#in the hands of distant unknown creators or ESPECIALLY publishers and hollywood studios please take better care of yourselves than that

[chamerionwrites]

The analogy presents itself pretty readily so I do get where people are coming from when they're like "tragedy/horror/other dark fiction are like bdsm, it's all good so long as they're properly labeled and the audience can consent to the experience," but for all the surface similarities (intense/painful/scary sensations and/or emotions that many people thoroughly enjoy experiencing in controlled circumstances), these are profoundly different things in a number of extremely consequential ways.

(1) When you're talking about bdsm - or for that matter any other kind of sexual consent - you're talking about scenarios that can be tailored very closely to specific individual needs and desires, as well as continuously adjusted in real time by the (usually fairly limited number of) people directly involved. This is not how storytelling typically works! Most of the time you're talking about finished narratives, created by a single author or a small group of collaborators, and then flung out into the world to be read/watched/experienced by an unknown and potentially vast audience who had no direct input on the story's creation, whose needs and desires the author(s) had no way of knowing, whose specific individual needs and desires may in fact directly conflict with those of other audience members.

(2) Will anybody who can give me an objective definition of "properly labeled" please stand up. You can't! That's an inherently subjective judgment call! There is literally no amount of tagging and warning that can account for the specific personal triggers (let alone general discomforts) of every potential audience member - some of which, again, might directly conflict with each other because competing access needs are a thing! - or for the inherently metaphorical and representational and open-to-subjective-interpretation nature of storytelling itself. Art by definition is FREQUENTLY About A Thing without directly being about the thing. Every horror story about possession is also a story about bodily autonomy is thus also a story about sexual violence, even if there's absolutely nothing sexual in it and even if - here's the real kicker - the author never consciously intended to put that there. This is just one example among many.

Meanwhile there are plenty of people who are triggered by innocuous or even normatively positive things, as opposed to the straightforwardly sad/dark/violent stuff that everybody frets and fingerwags about plastering with content warnings. Meanwhile there are plenty of people like me who are triggered by Vibes. In my case, what I sometimes refer to as anglerfish vibes: softly glowing light in the foreground, mouthful of sharp teeth in the background. The upshot is that I typically do pretty well with in-your-face depictions of violence but can occasionally get mentally and emotionally sledgehammered by stories that most people consider very soft and safe and comforting, specifically because they gloss over their own darker elements in a way that raises every hair on the back of my neck. GOOD FUCKING LUCK finding a way to warn for something this nebulous when even I can't reliably predict it. This is just one example among many!

Long story short...I'm genuinely not opposed to warnings but if we're going to be serious about their uses and shortcomings I'm gonna need people to stop and think for 2.5 seconds about how they function in the real world, and recognize that Objective Proper Labeling which reliably prevents anyone from having a bad time does not exist. I'm sorry but it's fake. That's not how trauma works, that's not how fiction works, and that's not how the intersection between those things works. And imo it does more harm than good to pretend it does work that way.

(3) Even in kinky sex that can be tailored to the specific needs of a handful of individuals, somebody discovering that actually they're not having a good time and calling things off is not a consent violation, it's safeguards working as intended! So if somebody picks up some dark fiction that was not and could not be tailored to their individual needs, gets surprised by bad feelings they weren't expecting, and closes the book/tab/movie...sorry but framing that as a consent violation due to lack of "proper labeling" (subjective and impossible) is BONKERS.

(4) In my experience a lot of the people who think darker fiction is inherently harmful think the same thing about kink, so while this doesn't mean your argument is bad per se, from a practical perspective I think it's unlikely to reach people having a moral panic because some folks like their hot sauce extra spicy.

Like I said I do think these comparisons are largely well-meaning! And maybe I'm hairsplitting, maybe the metaphor isn't meant to be extended this way - but the problem is I frequently see people extend it in exactly this way, and I find it a really troubling way to talk about consent and maybe an even more troubling way to talk about fiction. Asking a storyteller to predict and accommodate the subjective emotional responses of every hypothetical member of their audience is asking for well beyond what's fair or even feasible, and if we actually want to talk about consent in this context it's very simple: you have the choice to pick the story up and you have the choice to put it down. End of.

Maybe I'm just terminally prone to hairsplitting but while most of those doing it seem to mean well, personally I often find it really troubling the way people use the language of consent to discuss labels and warnings on fiction