bottles of Armorall on the floor. Some people won’t mind the mess that comes after, but at the end of the day you’re still creating a potentially dangerous hazard, and folks that slip and fall are only going to remember you as an asshole.

Not to mention, this is part of healthy fandom.  This is the informed part of the informed consent between the reader and the author.  It’s especially crucial for those of us who write kink fic, dark fic, and any other kind of content that the moral purity brigade wants to police out of existence: we have a right to create our content without harassment, and the people who don’t want to see that shit have a right to be given the upfront warning and ability to sidestep it where ever possible.

Plus, the other half of tagging isn’t just warning.  It’s advertising.  How are the readers looking for that sweet, sweet satisfaction supposed to  find it if they go digging through the tags and yours isn’t there?