I know I'm in my own world... it's okay, they know me here

I'm the first to admit that I'm not very plugged in to the discussions side of fandom. I'm a lurker by nature and always have been - I came for the fic, and stayed. So when big wanks blow up, I'm usually the last to know, and have to dig around to find out what's been going on.

I like to understand what people are arguing about, and to hear both sides, then make up my own mind about where I fall and what I want to do about it. I did this with the whole Racefail '09 fiasco - read what people said, considered it, and decided to integrate it into my own personal behaviour so that I could be a better person. Not that I'm saying I was particularly racist before - but I grew up in an almost exclusively white area, am middle class and white, and have very little experience of non-white issues. I try to be fair to everyone and treat everyone the same. I want to be the kind of person who does good things for everyone around her, not bad things - I want to leave the world better off when I die, not screw it up more. This includes upsetting people.

So why, when it upsets abuse victims and can trigger horrible mental backlashes, do people talk about warning for triggery topics in fic as though it's a terrible imposition? I'm sorry, I just don't get it. It reads to me as though you're telling the abuse victims it's their own fault, so they should STFU and get out of fandom if they're going to be so whiny about it.

Um, no. That's not how MY fandom works. In fact, that's not how MY LIFE works. I would have thought it wouldn't be the way you wanted your life to work, either.

So. Here is my personal policy on warnings. I'm only just creeping back into writing fanfic again after several years, and who knows - I may end up backing off again into the dark and re-lurking. But I'm not willing to not touch on this issue.

I will always warn for rape/non-con, dubcon, child OR ADULT abuse (sexual/emotional/physical), character death or kinks that may be triggery such as BDSM.

To the best of my ability, the fics I link to on my delicious, which I consider to be a recs page, will always carry warning tags for these issues. If I slip up and forget one, I apologise, and a request for me to tag a fic correctly will always be listened to.

If, like me, you had no background information to this at all, I started here, at queenofhell's journal, and branched out. This post by impertinence is a candid and straightforward explanation of what triggers are and how they work. Warning: Very explicit discussion of sexual assault and the nature, anatomy, cause & effect of triggers. Is itself triggery.

So today I've been thinking about what makes me read certain fics and what makes me click the back button on my browser, and why sometimes going back to a fic you loved makes you frown and say, 'huh, you know, I don't actually want to read this fic now.'

I'm going to talk about my thoughts, so if anyone feels they disagree, I'm not dissing you or your favourite pairing or type of fic or whatever, and please feel free to comment and discuss. I don't get to do this sort of thing any more, eyeballs are pretty cut and dried when it comes to your own inner monologue :D

For instance, then, after rereading The Mirror of Maybe up-to-date - which is a very good Harry/Snape fic, by the way, if you haven't read it, and it's worth a try even if you're not a fan of the pairing, which I wasn't before this - I've been looking for Harry/Snape fic to read and basically being picky about it.

I am willing to read this but not willing to read other fics (I, of course, don't tag fics I don't like, so I don't have one to put here just yet. Maybe if I find one later I'll fill in the blank.) If I'm reading Harry/Snape, it can't be fluffy, or really particularly light at all, because it just DOESN'T WORK. It has to be hard, and painful, and twisted but right at the same time. Something has to go wrong for it to go right for them as a pairing. (That said, The Mirror of Maybe doesn't exactly fit these criteria. But it has other things going for it, and Midnight Blue makes the pairing work. So I'm perfectly happy to read any of it I can get my greasy mitts on. I wish she updated more than once a year. I kid you not.)

Take Heroes fandom - I'm only willing to read Nathan/Peter, at least at the moment. Why? Because they're the characters I'm interested in, and because they have so much screen chemistry it makes my teeth ache. I love the other characters - in fact, there is not one I'd out and out get rid of - but I don't actually want to know about their sex lives. I do want to know more about Nathan and Peter's dynamic, because there is so much there under the surface, hidden from plain sight, that I feel like I'm picking up on. There are too many characters for an individual rundown, but my immediate thoughts - Hiro is too cute for me to want to consider his sex life, and the person Claire has the most chemistry with is Peter, but not in the same incestuous they-could-actually-go-there way that Peter has chemistry with Nathan. And that's fine, because she's pretty awesome all on her own. (Well, truth be told, I wrote a Nathan/Claire/Peter smutlet for the Heroes Pornathon a while back. So basically I'm good at breaking my own rules.) Again though, for me Heroes is not a fluffy fandom. It doesn't really work for me in fic. While there are probably even fics I've tagged that are sort of fluffy, it's not what I'm looking for.

I suppose what I'm really saying is that, with fanfic, I need to feel like it fits with the show or books or whatever before I can be comfortable enough to immerse myself in it. Stargate Atlantis fandom can get away with the most outrageous crack, because there is no limit on the crazy you can inflict there. (Though I seem to have gone off SGA fic lately. No idea why.) Supernatural - yes, crack, but not really fluff. (Sam and Dean are another pair that are so wound up in one another that fic really has to make sense to me before I'll read it, because their dynamic is so set in my head. I can imagine them killing for one another and not batting an eyelid, time and time again, and that's not fluffy. It's heartrending and breathtaking when it's done right, but it's never fluffy.)

I won't even go into the topics of grammar and spelling for now, as I suspect Sam is coming to pick me up to drag me out to Carnibar for the evening. Maybe I'll come back and expand this later. Until then :D