Oh wait now I get what triggers are
Yeah, see, THIS is a trigger. Something that prompts a horrible flashback that makes someone go into a literal panic attack. It is NOT something that makes you slightly uncomfortable, so can we all just stop tossing that word around like it’s nothing.
thank you Wreck It Ralph
Reblogging for valuable commentary
Also, can we talk about how Felix dealt with it? He NEVER used that word again (only once in front of Ralph, never by her), there was never any talk about how she could get over it, and in their wedding they all made plans to help her with her paranoia by recognising her fears and showing she was safe by pointing guns at the window and having extra security.
A++++++ on dealing with mental issues magnificently, Wreck-It Ralph!
Will never not reblog this when I see it
also this was the greatest 5 second character development in cinematic history
Tag: trigger warnings
How was squick used? Like would you tag something you didn’t want to see or comment “X is my squick because of Y”?
For the original ask, requesting the definition of squick, please see this post.
Squick is a fun term that was often used as both a noun and a verb. Either X was one of your squicks, or X squicked you, or squicked you out, or squicked you hard.
It was often used in fic exchanges. They would ask for a list of your squicks so that the gifting author would know not to include any hint of them. It was also used in casual conversation with fandom friends, authors, artists, etc. It could be left in comments, or as a reason you just didn’t read your best fandom friend’s latest fic. “Sorry, bff, you know I love your writing, but you have X tagged at the top, and that just squicks me out.” “Hey, no worries, best reader friend! I totally get it. Give this one a pass, but I’ll send you a note when I post my next one! I promise it will be totally X-free!”
Here’s the thing though. In your example, you explain why X is your squick with Y. But the beauty of squick was that (at least in my experience) no explanation was necessary. Not only was it not necessary, it was rarely asked for. A squick is a squick, and there doesn’t have to be any rhyme or reason. In fact, why would you have a rational, bullet-pointed, well-thought-out argument as to why something squicked you out? Very often it’s a visceral reaction, and if you don’t like the thing, you’re likely not going to sit and do deep meditation on why not.
Squicks were respected by fandom. You don’t like the thing, okay, we will tag the thing appropriately, you do not have to read the thing, no judgments on either side. There was no fandom policing, only respect.
And this, I think, is super important, because fandom policing is a problem, especially when it comes to triggers. “Trigger” has become so overused, so all-encompassing, that people feel they have to defend their legitimate triggers. If X triggers you, it triggers you, and you DO NOT need to provide an explanation. But because “trigger” is so often used in place of “squick,” some people feel they have the right to “call out” those who use the word. They want explanations, they want you to tell them what that triggering concept does to you, so they can call bullshit and feel superior. You don’t have to explain either your squicks or your triggers, but using the correct word stops the fandom police from feeling as though they have the right to ask.
Bring “squick” back, people. Don’t devalue triggers, which are horrible, nasty, dangerous things.
#the beauty of squick was that it offered no moral judgement#merely a statement of personal taste#and let you estate when something just wasn’t your cup of tea#without having to justify it#plenty of things squick me out in fic which are absolutely not triggers#but now there’s a real culture of having to justify not liking stuff on a moral basis (via clarias)
the culture of justifying dislike on an ideological/moral basis in part one: chapter one of my novel, Let Me Show You My Issues With Tumblr Fandom. the requirement for ideological purity has become so impossibly strict, and is valued so highly, that tearing the thing you dislike from an ideological standpoint is the quickest way to shut it down. it’s a cheap, disingenuous shortcut that exploits social justice language for personal leverage. it’s not like we were free of wankery and ship wars back in ye olde lj days, god, far from it, but at least the insults we flung at each other were subjective: A is so bad for B and if you can’t see that you’re an idiot!!! B/C OTP!!! (i should also disclaim that we did have moral policing as well, it was just FAR less extensive.) leveraging social justice concepts is an attempt to gain a kind of objective superiority. “they’re a dark ship and i don’t like that” holds little power; “they’re abusive and you support abuse by shipping this” is a trump card to shut down the content you don’t like and the people who fan it. that kind of rhetoric is all over the damn place and it continues to be propagated because it works and it has created a culture from which a variety of problems like the trigger issue explained above consistently arise.
…i would go into further chapters on my novel but i am tired now
As an additional data point, as far as I know the term “squick” comes from the BDSM community, originally. At least that’s where I first encountered it, on BDSM message boards on usenet in the mid-90s – yes, I was on BDSM message boards in the mid-90s; long story. As such, the implicit lack of judgment is important to the meaning of the word; you need a word to mean “I really don’t want to do that, and I don’t want to watch you doing that, but I don’t judge YOU for liking that and I don’t mind if YOU do it … somewhere far away from me.”
I can’t really think of any other words we have for the same concept that aren’t judgmental to some extent. Anything I can think of to try to define “squick” using non-slangy words (disgusting, unpleasant, etc) have a judgy sort of vibe. And we really do need a word to talk about tropes and kinks in the same kind of way we can talk about how you like that ship and I like this ship but that doesn’t make your ship bad.
(Er, ideally we’d be able to talk about ships that way, obviously, in a perfect world … XD)
I was also thinking about how the original ask implies a very modern fannish mindset that’s just … not there, in the original fandom milieu that the squick concept came out of. Not that I’m saying fandom was better in the old days or anything, god no. But trying to explain why you have a squick, or asking someone else why they have theirs, is just not a thing you’d generally do. Squicks are irrational; that’s baked into the meaning of the word. Squicks aren’t something you explain. They just are. I mean, you could obviously try to figure it out, just like you can try to figure out why you have a particular kink, but in both cases, you don’t have to explain or justify it in order for other people to accept it as valid. I don’t need to explain that I like h/c for X and Y reasons in order to request it in an exchange. And squick functions the same way.
All of which makes it a very useful word for talking about fandom concepts without implying that someone else’s tastes make them a bad person!
My tired old soul reflecting on how ideas, concepts, sensibilities, can just disappear.
Squicks are not triggers. I have both: much better as I’m feeling these days, certain visuals can trigger my OCD. Once triggered, my OCD must be handled or it will fucking impair me.
This is so utterly different from encountering a squick. Look, dude, Omegaverse dynamics are a squick of mine. Stumbling over Omegaverse Turkfic will not force me to get my CBT and exposure practice going on. It will make me feel icky and I will stop reading and move on, grateful for all the kind souls who tag their Omegaverse fiction.
Now I live in this world where no one, apparently, should produce content that squicks anyone else, because squick=trigger, and triggering people is immoral. I can’t figure out how we landed here, as fans.
An important distinction like the difference between “squick” and “trigger” should not disappear in the name of protecting people from culture.
I must’ve have slipped under a rock, at some point, and not noticed…
When, how, and why, did “Squick” ever fall out of use?
Why are we now talking about it as if it were some kind of archaic term in fandom? How long have I been using it, and utterly confusing people?
I noticed squick falling out if common use around the LJ Strikethrough in 2007. I don’t know if the two are related, but it was about that same time that I noticed the decline. I thought little of it at the time, because language is ever changing. Like you, I kept using it and probably confusing newer fans (though it’s probably something you can figure out from context.)
But now? Man, I am all for bringing the word back into common use. Because the thing that squicks me out is certainly not the thing that triggers a panic attack because of something the abuser in my past did.
squick is such a useful word.
squick =/= trigger.
now, a thing can be both a squick and a trigger. for me, humiliation kink fic is both. it brings up bad memories and their associated autonomic functions, and also makes me do the eww shudder. but there are also things that are one and not the other.
for instance, in my case, false accusations are a trigger but not a squick. upsetting, but not yucky.
and pee/poop associated with sex is a squick but not a trigger. i find it extremely ishy, and do not want to read about it or see pictures having to do with it, they make me go urp. but it’s not emotionally distressing. it just grosses me out.
important: both squicks and triggers are orthogonal to morality. they’re not on the same axis.
there is nothing morally wrong with someone having a humiliation kink, even though it brings up childhood emotional abuse for me and gives me a terrible day. not everyone has that background, and some people who do find that kink cathartic rather than distressing. this is absolutely ok!
there is nothing morally wrong with someone having a bodily waste kink, even though it makes me queasy. it’s up to them what they want to do with their bodies, and nobody’s getting hurt. i don’t have to clean up after them, so it’s none of my dang business.
and this is hard mode for a lot of tumblr but – there is nothing morally wrong with people writing about morally wrong things happening to fictional characters, because it isn’t real and no actual people are getting hurt. if it squicks you or triggers you, avoid it. it’s ok to feel bad when you encounter it. it’s also ok to not feel bad when you encounter it. it’s ok to hit the back button in a hurry and go look for some fluff to cleanse your palate. it’s also ok to revel in the cathartic release of fictional suffering. it’s ok. you’re ok.
Bring back squick 2k18!
there was a post going around saying “”dldr is meant for things like, “if you don’t like coffee shops, don’t read this coffee shop AU,” not, “i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer””. a lot of people in the tags argued that this is what they mean when they say incest/p*dophilia/abuse portrayed in a positive light in fanfic is problematic. whats your opinion? xoxo
… phew. this ask almost passes as a legit question, but the ‘xoxo’ at the end is a little much. still, what a great opportunity to talk about this ongoing problem of people ignoring warnings that a work contains content that upsets them, then complaining that they were upset when they viewed it.
(first, a side note: don’t censor the word ‘pedophilia’. It’s not a slur – it’s a content warning. If you censor it, the blacklists of people who don’t want to see posts that mention pedophilia won’t catch it and they could be harmed. Just use the word.)
anti-shippers who look at a fic or fanwork’s tags and say ‘this has problematic content! I better go tell the author how problematic their content is!’, I have news for you:
warnings on fanworks indicate that the person creating the work knows the content is ‘problematic’, not for all audiences, and may hurt people if they view it unsuspectingly.
stop taking fanwork warnings and tags in bad faith and using them as an excuse to harass and harm creators.
warnings aren’t ‘disclaimers’ (and aren’t used as such). they’re the CONTAINS NAPROXIN. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN sticker on painkillers. The content is good, even helpful, for some people, but for others who don’t need it or are too young to understand what they’re consuming could be harmed. take the warnings seriously and if you don’t like what they say the fic contains, you really are better off not reading/viewing it!
‘they’re not warnings, they’re advertisements!’ they can function as both! people who want to read that content can find it and people who don’t want to read that content can avoid it. everyone is happier, except anti-shippers who are mad that people are enjoying content they don’t personally approve of.
‘If the creator knows their content is problematic, then they shouldn’t have created it in the first place! Or if they did, they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see!’ well that’s a very different conversation. What you’re saying is that you advocate for censorship, and in that case ‘don’t like don’t read’ would be worthless: only things you like would be allowed to exist in the first place.
But let’s talk about how ‘they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see.’ the basis for this is, I know, that it could corrupt the unsuspecting youth who read the bad content. But isn’t this a bit contradictory? if a fanwork is tagged with a warning that it contains abuse, everyone who looks at the fanwork is going to know that 1) the author believes that abuse is bad and needs to be warned for, and 2) the work contains abuse. Taking these points together, no matter how positively the abuse is depicted, a viewer has foreknowledge that it’s abusive and the creator thinks abuse is bad. It’s simply insulting to imply that viewers will look at the abuse in the fanwork so uncritically as to not think it’s horrible after receiving such a warning.
In fact, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that people who have been raped or abused (or still being abused) or undergone other harm have read fics with these warnings and because of the warnings, realized what had happened to themselves was not okay. If anti-shippers had their way, those fics wouldn’t even exist, much less be warned for.
I’m about to say something radical, so brace yourself:
because tagging warnings is the accepted way to warn people about dangerous content in fandom, the things more likely to cause confusion and harm in fanworks are the things that aren’t warned for.
Even the most positive depiction of abuse would be spoiled by a warning. Can you imagine if the beginning of every copy of Nabokov’s Lolita started with ‘Warning: this work contains depictions of csa, abuse, and child grooming.’ It would force readers who are blind to the hints that the narrator is unreliable to read the work with a very different eye, and I doubt most people would read it and conclude it’s a love story the way many people do today.
Now Lolita was intended to be a kind of monster story from the point of view of the monster – it was never meant to be a positive depiction at all. Nabokov’s work was too subtle for most people, but he was a master storyteller. I think if he could, he’d go back and add a warning so people would stop getting the wrong idea.
In fandom, where we have a widely-accepted tagging system, potentially harmful content that the creator adds deliberately will be warned for. But the potentially harmful content that the creator doesn’t know about won’t be – and that’s the stuff that tends to be a lot more sneaky and insidious.
Let’s take your example:
“i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer".
Racism does crop up a lot in fanworks, but not in the way this implies. There’s a huge difference between a creator recognizing racism exists and utilizing it as an aspect of a setting or acknowledging it in a respectful, truthful way and a creator who does not recognize their own racist blind spots and therefore ends up perpetuating harmful stereotypes or providing racist narration without realizing it.
The former tends to be warned for; the latter never is because the creator doesn’t even know they’re being racist. The former may be painful, because racism is shitty and harmful and real, but a person can steer clear if they want to avoid it and the warning shows the content is known to be bad. The latter is more painful because it’s not just depicting racism: it is in fact perpetuating racism.
So which is actually worse: the fic that has a warning for racism or the fic that doesn’t?
And this can be applied to anything. A fic that depicts a character being abused but doesn’t warn for abuse tells me that the author doesn’t know the work contains abuse (which is worrying for the safety of the author). A fic that contains dubious consent but the author doesn’t warn for noncon/dubcon/rape tells me that the author has a poor understanding of consent. These are the fics that are more likely to be dangerous. Fics without content warnings are also the ones most likely to unironically and uncritically depict the bad behavior in a positive light – because the authors have been taught by the rest of society outside fandom that what they’ve depicted is normal/not harmful. They are victims, and they need help, not people yelling at them about how problematic they are.
Two last notes, which I’ll try to keep short:
- If a fanwork depicts a relationship that’s canonically unhealthy in a world where it’s fluffy and healthy, they are not responsible for putting warnings on their fic that pertain to the canon version of the ship. For instance: Kylo and Rey are enemies in current Star Wars continuity and Kylo tried to torture Rey for information. But if a fic is set in a future where Kylo is well-adjusted and happy and dating Rey in a non-abusive relationship, the fic does not need to warn for ‘abuse’. the fic doesn’t contain abuse. Let it go.
- No creator is beholden to using anti definitions of words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘abuse’, and ‘incest’ for their warnings. The definition of what antis call ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, and ‘abuse’ varies from fandom to fandom – sometimes from pairing to pairing. While tags will always be somewhat subjective, the wide variety of definitions these words have in anti-shipper parlance makes them all but meaningless, so use them when you see fit, not when antis demand it. If antis have a problem with it, they’ll just have to start treating ship tags as warnings* and avoid all depictions of ships they don’t like. (which is what we all wish they’d do anyway.)
And now for the final irony: every time anti-shippers use warnings as a reason to go yell at people about how their fanworks are bad, antis give creators less incentive to tag warnings. People might start to hope that if they just don’t warn up front for the potentially dangerous content people will stop yelling at them without even looking at the work itself. Or if the work is borderline (’maybe this is abusive but maybe it’s not’), they may opt to go without the warnings so they can avoid the extra trouble. this is already happening with dubious consent depictions. If a noncon warning gets you yelled at, then fics where the consent isn’t completely denied will just not get warned for at all, and that’s fucked up. And when the warnings aren’t there, people are way more likely to stumble on something of a nature that upsets them!
So as usual, in their crusade to eradicate all content that isn’t unquestionably wholesome and pure antis make everything a little less safe for everyone. Thanks, guys. (please stop.)
and creators: please, depict terrible things in your fanworks in whatever light you choose – and warn for them. you might accidentally help save someone from a real situation that’s terrible.
*ship tags also work as both warnings and advertisements, as it happens. Funny, isn’t it?
Question of Smoke 