boo bear

There is a show called Arrested Development. There is one specific scene where a character finds a bag in the fridge. The bag is labeled “DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT!” The character looks inside the bag. It is a dead dove. The character looks up and says, “I don’t know what I expected.”

The bag warned specifically what was inside it. The character looked anyway and found what the bag warned about. It was not the bag’s fault he looked, nor the fault of the person who labeled the bag, because, hey, they warned anyone who looked at it there is a dead dove in this bag. It is entirely the fault of the character who looked, and he admits that by saying he didn’t know what he expected other than what he was warned for.

This warning phrase has become a tag for authors, mostly because people are looking at the warnings, reading the fic, and then complaining about things they were warned about beforehand. It is the authors saying, “You read the tags and looked anyway. That is on you, not on me, because I warned you. You made the choice to open the fic and read it. You made the choice to open the bag.”