Archive of Our Own

“We have a responsibility…to do no harm”:
Community Values in Fanfiction Warnings

In the past few decades, fandom has evolved considerably, rising from a fringe culture ignored or derided by academics and laymen alike, to a legitimate source of study. Stereotypes of pale, overweight nerds living in their mothers’ basements and entertaining themselves with nothing but spirited online debate and Star Trek fanfiction still hold sway in some areas of the media and the general cultural consciousness, but as fan culture itself has become more mainstream, so has the academic study of it from sociological, literary, and cultural-studies perspectives. Even with greater acceptance of fan studies as a valid field, however, few studies scrutinize the actual practices that maintain the sense of community so valued by members of fandom. In this instance, the content warnings required for fanfiction posted to the community Werewolf Big Bang—and the fandom history that made those requirements especially necessary—provides insight into the community values prized in this particular area of fandom.

Fanfiction itself is hardly a new development. Virtually any work based on earlier literature or legend could be considered a form of fanfiction, and in its current form and nomenclature, the practice dates back to the 1960s with fan-written Star Trek stories published in fanzines. Only in more recent years have fan studies become an accepted focus of academic interest, and current scholarship provides a significant amount of background on fandom and fan activities. As a long-time member of fandom myself, I have seen a number of academic accounts of the practice of fan-writing, some of which have been written from the perspective of self-described insiders such as Henry Jenkins, Rebecca Black, and Matt Hills, but even these fan-academics seem to miss the focus on specific kinds of participatory culture valued by the areas of fandom I frequent, and few writers have approached the topic at the level of specificity I have tried to do in this project. The existing groundwork is critical for any such study, however, even if it is largely useful for examining the difficulties and misconceptions that remain in fan studies. Hills attempts to dismantle many of these in Fan Cultures, in which he primarily examines the approaches of other theorists and argues for a method of study that retains fandom’s inescapable contradictions.

Inevitably, though, both academics and fans value their own ways of reading and writing above the practices in the other group, where fans can seem too emotionally invested, academics too detached; attempts at hybridizing the two, as in the academic-fan ideal popularized by Henry Jenkins, present their own difficulties. Both fans and academics tend to maintain an us/them distinction supported by their own feelings of common sense. Academics like Hills point to the difference between “rational” and “immersed” perspectives; fans, to that between “immediacy” and “over-rationalisation” (21). These subjectivities are only the first of many dualisms Hills attempts to deconstruct—and, in so doing, preserve a sense of the utter lack of homogeneity that fandom represents. “The best we can hope for is a theoretical approach to fandom which can tolerate contradiction without seeking to close it down prematurely,” Hills states, and in fact this seems to be his primary argument against all the other major fan-studies theories he examines throughout the book, that “any academic approach to fandom which favours one side of this contradiction inevitably falsifies the fan experience” (44). In many ways, this approach is the only one that can even come close to fandom’s real nature. Most binaries shut out a more important third term; in this case, the nature of the binaries seems to be that both are valid at once, that fandom is contradiction, and explaining this away also removes one of its most defining characteristics. Fandom is good and bad, crazy and rational, intimate and huge, creative and consumer-driven, enjoyable and frustrating, emotional and intellectual—it is never one or the other but all these things at once.

For good or ill, fanfiction has generally been included in these studies of fan practices, and as such it has received the same treatment. Earlier studies in particular often failed to examine the actual content of the stories and their place in the fan community, largely because this outsider perspective. Chander and Sunder’s “Everyone’s a Superhero,” for instance, recasts the Mary Sue character type as an empowering voice of social dissension. Given that a Mary Sue is a clichéd and one-dimensional character inserted by the author (or, at times, a canon character twisted out of character using these characteristics), often as wish-fulfillment, it should be easy to see why the fan community in general derides these sorts of characters. While Chander and Sunder acknowledge this view, they still proceed to use the Mary Sue as a feminist model rather than examining why the community holds this view, and in doing so they introduce a number of additional inaccuracies that reveal what appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the fan community. Standing in contrast are scholars like Hills and Henry Jenkins, another significant figure in fan studies. Jenkins in particular helped create the idea of the fan-academic who could approach fandom from more than one perspective. He began writing about fandom just as academics were discovering it, so he experienced fandom studies as both a fan and an academic, a situation he describes in Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers as uncomfortable: “Historically, academics had abused that power [imbalance between fans and those who studied them], constructing exotic and self-serving representations of fans. Even many of the most sympathetic audience ethnographers signaled their distance from the communities they described. I did not have the option of distancing myself from the fan community. What I knew about fandom I knew from the inside out” (61). From the opposite perspective, too, “fans have often been hypercritical of academics because of their sloppiness with the details that are so central to fan interpretation.”

Still, it seems that actual study of fanfiction in its own right has only happened in more recent years. Even then, little seems to have been written from an insider’s perspective. Studies of fanfiction tend to take either a cultural/sociological or an educational approach, often blending the two. Rebecca Black’s work is fairly representative in this case. “Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction,” from Lankshear and Knobel’s A New Literacies Sampler, examines the role of fanfiction and reviewer feedback in English language learners’ developing English-language skills. “Online Fan Fiction, Global Identities, and Imagination,” an article that was published two years later in Research in the Teaching of English, appears to draw from the same ethnographic study but focuses on “the influences of new media and technologies on modern configurations of imagination, identity, communication, and writing” (397). Other studies that focus on the young age of many fanwriters also emphasize the skills that these writers can gain through writing about something they enjoy in a relaxed environment. Jenkins, too, has devoted an entire book-length report (Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century) to the use of new literacies and the media in education, making reference to fanfiction only in this context. The few articles that take a critical insider approach to fanfiction tend to be from popular magazines and newspapers rather than academic journals, such as Young’s “The Fan Fiction Phenomena,” written by a self-professed Xena fanwriter. She describes the frustration of “the high crap-to-quality ratio” and the genuine danger that “inexperienced readers may develop seriously skewed standards of what constitutes a readable story,” noting that reviewers on fanfiction.net will often compliment a writer simply for having good grammar and spelling since those qualities are so uncommon there—but her article is a brief overview, not an in-depth study.

The site analyzed for this project, “Werewolf Big Bang,” provides an opportunity for just such a closer study, but the name and the idea behind this particular community require some explanation, to begin with. A “big bang” refers to a fanwork exchange focused on a specific topic of some kind, which can be as narrow as a single character or romantic pairing, or as broad as “Fantasy Big Bang,” another ongoing challenge. Other organized fanwork exchanges and writing challenges exist, but a “big bang” distinguishes itself from other such events by requiring unusually long pieces of fanfiction and pairing them with other kinds of fanworks. Werewolf Big Bang, for instance, has a minimum word count of 10,000 words; the original “big bang” called for stories of 40,000 words or more. Writers commit to producing these stories, several months before the stories are due to the moderators who then follow a schedule for posting them to the community; when rough drafts are due, summaries are posted so that those members of the community interested in producing accompanying artwork or mix CDs can “claim” a specific fanfic. As implied by the name, Werewolf Big Bang focuses on the general idea of werewolves, but it is not restricted to fandoms like Harry Potter that already include lycanthropes. Writers are only limited by the guideline “Participants will be required to write a 10,000 word fic in the fandom of their choosing that focus on the theme of werewolves,” which can include original-fiction stories that are not related to any existing fandom, as well as the introduction of werewolf elements into a fandom that ordinarily would not have any. Posting dates for big bangs are often significant—another recent exchange focusing on the character Remus Lupin was designed to post “long, complete fics, with accompanying artwork…in time for Lupin’s 50th birthday on March 10th, 2010.” Similarly, Werewolf Big Bang began posting completed fanfics on Halloween of this year, an appropriate date considering the subject matter.

Even these basic definitions already reveal something about the community values of this particular area of fandom. Most fanfics are not as long as the requirements for a big bang, so the idea of an event focused on these long fanfics demonstrates that this particular area of fandom values long, well-written, and reasonably thoughtful stories, rather than a few hundred words produced by a 13-year-old Twilight fan on a sugar high. Beta-reading—the practice of asking for peer review and gaining constructive criticism from an experienced community member—is not required in Werewolf Big Bang, but it is encouraged, further strengthening this community value. Due dates and other requirements create a sense of accountability that may be lacking in other areas of fandom—audience is always important to the very concept of sharing fanfiction, but a fun, personal activity might seem to have no need for deadlines. When writers commit to producing these long works by the given deadlines, they are demonstrating their recognition that they are writing to an audience who expects to read these stories within a certain timeframe, and that their work will not exist in a vacuum but must reach a level of completion so fellow fans who have committed to producing fanart and fanmixes will be able to do their parts.

This accountability extends even to such mundane items as the fanfic headers, a fanfiction term that “refers to the information included at the beginning of a story posting to help readers know what follows—and to help them determine if it is a story they wish to read or not” (“Header”). In this community, writers are required to use headers that include information about the fandom and pairing in question, and—most importantly—warnings for situations like character death or issues of sexual consent. These warnings let readers know what they can expect and protect community members who might be harmed by coming across such topics by surprise, and as such, this particular requirement became the most intriguing for study.

To understand the importance and significance of these content warnings, it is necessary to examine recent history in fandom and the ugly, protracted debates that have occurred over this very subject. The most recent major controversy on this topic—known in fandom as “Privilege Wank”—occurred in June 2009, and is recounted in detail on Fan History. (For this reason, usernames have not been changed if those users’ comments are a matter of record in such an archive.)  “Wank” is itself a fannish usage that carries its own connotations about the tone of the debate; FanLore describes the term as “a loud and public online argument, often involving many participants outside of the initiating members, and often devolving into side-taking, hyperbole, and personal attacks” or “a catchall term for objectionable or contemptible fannish behavior.” In the case of this particular controversy, the argument began in bandom (a portmanteau of “band fandom,” generally referring to a specific group of related bands), where a writer failed to warn for a scene of dubious sexual consent. This and similar situations in fanfiction tend to be controversial regardless, in part because of the overlap between “dub-con,” non-consensual sex, and actual rape and the idea that any such divisions are spurious—non-consensual sex is by definition rape, except that some fans draw a distinction between the criminal act and rape fantasies as self-aware kink. Privilege Wank began when comments regarding this fanfic’s lack of warning devolved into a widespread flame war between fans who believed warnings for potentially harmful content was a simple way to show courtesy toward readers, and fans who thought the supposed mandating of such warnings constituted an attempt to stifle their creativity.

Central to the debate was a LiveJournal blog post by Impertinence, in which she described the sixteen years of sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather and the ways in which certain kinds of content in fiction could work as a trigger to those who had experienced similar trauma. She explained the anatomy of triggers in detail, using her own painful memories as an example to help other members of fandom understand the importance of the issue:

What happens during triggering is both simple and complex: an event…throws the survivor back into the mindset she or he was at during the time of the assault, or at the very least brings that feeling very close to the surface. For me, being strongly triggered is almost like a flashback: I am left shaking, emotions in a turmoil, unable to function…

Often, people who have been triggered cannot stop reading. Because of the nature of sexual assault, part of a trigger is being brought back to that awful feeling of violation... Triggering is being made helpless all over again. It is intense and sometimes unavoidable. It can result in anything from a crying jag to weeks of worsening depression.

Survivors…are not just asking for warnings to be saved a mild inconvenience or short-term disturbance. Additionally, survivors are not asking for extensive warnings on their rare and/or particularly specialized squicks. Survivors are asking that authors not hurt them even further by placing them in danger of being thrown back to such harmful mindsets. Survivors are asking that they be given a tool that helps them choose their fandom space and continue to heal, rather than have the same wounds reopened. And most importantly, survivors are asking for something that they did not have at the time of the assault(s): the power to say no. The power to not be made helpless and afraid.

Despite the post dismantling most anti-warnings arguments, the wank only escalated from that point. As one of many participants who expressed similar opinions, Cynatnite commented on Impertinence’s blog entry, “I get resentful with the use of emotional blackmail in order to get me to do what they want even though it goes against my beliefs. … The reader needs to say to herself ‘I shouldn't have read that’ and then stop reading. It's called taking responsibility for one's actions and acting accordingly.” This statement directly contradicts what Impertinence said about the ways triggers operate and incensed other fans who supported the idea of warning to help assault survivors, but many posts and comments still echoed similar ideas, some going so far as to accuse those asking for warnings of using “a classic abuser’s rationalization.”

As tends to be the case with such arguments, the controversy eventually died down without participants reaching a true consensus—those who had argued the loudest against warnings refused to change their minds, while those who argued for warnings found it difficult to comprehend the other side’s views. User IAmTheEnemy wrote in her LiveJournal blog, “the argument isn't about holding everyone's hand on the Internet, it's about caring enough for the well being of your fellow community members and warning for things that have been known to trigger many of them. All I’m saying is that there’s a way to be a person, you know?” (emphasis in original). However, the debate did serve to place the significance of content warnings in the forefront of many fans’ minds and helped re-establish a sense of what was expected in warnings. While it has never been possible to standardize such warnings across all of fandom or to enforce any agreed-upon standard, a number of archives did change requirements somewhat in an attempt to accommodate both those who could be triggered and those who would prefer not to be spoiled. The site Archive Of Our Own instituted a feature that allowed users to specifically notify that they chose not to warn, providing a non-warning that would itself serve as an indication of the story’s potentially harmful content. Several participants in Privilege Wank suggested the use of “spoiler text,” some of whom offered HTML coding so other writers could easily make their warnings readable only to those who chose to highlight that text and reveal warnings that might spoil plot elements.

While none of the fans running or participating in Werewolf Big Bang made any explicit references to Privilege Wank, it is still easy to deduce that the debate had some influence on the standards that this particular community chose to enforce. The exact warnings requirement in the community’s Frequently Asked Questions page could have been compiled from the lists of common possible triggers described in Privilege Wank: “Other warnings are up to you, but please note that warning for rape, dub-con, incest, graphic self-harm/suicide and character death is absolutely mandatory” (emphasis in original). In fact, this requirement was listed in a brief section describing the information fanfic headers needed to contain, and it was repeated in a separate section specifically about warning. The rules added, “If you are unsure of what to warn for or have a question regarding a specific part of your fic please feel free to ask the mods via email or by comment. Please err on the side of caution when warning.” The community rules also dealt with the other side of the debate by providing HTML for spoiler text: “If you feel warning may spoil part of your fic you can place the warnings behind blacked out or whited out text using the following code.”

In addition, the numbers of fic and comments posted to the community indicates that a number of the participants in Werewolf Big Bang are also active in bandom, making them more likely than others in general fandom to have some personal connection with arguments posed in Privilege Wank. (In fact, at least three participants in Werewolf Big Bang can also be found in records from Privilege Wank, including Impertinence.) Of the 39 fics that were posted by the end of the exchange, 13 were bandom of one kind or another (of these, the majority involved the band My Chemical Romance) and an additional four were “real-person fic” of a similar nature but without the band connection. These numbers represent an unusually lopsided divide between bandom and other fandoms, as did the responses to these fics: bandom stories tended to receive significantly more comments than those written for other fandoms, again indicating that participants in Werewolf Big Bang came predominantly from bandom.

Other data, given the background of Privilege Wank, is even more relevant. Thirty-two of the 39 stories were rated R or NC-17 (or an equivalent); only seven out of the total used no warnings or wrote “none” in the warnings section of the header, and all but one of these fics were rated R or NC-17. Four participants used the code for spoiler-text provided in the community’s FAQs, and only one of these writers would have been required to include this potential spoiler as a warning. The warnings themselves tended to fall into a few major categories, although the numbers overlap considerably since most included a warning for more than one type of content, as in this example from writers Letut and Erode: “Minor violence, hinting at accidental self-harm, some minor language.” Out of the total number of warnings, nine referred to language, 17 to violence, 15 to sexual content, seven to character death, and nine to other content that does not fall into those basic categories.

Perhaps even more significantly, the vast majority of the authors warned for content that did not require a warning in the community rules, particularly if the exact wording of the rules is considered. Werewolf Big Bang requires warning for dub-con, for instance; one writer chose to warn for “possible sexual-coercion if you tilt your head the right way but not really dub-con,” while Letut’s fic warned for “hinting at accidental self-harm” even though the rules only required warning for graphic self-harm. Even operating under these broader definitions of the terms in question, only a small number of the stories posted would have required warnings at all. Six fics included warnings for dub-con, two for incest (both consensual), five for elements regarding self-harm and/or suicide, and seven for character death; no warnings for rape or non-con were necessary. In total, 28 authors included content warnings when they would not have been required to do so. Reader feedback to the stories posted was overwhelmingly positive. At no point was there any debate on the adequacy of warnings provided; only in one instance did a reader comment on a fanfic warning at all. Here, Valderys used spoiler-text to warn for “sex with a man who was once an animal (so not bestiality in my book, but thought I’d warn, just in case).” Ignisophis complimented the story and added, “it’s most definitely not bestiality in my book either (and wouldn’t be even when George was in dog form), as to my mind what makes bestiality is the non-sapience of one of the participants rather than morphology.” Valderys responded, “Oh good, I didn’t think it was bestiality either, but I tend to err on the side of caution with warnings, because it’s safer that way, but greyed it out in order to not spoil for people who are less sensitive - seemed the best compromise I could manage!” Valderys’s attitude on the subject is representative of that expressed by the users of the community in general, as indicated by the data gathered on the various warnings. The vast majority of authors who participated did err on the side of caution, as the rules advised. Two participants actually warned for content not listed in the community rules but that some participants in Privilege Wank brought up as their own personal triggers: “Depiction of an extremely severe car accident” and “depictions of mental illness, for those triggered by such.”

The idea of community values did not come up explicitly in the context of Werewolf Big Bang, but it is clearly represented in the warnings requirement and in the warnings given in actual usage. At least in this part of fandom, the majority of authors make every effort to ensure they do not unintentionally harm their readers, so they go beyond the specific wording of the requirements and warn for anything that might trigger or even offend a fellow fan. Airgiodslv summed up this view well in a post made during Privilege Wank:

We’re a community, and we look out for each other. We inform each other. We share stories, and we teach, and we try to make the world a better place. We provide a support network that every single one of us can turn to in times of need.

What I try never to do, however, is to knowingly hurt a member of this community, or to hurt someone without then apologizing for it and doing everything in my power to rectify that mistake.

We are a community of minorities, of all colors and sexual orientations and gender identities and religions. We have a responsibility, to ourselves and to each other, to do no harm. Part of what this means is that just as we inform each other, we look out for each other. Part of what being in this community means is that every person in it has a right to feel safe. Posting warnings is a part of what makes our community safe for everyone. It’s not an attack; it’s a defense. It’s part of what we do to make sure that we as artists do no harm. Personally, I would rather have fifty people skip reading my story or prematurely find out a ‘surprise’ plot detail than have one person’s mental health be endangered by it.

I hope that everyone who reads this feels the same.

If the warnings provided by participants in Werewolf Big Bang are anything to go by, most fanwriters do value exactly this sense of community. Fandom is not enjoyed simply for the ability to play in someone else’s created universe, post stories for those worlds, and receive feedback from other fans, but for the friends made there and the safe space provided when those friends treat other fans like human beings, not impersonal words on a screen.

Works Cited

“Header.” Fan History. Fan History Wiki: The Fandom History Resource, 27 June 2009. Web. 24 November 2010. Retrieved from http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Header.

“Privilege wank.” Fan History. Fan History Wiki: The Fandom History Resource, 11 February 2010. Web. 20 November 2010. Retrieved from  http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Privilege_wank.

“Wank.” Fanlore. Organization for Transformative Works, 17 January 2009. Web. 8 December 2010. Retrieved from https://fanlore.org/wiki/Wank.

Airgiodslv. “Community.” And then Gabe happened. Livejournal, 23 June 2009. Web. 8 December 2010. Retrieved from http://airgiodslv.livejournal.com/481774.html.

Black, Rebecca. “Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction.” A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 115-136. Print.

Black, Rebecca. “Online Fan Fiction, Global Identities, and Imagination.” Research in the Teaching of English 43.4 (2009): 397-423. Web.

Chander, Anupam and Madhavi Sunder. “Everyone’s a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of ‘Mary Sue’ Fan Fiction as Fair Use.” California Law Review 95.2 (2007): 597-626. Web.

Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures (Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication). Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2002. Print.

IAmTheEnemy. “Warnings and such.” Authorised for use by Qualified Time Lords Only by the Shadow Proclamation. LiveJournal, 19 June 2009. Web. 25 November 2010. Retrieved from http://iamtheenemy.livejournal.com/309648.html.

Impertinence. “Sexual Assault, Triggering, and Warnings: An Essay.” i sneezed another brave idea. LiveJournal, 20 June 2009. Web. 24 November 2010. Retrieved from http://impertinence.livejournal.com/480847.html.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Print.

Thomas, Angela. “Blurring and Breaking Through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction.” A New Literacies Sampler. Ed. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. 137-165. Print.

Valderys. “Kingmaker, Being Human, Mitchell/George (R).” valderys’s Journal. LiveJournal, 4 November 2010. Web. 7 December 2010. Retrieved from https://valderys.livejournal.com/75313.html.

WereMod. “Wrapping it up: Master List, Werewolf Big Bang 2010.” Werewolf Big Bang. LiveJournal, 20 November 2010. Web. 27 November 2010. Retrieved from https://werewolfbigbang.livejournal.com/16580.html. 

Werewolf Big Bang. LiveJournal, 2 May 2010. Web. 5 October 2010. Retrieved from http://community.livejournal.com/werewolfbigbang/.

Young, Cathy. “The Fan Fiction Phenomena.” Reason 38.9 (2007): 14-15. Web.