Love in Dark Settings

But for every loud person saying, "You've GOT to do this," I suspect that there's ninety-nine quiet, polite people thinking, "It would be really nice if you did this." They just don't tend to speak up when the conversations get loud and noisy.

Well, that's one way to make sure that the rude and noisy people set the community standards - one way or another.

I'm sorry, but I think this is a bit harsh.

I'm sorry too: but this is my reaction to reading a stack of people issuing harsh demands for warnings. It seems to occur to none of them that they themselves can do some of the work and carry some of the responsibility: that if they know there are kinds of stories they have issues with, they should figure out for themselves some way of finding out which they are before they read them - and avoid reading brand-new stuff about which they know nothing if they know they're not in a state of mind when they can cope if they run into something they didn't want to read.

There's a middle area between "too traumatized to do normal activities" and "okay with doing all activities."

Yes: and demanding that the writer do all the work of making sure you're guided to the stories you want to read, and only to those stories, is inappropriate. Which is what these people seem to me to be doing, and that's just annoying.

Because the fact is that many authors write both erotic het and non-erotic het, and me wanting some authorial help in differentiating between the two isn't me not using my brain.

But I won't warn for erotic het any more than I will warn for erotic slash. Not least because I realised many years ago - since I quit writing sex scenes to rule, in fact - that I no longer had any notion when a story of mine became "erotica" in the eyes of other people. I write - or I intend to write! - sexually-charged stories in which the sexual tension builds to a climax - I want to get the reader charged up and turned on - and I write very few sex scenes, but I am absolutely not going to let on where they are, what they are, how detailed they are, or anything like that. (At least, certainly not in the form of a list of tags: if you want to know where all of what could possibly be described as "erotic het" moments are in all my stories, e-mail me and I'll let you know.)

I tend to think this is a community matter.

*nods* That's absolutely right. One of the things that some of the rude/noisy people do not seem to grasp is that there is no such thing as a universal fannish community standard with regard to warnings. There are a whole array of fannish communities all of which have different standards.