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Countdown to wank in 5...4...3...2...

The first entry for

originalfic_las was due today, and I used my first skip. I just couldn't come up with anything! I promise, though, I will do better in the future. Promise.

In the meantime, I will be voting in this round, and you should, too! There are many good reasons to do so, not the least of which is all the AWESOME WARNINGS posted with the fic!

My attention was drawn to the warnings by the lovely

ladylovelace when she pointed out that one author chose to warn for: "a little language, gays (no slash)." GAYS! The author warned for GAYS! I'll have to lodge a complaint as soon as I finish laughing my ass off.

Here are some examples of the other high quality warnings on offer:

Mild innuendo
body horror
brief mention of drug lab
f/f relationships (if not your cup of tea, apologies)
The word 'shit'
hints at a male/male relationship
implied death
Adultery

I'm sure most of these people are well-meaning and just trying to be safe rather than sorry, but seriously: what word do these people live in that they really think someone is going to be shocked and appalled at "mild innuendo"??? Haven't they ever been--oh, I don't know--on THE INTERNET before? There's a lot more than innuendo out there.

And what is 'body horror'? Is it one of those "if you have to ask, you don't want to know" type of things?

TWO MORE people warned for "teh gayz".

LOL at warning for "the word 'shit'". (But did they warn for the warning???)

We now have to warn for even the MENTION of death?

And adultery? Really?

Ay yi yi!

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HAHAHAHA! You didn't mention the warnings for breastfeeding and plastic surgery and the severtal that should have warned for, but didn't, bloody awful fic.

OMG, what is this strange comm you have joined? And who are these crazy people on there that warn for ... all of the above? I guess it's going to be really easy to decide which ones you won't be voting for.

I had to laugh, I clicked on the one that warned for gay and the first line was so bad I had to go back and read it twice to check they weren't being funny in some random obtuse way I didn't understand. I might go back and find it then report back to you.

I might also have to bookmark the page for those days when I'm feeling depressed and inadequate!

Here it is:

I knew he was dead soon as I stepped into the room. He simply wasn’t as… lively as he usually is, if you would excuse the pun.

You don't say.

I read that! I haven't started slogging through the (51!) submissions yet, but I had to read the fic that warned for OH NO TEH GHEY! The rest of the story is INSANE, too. I don't even want to know what was going on in the brain of the person that wrote it.

Someone on

ladylovelace's journal mentioned the breastfeeding warning; I forgot to include that one. And I figured the "plastic surgery" warning was fair enough if there were graphic descriptions of the surgery, but I haven't read the entry yet to find out if that's the case.

YOU NEED TO BE NICE ABOUT MY NEW COMM SO THAT I CAN FEEL GOOD IF I WIN! (-;

Hmmm... methinks you have have a shot!

WARNING: mentions of violence in a metaphorical, non-serious manner

Edited 2010-10-21 03:25 (UTC)

Yay, thanks for the vote of confidence! :~)

(BTW, the warning should come BEFORE the content! I was very nearly traumatized there...)

Hee!

I always try to put the really important stuff last. You know the really intellectual additions that I couldn't get in into the actual content.

BTW... your package is assembled and will be going to the post office tomorrow. And your card. How adorable and with a bit of steampunk flair. You don't want to know how many clock stamps I have! Or maybe you do and should come visit and I can show you. :D

*does the Happy Dance of impending packages*

Yay, you got the card! I have a whole series of those rub-on transfers from Michaels, all with different themes. (HOW DID I KNOW YOU WERE INTO CLOCKS?!? OMG, spooky!) (-;

There are ... 50 entries? I haven't read them, and I'll bet there are plenty of good ones. It's always easy to target the ones at the extremes. That line, though! It's like something out of a Monty Python skit, and it cracks me up so much.

I hope you do win! Let us know how it's going, and if there are any worth reading. btw, I didn't get a comment notification - I just checked back this morning. Do you think it's the captcha?

There are many, many, many entries! It's a wide open field. I'm going to start reading and paring them down to my final choices for best and worst today.

That line was hilarious, in a way I'm not entirely sure was intended by the author! It should be saved in an archive for posterity.

I have no idea what's up with the comment notifications--every once in awhile they'll go kinda wonky for me, and it'll take a few hours before they show up in my inbox. Let me know if the comments never show up, and maybe I'll just have to suck it up, abolish the captcha, and deal with the spambots. (Who are all obsessed with HP, for some reason...Robots love Rowling!)

Wasn't notified for this one either. :( I kept the page open and refreshed when I just got home.

Thank you, I am sitting here cracking up in front of my computer. I have a vague recollection of warning for ridiculous things in the past (in fact, one of my old author notes from my ff.net days warns for an authorial obsession with shoes...), but breastfeeding? How could a prose description of breastfeeding possibly offend someone? (... I don't want to know the answer to that, but I'll wager it's not actually in said fic.)

I also love "implied death." Maybe I can work that into my dark!fic. And "body horror," which I imagine as a Kafkaesque "Wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, discover you are actually a bug" sort of thing.

And "body horror," which I imagine as a Kafkaesque "Wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, discover you are actually a bug" sort of thing. - this is precisely what I imagined.

I can't remember what it actually was because there is a point at which the poor grasp of punctuation, basic syntax and complete inability to write a short story all blur together into one mess of 'the worst part is, one of these people is going to win'.

Ahem.

And "body horror," which I imagine as a Kafkaesque "Wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, discover you are actually a bug" sort of thing.

Ok, I read this comment, went upstairs to make a cup of coffee, watched some BBC America, took a shower, got dressed...and have been giggling about this through all of it. So thank you for that!

It's funny, because when I read that the prompt for this challenge was "change", one of the first ideas that came to me was a take on The Metamorphosis. But let's face it: I am not strong enough of a writer to borrow from Kafka and make it my own!

I think I have to agree with

ladylovelace: my absolute favorite warning is for "brief mention of (a) drug lab", as if the mere suggestion of illegal activity is enough to send readers into a fit of hysterics!

I really object to people warning for gay! Would they say "warning, black people"?! Warn for sex, yes, sexual preference, no. Frankly if someone's offended because I have written a same sex pairing I ... don't care? XD

The level of stupid contained in the warnings so far is appalling. Once the results are published and the authors of the individual stories are revealed, I will be sending messages to each of the people who warned for queer relationships explaining why that's offensive and entirely inappropriate. I'm going to be operating under the assumption that they are some combination of: young, well-meaning, and clueless.

How else could someone come up with: "f/f relationships (if not your cup of tea, apologies)"?

I prefer my tea HETEROSEXUAL, thank you very much!! ;-)

I am wondering now if my failing to warn for slightly more than innuendo and another of these things is somehow going to count against me.

I hope I get flamed.

I am now just confused by people who warn for gays. If most of the Internet lived in a strict Muslim country, I could go for it, but... they don't. I imagine these people to be mostly American with varying degrees of ESL. Even if it is indeed their first language.

I hope I get flamed.

I'll do my best to get the ball rolling. (-;

I imagine these people to be mostly American with varying degrees of ESL.

I can't entirely disagree with the "mostly American" part of your assessment, just because the demographics of the challenge are bound to swing that way. But I think the ESL evaluation more closely nails it.

I have a feeling that a lot of the writers for this challenge are very, very young, and their worlds are still very small. They can't have had much exposure to fandom or internet culture, or they'd realize that slash relationships are de rigeur, rather than some bold, edgy approach that people need to be prepared for.

I make the American judgement purely because the majority of the English-speaking Internet is American, and because this is the confusing part to me because like you say, these people seem very under-exposed to The World, in general. So unless they're all coming from the middle of nowhere, I'm completely lost.

But slash is edgy. Isn't it? Guys? :'(

But slash is edgy. Isn't it? Guys? :'(

Aww, it is when you write it, baby! ;-)

You're getting notification in your inbox of my comments, right? Some people aren't and I'm trying to figure out if it's the captcha that's interfering.

As far as I know, I am. I got an email for this one, certainly.

LiveJournal is prone to notification freakouts from time to time for no apparent reason.

Yeah, it's definitely happened to me before. I'm just trying to figure out if it's an LJ hiccup, or the fact that I turned on captcha for my comments. I think it's the former. Thanks for your help!

Poking my head in here, but outside of fandom I'm constantly surprised at how 'edgy' slash still is. My creative writing classes almost always had a That Guy (or That Girl, but usually That Guy) that was writing teh ghey just to be edgy. And people fell for it! Invariably this was the same That Guy/Girl who ranted on and on about clichés and how terrible and vanilla and uninspired everyone else's writing was and it was very hard for me not to point out every terrible slash fanfic cliché they ran aground on (I think the only reason I didn't was because I didn't want to out myself as a fangirl). And then there are the women I work with, and their "Gay, how does it work!?" conversations... I won't even get into those.

Anyway, point being, outside of fandom it appears to be super-easy to be well into or past your 20s and still feel like homosexuality is the sort of shocking thing you need to warn for, so I wouldn't put them all as super-young. I'll admit, though, that I generally operate under the assumption that LJ is all some sort of fandom, so I've found this especially baffling. (-;

Oh yes, slash could definitely still be considered edgy out in the wider world. I was speaking about internet culture generally, and online fandom more specifically. The moderator of this challenge runs an empire of similar comms, all of them fandom based except for this one. (I also follow, though don't participate in, the

whoverse_las comm.)

I had just assumed that most people found their way to this challenge through fandom-related channels, as I did. I could be wrong, though, and maybe that's the problem! It would certainly explain a lot, because no one who has been exposed to fandom culture for longer than five minutes can have any illusions about the ubiquity of slash! (One would hope--I have seen fanfic authors warn for gay relationships, and in those cases, they were very young and new to fic-writing.)

I could just imagine my mother coming across fanfic and being shocked at how much of it is slash-focused! (And I always love the conversations that crop whenever I have to explain to my RL friends what 'slash' is! They just can't believe how popular it is.)

What is this comm?!!?1 It sounds mildly insane.

Body horror What is body horror!?!?!? Blowy up heads a lá David Cronenberg or something?!

Warning mention of death
Death.

LOL I have to browse this comm now.

You should browse, and you should VOTE! I used a skip this week, but I am in it to win it, ya know. ;) (Though I do believe my greatest competition is the lady who posted right above you. *points up* It's my own damn fault for alerting her to the competition in the first place!)

I don't know what that author considers "body horror" to be, but whatever it is I know I'm going to be really disappointed after all the speculating we've been doing!

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