(no subject)

[shy_magpie]

Gender and Other Faulty Software
Written by John Wiswell
Posted on:Fireside Magazine
Genre: Sci-fi-AI
Length: 1k words, audio available
My Synopsis: If your AI is a advanced enough to ask about gender, the crew better be advanced enough to not be dicks about it
Tags/Warnings: under the cut

Swearing: OH YEAH
Sex: None
Violence/Blood & Gore: Suffocation, spacing, minor character death
Drug/Alcohol Use: Minor characters get drunk; Narrator uses the phrase "better than whisky" and discusses how great it is.
Bigotry: transphobia including misgendering; mostly towards the ship, with hints the attitude extends towards the non binary narrator
Other: not off the top of my head but am happy to edit

Comments

[shy_magpie]

Hope I did that right! I wasn't sure if I should tag it since what I'd be tagging for is already under a cut

[alexseanchai]

Tag for all of the relevant things, I'd say (paid users have tag filtering, and tags are organizational), and I'd explicitly say "character death" in the warnings too.

Thanks for the rec. I am having feelings and I am not sure what most of them are.

[gullwhacker]

That was a great read. Agreed on the tags, re: mentioning the deaths a little more explicitly. Might call it minor character deaths, on the balance of things.

...impressed and appalled that however far into the future, there's that many techs who refuse to respect someone's gender. I mean, fewer at the end of the story than at the start, but still.

[shy_magpie]

I think I physically flinched at "first nonbinary senior tech in the history of our asteroid belt" too. Hate to think it takes that long but our protagonists do give hope of making things better

[shy_magpie]

It look okay now? My brain is a bit fried so I probably missed things

[soc_puppet]

This looks great! Thanks very much for adding tags; I was a bit out of it myself when I asked you to post this rec last night, as well, so I'm sorry I didn't get back to things until now!

My thoughts are generally: Use tags for trigger warnings, and then cuts for more detail/context. It's not something I've had to think about a whole lot before now, though; I may have to do some tag tweaking (which I suspect will be an ongoing process, but is also a sign of life in this comm, so yay!).

[shy_magpie]

That makes sense! If you have any thoughts you care to share on that, finding the balance between providing the info Vs the warning being triggering in itself is something I worry about and you seem to be doing well.

[soc_puppet]

I usually boil it down to "Here's a list of the bad things that happened in the story, so you can brace yourself for them if you need to," for the individual warnings, either farther up the post and under a cut or in the tags, and then go into context under (a different) cut and/or farther down the post. That gives people the choice of just looking at the warnings (which may be optional on Dreamwidth, as Alex pointed out), or finding out more about how the warnings work, and controlling how many spoilers they want for the story. I think the list of warnings I put together for April Daniels' "Dreadnought" is a pretty decent example of how I did this, but I don't have more general content warning tags on my journal. Since that's something we have here, and the post itself isn't focused on content warnings, I think it's reasonable to include the tags, and then put the detail under a cut.

I hope that makes sense!

[shy_magpie]

thank you so much for writing not only the actionable advice but linking me to an example! I will save this post so I can come back to it for now but I will be looking at it for how I can improve how I rec things.

[soc_puppet]

Oh, also! The warnings-with-context are to help people decide who otherwise might be on the fence about something. If the narrative immediately condemns someone being racist, for example, or if the racist character gets their comeuppance in the end, that would make me more interested in reading a story than one where the racism gets a free pass. Knowing the context would help me decide whether I wanted to read it, whereas some other warnings might be an instant back-button for me, with or without context that might soften the blow.

[soc_puppet]

My pleasure! I'm glad you found it useful 😊

[shy_magpie]

Oh good point! Based off that I'm thinking of a "shirt and suspenders" method where all warnings are under the cut like this post with context in spoiler text next to the tag in question so people have the most agency in deciding how much they see. I just really don't want to be that person who says "you might need to be careful because x happens" then proceeds to describe the possible triggering event without warning in such detail that its basically fast forwarding to the worst bits. So something like:
basic deets on what the heck I'm talking about
cut
type of warning: Specific tag context

[soc_puppet]

I like it! I used white space in my Dreadnought post (as you saw), but this looks like a really good method, too.

[shy_magpie]

Thank you! and thanks again for talking with me about this stuff!