I know your dog whistles, hypocrites.

The "author chose not to use warnings" isn't helpful to someone like me at all.

Yes, it is. It helps you avoid harmful content.

What it does not help you do is assess and manage risks posed by a pool of potentially harmful content that you still want to engage with. It gives you what you need to protect yourself, but it doesn't give you what you need to access every piece of art you possibly could.

The first one is required by the social contract and common courtesy. The second one really has nothing to do with either of those.

Put another way:

If you try to hand us your chocolate chip cookie with peanuts in it and just say, "Yeah, this contains allergens," that's simply not enough info and we risk poisoning ourselves if we want to eat this cookie you're offering.

I'm not handing you the cookie. The cookie's sitting on a table in a box that says I make no assurances as to its safety, and I don't really care whether you eat it or not.

You're not obligated to tag appropriately [specific content] to the best of your ability, but you're also not obligated to be kind to people in general.

First off, tagging CNtW is, in 100% of cases, tagging appropriately. No other warning available on the Archive can boast that success rate. Now that's out of the way, you're looking for #9.

"But CNtW exposes people to all manner of things they never signed up for!" No, it doesn't. It couldn't, because they signed up for it by clicking through on the tag. (That's a draw for some of us, by the way.)

"But readers can't avoid what they don't know is present!" Yes, as a matter of fact, they can. This tag makes it possible. That is half the point of this tag.

So: we've established that CNtW does not expose the unwilling to content, but rather restricts content to the willing. By clicking through, you consent to the possibility of encountering anything that might otherwise be warned for. What, then, is the issue with it? Since it's not "inconsiderate and rude" on account of violating anybody's boundaries, I presume you're saying it's rude because it creates one. But if tagging CNtW is rude simply because not everyone can engage with it, why isn't tagging Rape/Non-Con equally rude? Not everyone can engage with that content, either. In fact, if not everybody can engage with it, isn't it rude for the content to exist in a public space at all? Isn't the only considerate and kind way to tell stories to tell ones that everyone can hear?

I understand that that's not what you're advocating. But CNtW content is already 100% avoidable, because it's tagged, so that can't be the problem with it. If the problem with it is instead that a subset of readers end up excluded, then trying to fix that problem goes bad places fast.

Back to the food allergy analogy

Must we?

[I]n this scenario, it's like there's a whole community of people who bake cookies and then offer them to strangers.

It really isn't.

I detest this food analogy. I am going to rant about why. Before that, though, I'm going to give it credit for getting one part of the analysis correct.

When fandom has tagging debates, it tends to conflate two distinct questions. With subtitles, or a ramp, or screen-reader compatible websites, what is at issue is whether someone can access the thing. All those provisions are means of access. This is what is usually meant when we ask about accessibility: how does someone access the thing? With food allergens, what is at issue is whether the thing is a thing someone can access. Or, really, not access, but consume. Can someone consume this without acute adverse consequences?

What "fic content = food allergens!" gets correct is that with fic, the question is whether the thing considered for consumption is a thing a given person can consume.* It's not whether they can access it. It's whether it has potential to harm them. People tend to ask these questions as if they were interchangeable in tagging debates, and they're not. They might be equally important, but they're not the same.

Regardless, the analogy between allergens and content is of limited utility, because fiction isn't food. Acting as though people's needs, desires, and behaviors around stories are comparable to those around food is disingenuous at best. We could tweak the metaphor to make it more apt: leaving cookies out on a table (in boxes! With warning labels!) is not the same as walking up to someone and urging them to eat one; your participation in the community is not contingent on eating any particular cookie (except perhaps the factory-brand ones that brought you all together in the first place—which are themselves being sold in supermarkets with deliberately incomplete information on the boxes). But ultimately, this exercise ends up not being very illuminating, because the things compared in it just aren't that similar in composition or consequence.

Fiction isn't food. We don't make it the same. We don't need it the same. We don't process it the same.

Fiction isn't food. Very few people would consider surprise or suspense essential to the experience of eating a cookie; very, very many do consider both of those essential to the experience of reading a story. Just because it's an element you're personally indifferent toward doesn't mean people who value it don't get to do the baking to meet their own needs.

Fiction isn't food. It's communication, and it doesn't usually have an individual target. Motivation for attempting this particular form of communication comes in a big, beautiful, unruly spectrum—even after you take money out of the equation by restricting this to fanfic. Some posters' uppermost priority is indeed reach and engagement. I've heard tell of authors who will go so far as to calculate their rate of kudos to hits and whatnot. That wouldn't be fun to me, but evidently for those folks it is fun, and I don't get to decide who's Doing Fandom Right. At the opposite end are people who aren't just indifferent to response, but inimical: these are the folks who celebrated when the feature to turn off comments completely went live on AO3, because they want no part of how others experience their work whatsoever.

In between, probably closer to the latter extreme than the first, you have a bunch of authors for whom any reader response is a (potentially) felicitous side-effect rather than the point. I'm somewhere in here. @lovetincture​ described posting fic in a way I liked very much: "Here is a thing that came out of my brain. You can look at it if you want."

For me personally, I think I take that second step—"You can look at it if you want"—in large part because my fic does reflect pieces of who I am that do not find expression in other parts of life, and I hope to feel seen. But I don't get any guarantees. Sometimes readers will comment in a way that makes me go, "Yes, that—you, too?" But sometimes I might get the dead opposite, even from readers who enjoyed their experience very much. The first outcome is of course more satisfying; but at the same time, part of the reward of posting a story for me lies in accepting that people will take different things from it, seeing the different things people take from it, watching the fact play out, over and over again, that human communication is so much more complicated than binary success or failure.

Granola bars seldom do any of that.

[Tagging specific content] takes a matter of seconds and no effort from you…. It's… easy and quick to tag.

Sometimes that will be true. Sometimes it won't. If it's true for you and tagging is compatible with your reasons for writing and posting, then knock yourself out. Any time tagging is a net positive for you, obviously tag. If tagging presents equal cost and advantage, flip a coin. But it is not correct that tagging is "easy and quick" for everyone or reliably requires "no effort."

Here is a non-exhaustive list of costs fanfic authors on AO3 might see in tagging specific content:

tags are reductive

author wants story to unfold for readers with as few externally generated expectations as possible (whether or not any "twists" are involved); tagging necessarily undermines this

author doesn't trust their own judgment of which tags best apply or what content needs tagging in the first place (because although you assert that everybody knows "what people are commonly triggered by just like you know what people are commonly allergic to," a) not everyone actually does agree on what topics are taboo or generally distressing; b) as tends to happen with racism and dubcon, even when people do agree on what categories are distressing, it's quite possible for authors not to notice they've written something that belongs in one of those categories; and c) personally, I wouldn't place too much confidence in the general public's familiarity with allergens either)

author genuinely has not a damn clue how to tag something

author doesn't want to get bitched out if people decide they tagged something wrong

author has a lot of inhibitions around creating and sharing work generally and wants posting to be absolutely as easy as possible to get themselves over that threshold; has perhaps selected AO3 as an archive whose terms of service are suitable to their needs in this direction

author knows antis sometimes trawl tags in search of controversial content specifically in order to harass the authors

author straight-up doesn't want to fuck with it

author considers that tagging extensively creates a fiduciary duty of which they want no goddamned part, and does not want to be perceived as offering a guarantee of safety with regard to this thing that came out of their brain

Et cetera.

And maybe a lot of the time the cost of comprehensive tagging will be small, even negligible. I get the temptation to dismiss balking at such a cost as pettiness or self-importance. But you don't get to call any reason, however slight, a fic author chooses to opt out of comprehensive tags "making a fuss" while calling anything less than maximal access to all fic you might want to read "inconsiderate and rude."

What I infer, from your readiness to equate marking fanfiction "read at your own risk" with criminally negligent poisoning, is that you are less attached to the contention that tagging costs nothing than you are to the belief that it doesn't matter how much it costs. Explaining all the ways tagging the way you want might cost someone something is pointless if you don't actually care. And of course you're not going to care if you're operating on the assumption that your needs are more important than anyone else's.

Either fic is important enough that it's a genuine bummer to have to miss some of it or fic is too trivial for any of this to matter. Pick one.

[P]eople, myself included, will search for specific content by their tags. As in, tagging allows everyone to find things they are interested in more easily in addition to other discussed benefits.

And as noted up top, this is a major reason why many authors cheerfully elect to do it. Which is great. If you want people to be able to find your stories more easily and you perceive no costs that outweigh that benefit, then this is the way to go.

But costs can be significant. I'm not going to repeat the whole list I just made, but I do want to emphasize that discoverability is itself double-edged. Yes, good SEO means more interested readers can find your story. However, sometimes authors actively prefer that their content be harder to find. This is because antis will pore over tags they find objectionable so that they can harass people for writing the content. It gets nasty sometimes; there was some college kid a few months back whom antis outed to her family for writing Wincest. Fortunately the family member didn't care, but the girl still ended up in the fucking hospital over it. The anti that doxxed her gloated. So not everybody wants their shit to be easy to find, and I don't blame them.

"Oh, but I wanted the peanuts to be a surprise." Yeah, thanks, now I can't breathe.

And when I pry your jaws open and cram the cookie down your gullet, that will be my fault.

(Fic still won’t be a fucking cookie, though.)

The contempt that expressing any kind of desire to surprise an audience can earn you lately is… well, it's really something. The demonization of surprise, suspense, and subverted expectations within fandom is fascinating to me, and will eventually get its own post; but as far as its bearing on CNtW/read at your own risk, the root issue is that arguments against CNtW are grounded in the assumption that everybody Does Fandom the same way. That's the assumption that says that everybody obviously must need x, because nobody could possibly need y.

"Nobody reads fanfic to be surprised, or discomfited, or to have their expectations violated. Well, they do, but only because they have execrable taste. If they were as refined as I am, they'd understand that watching a story unfold without knowing what's going to happen is but a low pleasure for the intellectually inferior. If they were as morally educated as I am, they'd understand that certain topics are too serious to be 'sprung on readers' for 'shock value.' They'd understand that what they want out of fandom not only doesn't deserve to have provision made for it with a compromise that takes the form of an easily filterable tag, but actually makes them assholes."

Well, like it or not, everybody doesn't Do Fandom the same way. People don't all read or write for the same reasons. Most individuals don't read or write for the same reasons from one day to the next, for that matter. For some fans, knowing exactly what they're getting into is vital; for others, not knowing is equally vital. The latter really do prefer reading with as little information as possible. They absolutely do consider specific tags to be spoilers and dislike comprehensive tagging for this reason. I've seen people complain of as much. What I haven't seen is those readers harassing authors who elect to tag or leveling accusations of "poisoning" or "anti-vaxxing" at anyone for failing to cater to them.

It's almost like they recognize that it's the author's right to present this thing that came out of their brain the way they want, or something.

I don't get the hostility to it?

The hostility is not to anybody tagging comprehensively if it suits them. The hostility is to anybody it doesn't suit getting harassed. The hostility is to readers who can't handle the results ignoring the "read at your own risk" tag and then laying their trauma at authors' feet. The hostility is to getting told posting fanfiction with a clear and easily excludable warning on it is a crime on par with assault or poisoning.

I would even speculate that those experiences are occasionally triggering, and the people doing the harassing sure as hell aren't tagging their hate with something easy to filter.

————————————————————

*Most of the time (or at least, the vast majority of the debate is framed around this). In fact, sometimes content information about fiction can change whether someone is able to consume it. In that sense, it starts to look a bit more like subtitles or a ramp. But in order to treat tags as comparable to a ramp, a means by which you access the work, you have to separate them from the work. They are not separate. They're part of it. Presentation matters. If it didn't, no one would get reminded not to write their résumé in Comic Sans. If it didn't, no one would pay professionals to write blurbs on books. If it didn't, no one would be arguing about this in the first place.