schmevil | jesus fuck

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oh humanity!

jesus fuck

Ok, there were warnings about child abuse and dark themes, so I can't really complain, but-- I'm not happy about getting halfway through a story before finding out one of the lead characters was a pedophile.

NOT ENOUGH FUCKING BRAIN BLEACH IN THE WORLD, NOT ENOUGH BACK BUTTON EITHER. MY GOD.

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What story is this, so I can avoid it?

Are you in Inception fandom?

Ah, that Inception fic I'm guessing? If that's the one I was lucky enough to have read the prompt on the kink meme a couple of days ago, and the summary of the fic was basically the same so I walked away from that unscathed. You have my sympathies.

I had a moment of pure hysteria when I realized what was going on.

Ah, yes. I'm all for the whole 'your kink is not my kink', and I don't like getting spoiled with certain warnings like, say, character death, but. This. Agh.

Not cool. So not cool it might as well be fucking Sahara.

I can't remember if she linked to the prompt or not, tbh. But the thing is, having just read the warnings, I went in expecting to hear about child abuse, but not to be asked to sympathize with a pedophile and... there are Arthur/Eames sex scenes before the revelation, and I was like oh, poor Arthur, it seems he was hurt as a child and has some lingering issues, perhaps Eames can support him while he works through-- WTF WTF WTF.

And then I couldn't sleep. :/

Ok, I went back and looked. She links to the prompt and probably warns sufficiently. So yeah.

Well, if I remember correctly she says 'don't click if you don't want to be spoiled', and that's quite different than say 'oh, btw, paedophilia.'

Yeah, and it's a dicey set up all around, if we're talking about readers with trauma triggers. It's not a trauma trigger for me, but surprise!pedophilia can still keep me up all night. I don't like the idea of sending people to prompt threads because then you come across those adoring WANT comments, to prompts that are squicking/triggering you.

...holy shit.

Yeah. I just... a stronger warning would have been nice.

There's something about rapists and pedophiles as sympathetic characters that makes for a fundamentally different kind of read from the usual narratives we encounter in fandom. These stories hit in an entirely different way, so I don't know... more specific warnings would be nice, I guess.

There's something about rapists and pedophiles as sympathetic characters that makes for a fundamentally different kind of read from the usual narratives we encounter in fandom. These stories hit in an entirely different way, so I don't know... more specific warnings would be nice, I guess.

That's one way to put it. I had a similar reaction to a story featuring anorexia years ago; it's not that I wouldn't have read the story anyway, but I picked it for reasons that had nothing to do with a realistic portrayal of anorexia, so I wasn't in a mental place to deal with that.

I've had that happen with professional works, too, but not as often; I can't tell if it's because of genre separation--aka the market for sci-fi anorexia in the real world doesn't exist, so it's not something that is likely to show up--or I was really lucky.

And yeah, that's kind of a textbook reason for warnings right there. There are some things I can justify as a surprise even if they bother me, but pedophilia, especially exporing it in context of a sympathetic character, isn't really one of those.

Another LJ user brought the issue of my warnings to my attention and I wanted to let you know that I edited them to warn for the pedophilia itself as well as my (attempt at a) sympathetic portrayal thereof. I additionally made the warnings "covered" so that hapless passersby could avoid them in the event that they might prove triggering.

Knowing what was coming, as the author, made it difficult for me to warn accordingly so that the reader would be mentally prepared. It wasn't my intention to portray the story as anything other than what it was, and so I'm very sorry to have lead you, and anyone else in a similar position, into it only to have you stumble upon something very, very different from what you were expecting.

My apologies. I'll try to be more conscientious in the future.

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