30-Day Fanfic Writing Meme, Day 15

[geri_chan]

15. Warnings – What do you feel it most important to warn for, and what's the strangest thing you've warned for in a fic?

I think it's very important to warn for common triggers like rape/non-con, suicide, and self-harm, though I rarely if ever write about them, and for things like character death or spoilers (for an ongoing or recently completed fandom source). I also note if a story is AU, and sometimes how much it deviates from canon, although it's less to warn than to avoid confusion--like explaining in an author's note that Snape is a pureblood in my Always series because it was written pre-Book 6.

(Going slightly off topic, but JKR's interviews and little tidbits of info that were released on her website kept messing up "my" canon! ~_^ I wanted to write about Snape and Lupin having birthday parties, so I assigned them dates picked at random, and when JKR revealed the official dates, of course they were different. I had written Tonks as a Gryffindor, and a reader politely told me that Tonks is a Hufflepuff--and I had to politely explain that I'd chosen Gryffindor for Tonks's house before JKR said in an interview that she was a Hufflepuff. And when I needed to give the Auror Dawlish a first name, I chose "Richard" and figured that was safe since JKR wasn't going to bother giving such a minor character a first name later on. And then--you guessed it--she revealed his name as "John" in a later interview! It's not really a big deal since my fics are mostly AU anyway, but then you have the occasional reader thinking that you got a detail "wrong." But generally it was more amusing than annoying. It was almost like, "Okay, what's going to get contradicted next?" I guess actually this rant should have gone under Day 13, but I'd forgotten about it until now.)

Anyway, I don't use warnings very often. I figure if people are squicked by slash or explict sex, those are already evident in the pairings and ratings, and I rarely write about the topics mentioned above, so I rarely need to warn for anything other than spoilers. I did warn for a non-explicit mention of a past rape in Phoenix Reborn and Phoenix Rising, and for dubcon and violence in a couple of chapters of Scars. (All Snupin stories.)

I think the only warning I gave that might qualify as "strange" would be for "Voyeurism (sort of)" in Part 3 of Family Visit: Okinawa. That was because Yoshizumi was eavesdropping on Kikuchi and Onozuka, listening to them having sex in the room next door, but I didn't think that it could strictly be called "voyeurism" since he couldn't actually see them! (I know there must be a proper term for that, but I don't know what it is.)

Previous days:
Day 1
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Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14

(You can find the full meme listed at the end of Day 5).