This is literally what a trigger warning is supposed to be. If you do this you’ve covered your bases pretty well.
My point exactly.
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I see a subtle distinction. A trigger warning is strictly warning you about topics that may cause an intense emotional reaction in a specific set of people, and is usually all-inclusive, much like the tags on movies and TV shows that warn of sex, violence, adult themes, etc. My forewords include both more and less than that. They mention things that people may find “icky” but that don’t really cause emotional distress per se, but at the same time, I don’t bother to mention things like rape, homophobia, violence, and several other things, since I see these as reasonably par for the course, considering the nature of what we write.
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But does it really cost you anything to add those things? Then if anyone complains you can just say “I’m sorry, it was in the warning”. I doubt any of your other readers will even notice. It seems like a lot of gain for a little effort.
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I think the tags generally cover most of the bases- there’s a homophobe tag if a character is homophobic, an incest tag if there’s sexual stuff between family members, etc. I just say tag diligently, and add tags as necessary. I think we all generally agree that there are currently ways to denote stuff that people might want to steer away from, so I’m not sure we need to keep beating this particular dead horse.
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Reading through this thread is pretty awesome because most people are on the same page. Some people have triggers, writers are not responsible for censuring themselves, but some content warnings before a few common themes would not go amiss.
My personal opinion is the only responsibility the author has to their readership is to warn in advance. Anyone who kept reading when forewarned is SOL, and those who refrained from reading because the content wasn’t agreeable don’t typically complain, they’re mostly grateful for the heads up.
I am currently in progress with my fourth installment of Ms. Perfect’s Finishing School for Bois and there will be several racial slurs used by the main narrator. The only thing i plan to do is warn at the start of the chapter, and let people read. I don’t condone or support any racism, but in our particular sub genre, we tend to write about horrible people. attempting to sugar coat that takes away from the impact of the subjects we write about, and I don’t write like that.
Haters gonna hate. wear your shades and know you didn’t choose writer life, writer life chose you.
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The type and style of content can matter as well. A lot of content on this site is technically nonconsensual but it’s description is pornographic, or the victim ends up enjoying it or are hypnotized to enjoy it or whatever.
There’s a big difference between, “I didn’t want him to do it but then he hit a spot in me and it felt like nothing I’d ever imagined and suddenly I wanted more,” vs paragraphs that go into excruciating detail about what it felt like to be raped, or the fear you felt when you were pinned on the ground, etc.
If someone wants to write the latter, that’s fine, but I think a warning would be warranted. Both writing styles could fall under the nonconsensual mind control forced aware categories, but will evoke different responses.
I see what you’re getting at here, @dreamweavr, but isn’t it presumptuous to say that actual victims of sexual assault would be more triggered by the latter story than the former? Maybe their rapist told them things like “You know you like it,” and so a sentence like “I didn’t want him to do it but then he hit a spot in me and it felt like nothing I’d ever imagined and suddenly I wanted more," would be infuriating and triggering for them.
Acknowledging that readers come at a story with different perspectives and experiences, I don’t feel qualified to play armchair psychologist in order to protect a hypothetical reader. If my actual readers started leaving comments about feeling triggered by certain parts of my stories, that would be different.
Okay, I do think that knowing something’s genre (whether it’s billed as a slasher movie, or as MC erotica) can be fair warning of what to expect. (And especially if that story is tagged “cop” or has the word “COP” in the title!)
I also think that saying “the whole idea of “triggering” is indulgent” and then mocking triggering as a concept is perhaps short-sighted.
If I posted a story on GSS about a cruel dom who turns the formerly-brainy protagonist into a dumb, musclebound, mind-controlled gogo dancer who is humiliated and upset by his transformation… okay, I would tag it appropriately (#humiliation #cruel), and people would know what to expect. Those who aren’t into that would steer clear. Those who are into it would happily read it!
But if, in that same story, I have the dom demonstrate his cruelty and total power over the protagonist by having the protagonist (over the span of ten paragraphs, in chapter 5) forced to slowly dismember and eat his own dog—
I mean, why not? It’s just fiction? As you said:
The point is they’re NOT real, therefore we can explore their reality and know we can close the book and be back in our own.
There isn’t a tag for “animal cruelty” on the site. There isn’t a low-effort way to alert a reader that “hey, this is what you’re getting into by reading my story — you’re expecting one type of story, and you’re actually getting a scene, five chapters in, where the viewpoint character is made to strangle, dismember, and consume his pet dog who he rescued from a shelter ten years ago.”
Most reader simply wouldn’t anticipate a scene in a gay mind control story where a character that they’re identifying with is forced against his will, paragraph by paragraph, to do that.
I can imagine the comments section would be a little intense.
And yet — any discomfort or anxiety you might experience from reading this story while unaware of its contents is, also, not actually you being triggered?
You being made uncomfortable by a horror movie is, also, not the same as being triggered?
To be fair, I think that the people who reached out to you are not using the term correctly either, but—
Here’s my thing: I think we can express our feelings about requests we find unreasonable from our readers without, like… mocking people with disabilities. I dunno. It just feels… weird, when we do it.
I honestly don’t see much difference between mocking wheelchair users and mocking people with severe PTSD. Like, maybe we can critique how some of the steps made towards accessibility feel overmuch, or poorly executed, or just come off as absurd. But mocking the people themselves, or the initial reasons behind the push for the changes, feels… I dunno. Cruel, I guess.
It is very true that you simply can’t anticipate many people’s true triggers. I knew of a woman whose trigger was the smell of frying eggs. It would cause her to immediately, involuntarily vomit. She was raped while someone was frying eggs in the other room and, because brains are weird, that smell in particular got tangled up with her PTSD and would trigger an uncontrollable reaction in her body. She was working on her PTSD in therapy, even though it was unclear if the trigger would ever go away, and she did not expect people to eliminate eggs from the world.
However, in spaces with close friends and relatives, the people around her learned to avoid cooking eggs when she was visiting, because they cared for her, and they wanted to make their spaces more accessible to her. 
That’s really the whole concept behind trigger warnings in the first place. It’s about making certain spaces more accessible to people with a particular kind of disability.
Some buildings don’t have wheelchair ramps. Those buildings are not accessible to people who use wheelchairs. Aka, the building is literally designed so that wheelchair users cannot enter them.
Some buildings seem like they have too many wheelchair ramps, and like they seem to go waaaay out of their way to cater to a relatively small portion of society.
And sometimes, people argue for changes and tweaks to the construction of a building without thinking about the reality of what they’re asking (installing an elevator in every house? totally redesigning the stairs??? really?) but I am still able to separate my feelings about certain ill-conceived requests from, like… my feelings about people with wheelchairs. Or my feelings about ramps and accessibility in the first place.
There is a way to frame the e-mails you received as “readers are asking for accommodations / edits which I don’t feel obliged or interested in providing, because their requests feel like they overstep, and I also feel like I’ve done my due diligence already, and here is why I feel that way”. (And honestly I would probably agree with you!!)
I wish that this whole thread didn’t also, at the same time, communicate a general tone of “LOL fuck people with PTSD” and that is why I wrote this post intead of focusing on the work I’m supposed to be doing right now 
EDITED TO ADD: I realized something I skimmed over was the way in which “trigger warnings”, as a phrase, gets tangled up with the concept of “content warnings” in general. I think content warnings are more like what sites like https://www.doesthedogdie.com/ are about. (Like, my friend who is prone to seizures will avoid movies where a character has a seizure, because of how viscerally uncomfortable and upsetting it is to her? But, not really the same thing as a PTSD-style trigger…) I was trying to make a point, though, that even the tamer “content warnings” can feel appropriate when the content is so left-field from reader/viewer expectations. Like, the movie Audition (1999) starts out like a pitch-perfect romantic comedy, and then halfway through swerves into a particularly violent and disturbing horror movie. Going into that theater while thinking you’re about to see a romantic comedy would be… an unhappy experience. But, even if you’re someone who feels that Audition shouldn’t have a content warning, and that viewers should get the visceral artistic experience of watching a romantic comedy morph into the most violent of slasher films with no advance warning… it also feels unkind to extend that attitude toward trigger warnings, and specifically because trigger warnings as a concept emerged out of a desire to make certain spaces more accessible for people with PTSD.
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@Nu-and-the-Nus, I agree with a great deal of what you’ve written here, and I think you’re making some sound arguments in favor of providing readers with some kind of warning if you write content that you suspect they’d find extremely upsetting.
However, I want to take issue with one thing that you wrote to @absman420, where you seemed to be highly dismissive of the story he shared concerning his response to slasher movies. To me, being unable to sleep and having nightmares for days sounds like a pretty serious set of symptoms. Who are you to say that this is not connected in some way to traumatic past experiences in his life? One thing that’s making me very uncomforable in this thread is the way that some posters seem to be claiming to speak for all traumatized people and drawing a clear line in the sand between people who have “legitimate” PTSD and those who don’t.
One of the key concepts of disability studies is that, at various times in our lives, in various ways, and to various extents, we’re all disabled. The false binary between a “disabled” minority on the one hand and an “able bodied” majority on the other is itself an ablist concept that leads to the “othering” of the disabled. And we could say the same about psychological disabilities like trauma–most people experience it to a certain extent at some point in their life, but some cases are more acute than others.
We don’t really know about each other’s offline lives, and we’re under no obligation to share those with virtual strangers on an internet message board. So maybe those posters who are strongly advocating for trigger warnings could stop assuming that they are the only ones with the right to speak about trauma.
I actually have the exact same response to slasher movies that absman does. I avoid all horror movies for this reason. (I even have trouble handling horror movie parodies, to be honest.) So I empathized very much with what he wrote there.
The reason I didn’t presume it was connected to traumatic past experiences in his life is because he himself was pretty explicit, I think, in not describing it that way. It does feel disingenuous to read it as otherwise — and especially because you earlier said you don’t want to “play armchair psychologist” to your readers and assume trauma when they haven’t otherwise specified it. It begins to feel like having one standard for your readers and another for the posters in this thread. I think we need to take people at their word here, for the sake of this particular conversation.
Also:
One thing that’s making me very uncomforable in this thread is the way that some posters seem to be claiming to speak for all traumatized people and drawing a clear line in the sand between people who have “legitimate” PTSD and those who don’t.
I can’t speak for other posters in this thread. I can only speak for myself. On my end: providing information and context on a subject (especially a subject that is being misrepresented) is neither claiming to speak for all traumatized people, nor de-legitimizing varieties of trauma. It is about expanding the range of how people are considering a subject, and inviting empathy, and a more precise degree of thought.
I gave an example of someone with “severe PTSD” who had a visceral, physical response to triggers, not because it is more legitimate, but because the conversation did not feel like it was even considering people like her at all. And it felt like, hopefully, including that context might help people think about this a little differently.
Disability exists on a range. Some disability is more debilitating than others. What many people in this thread have been saying, essentially, is “well, it’s not debilitating for me — so I don’t understand or relate to why it could possibly be debilitating for others.”
That sentiment, I think, presumes far more “right” and authority to speak about other people’s trauma (as you phrased it fairly well, earlier) than do attempts to expand the conversation.
I will also add again (in case it wasn’t clear!) that I am not personally advocating for content warnings on most stories on this site. I see no problem personally with absman leaving his stories as they are. I think the genre-expectations (and the tags) do a decent job (most of the time) at signalling what you can expect from a story; but more importantly, I think it is absman’s decision, and not anyone else’s.
I do wish that the conversations around that, though, included more thought and empathy toward people with fairly different experiences than theirs, and toward the concept as a whole. And I feel that trying to point out that someone else is being (unintentionally!) dismissive is not, in itself, dismissive — even if my tone may read as a little curt (for which I apologize if so; none of this is meant personally!).
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Mimbo Drops 2 is a great story. The second officer is sort of forced to become a himbo but he likes his new self. A happy ending usually justifies a Non-com storyline in my mind. I know I’ve written things that I would never try in real life and I know it is a fantasy. As someone with a tumultuous past I have things that trigger me. I have learned, and am still learning, to control my response to these things. A lot of the time I love a story but feel that I “shouldn’t” because it was kind of amoral or unfair. That is my reaction to the story. It is my personal reaction to it. It does not change the quality of the writing or the enjoyment of the story for others. I generally don’t read stories that I suspect will upset me. Once in a while something really upsets me from out of nowhere in a story I read. Events like this get my mind thinking about the value of my own writing and the whole issue of morality in fantasy. Again this is MY response. The world isn’t mine to control [except in my stories]. I have to accept that not every story will be something I like and that I can only suggest something to the author if I am bothered. They are under no obligation to change a word. We all know what we do and don’t like so we should stick with what we like. Seems simple I think. We don’t have to like every fetish for example but others should be allowed to like what they like assuming they are not hurting themselves or others. It’s hard to be open to other things sometimes but we have to try.
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Generally speaking, this fetish is something I enjoy almost in spite of my personal ethics. That’s partly what makes it so exciting for me. This is all deeply wrong, inherently, but that wrongness can be enjoyed in a sexual way almost because it’s wrong. For many people, controlled exposure to something they know to be wrong can be a turn on. So you build a little room in your brain to compartmentalize that unethical, bad stuff where you can go in, get some safe enjoyment, and walk out. The important thing is making sure what’s inside that room stays in that room and you don’t start thinking “well maybe it’s not that bad because ___”. Some people aren’t capable of that, they leave the door to the room open all the time, and let the “bad” stuff they consume bleed into their personal ethics, but that’s another discussion.
Because of what I keep in my room, I appreciate that erotica that I personally would find too objectionable is, for someone else, the “bad” thing that they would put in their room. For that reason, I try not to judge any story too harshly if it crosses certain lines. I’ll just stop reading, maybe leave a comment if I feel strongly enough, but otherwise leave it be.
There are some exceptions to this, namely pedophilia, because that isn’t a kink, it’s a mental health issue that shouldn’t be encouraged even if they keep that safely in their room. Self harm and suicide is another, though that’s not typically an issue in this fetish.
So when it comes to “triggering”, I think there’s some valid things authors should avoid if only for the benefit of the reader if for no other reason than it’s cool to be a consideate person. But at the same time, the author can certainly choose to write what they wish, and baring certain hardlines, there’s nothing wrong with that.
The important point, though, is that the author has the freedom to write what they like without caring about how it affects others, but at the same time, the reader has the EXACT SAME freedom to voice their displeasure with it. If you’re going to write something triggering, be prepared for the backlash. Complaining about the backlash just makes you look insecure, in my humble opinion. The impulse you have to write what you want to write is the exact same impulse the commentor has to write what they want to write, and both of you have the exact same right to share that writing.
So in the same way the reader can just “stop reading” if something triggers them, the writer can just stop reading the comments if they annoy them. Authors don’t get special protections from kickback anymore than readers get special considerations for tiggers.
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