For the last part in this little mini-series that started with horror and has evolved into content and trigger warnings, we’re going to talk about warnings versus spoilers.
I touched upon this briefly two weeks ago when discussing Archive Of Our Own (ao3 for short, like the cool kids say) and my own experiences using it. Now, ao3 is almost explicitly for fandom spaces and fanworks. This means fanfic, kids. You’re not going to find published original works on there, except for where someone uploaded The Great Gatsby and added exactly one paragraph to the entire thing. Public domain, I love ya.
As mentioned last week, too, using Does The Dog Die sometimes spoils things for me. But I personally am okay with that; I use the website to fulfill a specific purpose and that trumps my need for absolute blind watches.
But that’s not the way for everyone.
And where do books come into all of this?
There is no major, overarching system for rating published books the same way there are for movies, video games, or television. There are genres, of course, and search terms and BISAC subject codes and ratings and reviews on Goodreads. You go into a YA novel with different expectations than with a military sci-fi.
But that YA novel may very well say fuck a lot more than the sci-fi book does.
Ao3’s warning systems are entirely dependent on the creator’s choices and while the tagging system is robust, it is also the wild west. This is by design, of course. It’s a website, nothing has to be printed, and there are no images like book covers to worry about loading and formatting.
Published books have to go through a lot more*. Editors and formatters have their way with the manuscript. Design teams help out. Promotional and sales teams figure out what angle to market it at. The books will, ultimately, end up on a shelf to be picked up and looked at. The hopeful reader will look at the neat cover, read the back blurb (which had BETTER be an actual summary or teaser, not a list of reviews by people we don’t care about!), and that is all of the information they will have available to them when deciding to read or not.
*Self-published books don’t have that whole team behind them, though they can. The author has a lot more control, but ultimately, still follows categorization rules when submitting it for publishing.
There are many arguing that there should be a rating and content warning system for published books (and ebooks). There are several cases where I definitely would have appreciated one! Wanderers by Chuck Wendig, while an amazing book, is one I will never reread due to two scenes that made me physically ill. I would’ve really liked a warning for at least one of them, even if it was from another reader or a book reviewer.
A lot of book reviewers do put warnings into what they’re covering, but not all, and it’s hardly the standard. I’ve never seen a published book with warnings in the front or back, but I’ve seen many ao3 projects with warnings of all sorts in the tags and in author’s notes. Does it look less “professional”? Yes, most of the time. But does it serve a purpose? Absolutely.
Do they sometimes spoil the story? Also yes.
A lot of that comes down to personal taste and preference. Does The Dog Die exists for movies and television series, but it’s hardly forced upon every viewer. Most people tune out MPAA ratings, and the only time I cared about the TV rating in the corner of the show was when I was six and eagerly waiting for when I could legally watch Y7-rated Are You Afraid Of The Dark episodes. (They gave me nightmares even though I was seven. Alas!) I think the only people who worry about video game ratings are the stereotypical mothers at GameStop who are just now learning from the cashier what Grand Theft Auto contains within.
But I personally think there should still be a systemized option for published books to have some sort of content warnings. Books can hold a lot more content in them than a two-hour movie or even an eight-episode Netflix special. (How many times have you been upset your favorite book’s movie cut things?)
Yes, saying “oh, the girl dies at the end” of The Bridge to Terabithia is a spoiler. But at least going into it knowing would prepare someone, especially kids who may not have already been scarred with Tuck Everlasting or Watership Down or any other number of supposedly kid-friendly novels. And hey, it could always create a classroom discussion about knowing a twist going into a book and what the kids as readers think of that. You’re welcome for the lesson idea, teachers.
Ignoring the fact that everyone knows it already—saying Bruce Willis is dead at the end of The Sixth Sense is a spoiler. Probably the biggest possible spoiler you could give for the movie. That kind of twist ending could ruin your viewing, or at the very least color it; you sit there, picking up on the clues like a hawk zeroing in on a rabbit. Whereas before it was just a bit of red.
But you had the option of looking up a warning for dead people being seen online.
Do I think things have to be warned for? I’m ignoring the special snowflake stereotypes, because that’s not what this is about. This is about curating the content you ingest. This is about enjoying things! This is about avoiding the bad vibes.
Ye Olde Fandom has a saying I think should come back into vogue—Don’t Like, Don’t Read. This is, perhaps, an extension of that. Let the reader know what they don’t like so they can choose whether to read it or not.
Maybe the best answer is something crowdsourced and independent, like Does The Dog Die. Maybe it ought to be separate from the publishing industry rather than a standard like the MPAA ratings. Or maybe there ought to be general ratings, like the MPAA, with something else and more specific to subsidize it, like that website.
I don’t have the answer here and no answer would please everyone. And arguably, there are so many more books than there are movies, I wouldn’t know where to start or how to catch them all, much less how to process the backlog.
But I think it should happen, in some form.
