Work Text:
The @otpodcast had a recent episode about Warnings, Triggers, and Squick, and their questions and discussion led me to do a bunch of related stats. Because of the potentially sensitive nature of some of these topics, I’ve hidden almost all the stats behind a read more tag.
Meta-warning: I won’t get into any graphic details, but I will:
- list a bunch of tags that are frequently used as trigger warnings,
- list a bunch of reasons given for using the “Dubious Consent” tag,
- look at which ships most often get the “Underage” tag
- discuss which warning tags tend to receive a high number of kudos.
If any of this discussion is likely to bother you, feel free to skip these stats.
I’ve looked at AO3 warnings before, but only at how often each of the four major warnings are used, alone and in combination. (That last post was a bit more thorough than the above graph, but I wanted to do an updated version). As you can see from the graph above, “[Graphic Depictions of] Violence” and “[Major Character] Death” both get used on close to 5% of fanworks, while “Rape[/Non-Con]” and “Underage” get used on roughly half as many fanworks.
The @otpodcast folks pointed out, though, that there are a number of possible triggers that aren’t included in this set of warnings, and they listed a bunch. I captured as many as I could, and looked at how often those are tagged for on AO3 as well:
I was a bit surprised to see that more fanworks use the major archive warning “Graphic Depictions of Violence” (far left, dark red) than the “Violence” tag (far right, light red), which contains “Canon-Typical Violence”, “Killing,” “Brutality,” and many other subtags. This could be in part because creators are forced to choose a Major Archive Warning box (or to check “No Archive Warnings Apply” or “Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings”), but aren’t forced to use any other tags – or that they felt adding the other tags would be redundant. Similarly, more fanworks use the “Rape/Non-Con” major archive warning (second from the left, dark red), than the “Consent Issues” tag, which contains “Rape,” “Dubious Consent,” and many related tags.
Out of other trigger warnings I looked at, “Incest” and “Suicide” (also contains “Suicidal Thoughts” and related tags) occurred on over 1% of fanworks. “Self-Harm” and “Eating Disorders” are both rarer.
So, that’s what tends to get produced most often. What tends to get rewarded most by readers? The average (median) number of kudos per fanwork on AO3 is 19 kudos. I compared this for the major archive warnings:
Whereas graphic violence and character death were most commonly warned for, violence gets an average number of kudos, and character death appears to be avoided by readers. Rape and underage fic, OTOH, receive more kudos than average.
Is that because readers seek out rape fic and underage fic due to kinks? Not necessarily. Some readers and creators do have such kinks, but that’s probably not the whole story. If we look at the average number of kudos for the other trigger warnings, we see some of them also receive very high kudos:
I suspect that the popularity of a bunch of these subjects often has more to do with readers rewarding a creator for tackling a difficult topic, and/or for showing a favorite character working through something the reader has experience with. Fanworks can be a venue for showing hurt/comfort and eventual healing in a way that mainstream media does not always portray.
I was curious about what kinds of tags people most commonly use along with the major archive warnings:
Each column represents one of the major archive warnings (leftmost are None Apply and Choose Not To Warn). The light/pastel colors (black text) are very common tags overall on AO3. The dark colors (white text) stand out as being common mostly with the warning tags. From this, we can see that many creators tend to be redundant and/or more specific in their additional tags:
-
“Graphic Depictions of Violence” often cooccurs with “Violence,” “Torture,” “Blood”
-
“Rape/Non-Con” often cooccurs with “Rape,” “Rape/Non-con Elements,” “Violence,” “Non-Consensual,” “Torture”
- “Underage” often cooccurs with “Underage Sex,” “Dubious Consent” (along with many specific sex act tags)
-
“Major Character Death” often cooccurs with “Character Death,” “Death,” “Canonical Character Death,” Suicide,” “Grief/Mourning,” “Violence”
@otpodcast also had a discussion about when violence is graphic vs. canon-typical – interestingly, most of these common extra warnings for “Graphic Depictions of Violence” go away when we instead look at “Canon-Typical Violence”:
I guess a lot of the canons that include violence also include character death, though, somewhat unsurprisingly.
There was also a portion of the podcast that discussed the “Underage” tag, and (IIRC) whether it gets applied more when one of the members of the pairing is an adult, as opposed to when it’s two teens or kids having age-appropriate interactions. To look at this, I chose three different fandoms – Harry Potter, Teen Wolf, and ASOIAF – and in each fandom chose one pairing that is canonically close to the same age, and two pairings that aren’t. I looked at what percent of each pairing’s fanworks receive the “Underage” tag:
Harry/Draco and Sansa/Jon (closer to the same age canonically than the other pairings in their respective fandoms) were both relatively unlikely to receive the “Underage” warning. (Note also that for many of the ASOIAF fanworks especially, but also in the other fandoms, many pairings were cooccurring, so the warning may have applied to other pairings.) Harry Potter/Lucius Malfoy and Stiles/Peter Hale were especially likely to receive the “Underage” tag. All of this generally supports the notion that many fans tag “Underage” more when one of the characters in the pairing is an adult and the other is not.
Given this, why is Stiles/Derek less likely to receive an “Underage” tag than Stiles/Scott when there is a greater age difference? I can’t be certain, but my hypothesis is that it’s because Sterek is the juggernaut ship in the fandom. There is just SO MUCH Sterek fic being written, that there is a ton of AU fic and Future Fic (and at this point canon fic where Stiles is an adult, I presume, though I haven’t watched much of the show?) – with such a large ship, there’s room for a high percentage of that fic to feature them both as adults. (Similar is probably true to a lesser extent of Harry/Snape.)
I’m not sure why so much Stiles/Scott fic does receive an “Underage” tag, but it looks like about 7% of Allison/Lydia is also tagged “Underage”, so perhaps the whole fandom has a higher tendency to use the tag than the other fandoms I looked at. Edit: See also an additional note about California age of consent laws and how the fandom takes them into account them from someone in the Teen Wolf fandom.
I was inspired to look at one final thing – what are the different reasons that different fandoms tend to tag things “Dubious Consent?” I know that Omegaverse is all the rage in the recent fandoms that I’m most familiar with, but I was curious what dubcon tropes were popular in other & older fandoms. Here’s a sample of what I found:
A few notes: Pacific Rim sure has a lot of different dubious things going on! And no matter how many times I research Homestuck, I still can’t remember what all the quadrants of romance mean – but I think those two make sense to have cooccur more often with dub con?
Thanks, @otpodcast, for the inspiration! Here’s the raw data for anyone who wants to take a peek or make use of it (there are a few more analyses in there, too).