Reader Discourse - Tumblr Posts
The onus of responsibility is on you, the reader, to ensure you're prepared to encounter - or avoid - content in whatever capacity. And here's a fun little fact for you:
You can filter by kudos and other criteria in order to find works that likely fit your "quality demands."
You can look at rec lists. Collections. Bookmarks. You can ask for recommendations from other users who share similar standards and interests to yours. And, yes. That means every. Single. Time. Because again; if you have specifics you want, its not up to the author to jump through hoops to bestow their works at your heels like a peasant to a 14th century King. Its up to you to go looking for it.
If you're so bothered by other writers and their "mediocre" content, here's a suggestion.
Write it yourself and stop complaining.
"Then just…. don't skim the unfiltered character tag? Filtering out a NOTP, a rating, and a few major squick tags takes literal seconds and is how the site is meant to be used."
Do you fucking hear yourself? Do you have any idea how many ships there are, especially in a big fandom? Am I supposed to astral-project to imagine every single combination of characters I'd find disturbing to read about? Every possible setting? And if I miss something, it's on me? Are you for real?
And hell, that's not even a solution. It's not that I would never read an incest fic, I would. It's not that I would never read that particular incest ship or that particular rating, I would. So why the hell would I filter for it? But shit like that is something you need to ease into, and that means not dumping it in the summary or tags that you read specifically to decide if the actual fic is worth it.
What's squicky can be so heavily context and situation-dependent that it is ridiculous to the max to act like authors are free to be as gauche as they like in tags and summaries, and it's readers' fault if they get majorly squicked by something they wasn't quick enough to "argh my eyes my eyes stop reading" on.
Let me say this even more bluntly:
I love reading rapefic, it's a major kink for me. When it's written well, and in a specific way. Ergo, I'd still absolutely hate it if it were commonplace for people with rapefics to make the summaries and tags explicitly vivid. Please, in all your apparently infinite wisdom, go ahead and tell me which combination of filters I should use to not get upset by shitty summaries while skimming fic summaries for something I'd actually like!
Poor or gauche writing in and of itself can make something squicky or potentially upsetting.
So screw everyone who replied to this post with some variation of "Just get better at Not Reading Things while reading". You can't always predict what you'll find squicky and you can't filter for "this thing I only find squicky when it's not done in a way I subjectively find tasteful". Maybe don't be so intent on making the archive miserable to use, mkay?
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