#reader responsibility

Curate your own online experience. I’m not your babysitter.

I got a comment under one of my stories and it hit me how a lot of new people have followed me lately, and a lot of you clearly don’t know how I write, how I tag, or how I approach 18+ content on this blog.

So let’s make this painfully clear before anyone starts clutching pearls and writing thinkpieces about how I’m “terrible again.” I don’t care.

If you’re reading my 18+ work and choosing to interact with it, I’m going to treat you like an adult. I’m not going to baby you. I’m not going to sanitize it. I’m not going to pretend explicit fiction needs to be handled with foam padding and a waiver.

I am not responsible for the media you choose to consume. That includes fanfiction. That includes dark themes. That includes characters who are canonically awful, violent, manipulative, morally bankrupt, or all of the above. If you’re walking into a story about a character like that, it’s on you to know what you’re getting into. “I didn’t realize” is not a life-ruining tragedy, it’s just you not doing basic homework.

My darker fics come with warnings when they need them. This specific piece didn’t have a separate warning because the anon ask that requested it already contained the warning. The request itself spelled out the vibe. I’m not going to repost the same disclaimer five times in neon lights just because someone skimmed.

I assume my readers are intelligent. I don’t write like I’m explaining a moral lesson to a classroom. I don’t spell out every implication. I don’t “draw the lines” like you’re a child who needs everything labeled in crayon. Subtext exists. Context exists. Canon exists. If you want a completely curated, heavily tagged, filterable reading experience, AO3 is right there and it’s literally built for that. Use it. That’s what it’s for.

I do not owe you emotional comfort.

I’m not obligated to care what offends you. I’m not obligated to manage your triggers for you. If you know certain content wrecks you, then you protect yourself like an adult. Check the source material, check the vibe, back out when it’s not for you, and move on.

I would understand if people don't post triggers or mislead about their fic content. Plenty do that or post it in the wrong tags for reach. But the thing is you're not doing that. And also while we are at it, the words rape etc should not be infantilised and sanitized to make it palatable. Rape is rape. And twisting the word to make it uwu and acceptable is just the same as sweeping it under the carpet like a dirty little secret. Rape exists in fiction in many forms, as part of a plot, as the male gaze, as kink, to shock, to explore trauma etc. You're never going to stop it being written in any shape or form so you have to curate your experience or you are literally an old man meme shaking you fist at the sky.

I absolutely hate parent/child smut but apparently it's acceptable and I'm being pro censorship and a puritan. It's just 'fiction'. To me it's another form of child abuse. This is because I was groomed online and my abuser and his friends would write fic in popular fandoms along those lines, post on ao3 and RP. That formed part of my abuse. But people don't want to hear the victims point out this aspect of fanfic 🤷

Thank you for this.

I don’t think that person was malicious or “rage baiting” either. I think this is just what the internet has trained people to do now. Consume something they already know they won’t like, then act shocked and morally injured about it in public like that’s a personality.

You’re exactly right on the basics. The anon request was explicit, and I was explicit in my own framing. I also wrote the character as… the character. If someone sees “Aerion being Aerion” and still decides to walk in, that’s not me tricking them. That’s them ignoring the giant sign that says “this is not your thing,” then getting mad that it’s not their thing. People really do this to themselves and then demand the author take responsibility for their decision. It’s bizarre.

I had a Maegor fic on an old AO3 account. It was tagged with a rape warning. People still came into the comments to yell at me like they had been ambushed. Like… why are you voluntarily walking into a tagged dark fic and then acting betrayed by the content you were warned about? That exact nonsense is one of the reasons I deleted that account and why I refuse to post ASOIAF fics on my other one. I’m not doing the “come scream at me for writing exactly what I said I wrote” dance anymore.

On the word censorship point: agreed. I’m done with “grape” and euphemisms like we’re trying to keep the algorithm from fainting. Rape is rape. Softening the language doesn’t make the reality kinder. For some of us, it does the opposite. It makes it feel like the thing was too shameful to name, like it’s a dirty little secret we’re supposed to whisper around to make everyone comfortable. I’m not interested in pretending trauma becomes less real if we spell it cute.

I’m genuinely sorry you went through that anon. Being groomed is horrifying and it makes complete sense that certain themes land differently for you.

This is where the uncomfortable truth lives for everyone.

Your (I’m talking to all my readers) boundaries are valid, and so are mine, and they won’t always match. There are things you can’t engage with, and there are things I won’t stop writing or discussing. The only workable solution online is to curate your experience. Back out. Block. Filter. Avoid tags. Protect yourself early, not after the fact.

Hey anon! I’m glad you asked, because I don’t think it’s anything you could’ve done differently. It’s a thing I don’t like to read about no matter how it’s written, so I stopped reading when it came up. I can’t speak to how you wrote it, bc backbuttoning/bc for me it’s a thing that, in fan fic or pro fic, I just don’t like reading about, so will stop reading if I come across it or won’t start reading about if it’s tagged. But I think that’s a thing that happens. People come across things they just don’t want to read about, and then I think it’s best for the author and reader both if the reader doesn’t proceed. And I guess with fanfic there’s the option of tagging, and that’s a thing, but tbh as an author I def understand the challenges of tagging, and wasn’t pressed about that. I think this one’s on me as the reader, anon/MA, which is just a thing that happens.

Analogy: I dated someone once who wouldn’t watch movies or tv shows with heavy drug use in them. She’d never used hard drugs and no one in her family had a drug problem, it just really upset her. If it was done realistically, it scared her to the point of nightmares. If it was done in passing or jokingly or if it was glamorized, it upset her that people weren’t taking it seriously. There was literally no way for anyone to write a movie or tv show about drug use or with heavy drug use in it that she would enjoy. So, she didn’t/doesn’t watch them, and if she got into a movie or series and then it came up she would stop watching. That doesn’t mean that Requiem for a Dream or Dazed and Confused are bad movies, or that Darren Aronofsky or Richard Linklater are bad directors, or that they should have told different stories or told their stories differently. Just that she was the wrong audience for it.