Horror Aficionados discussion

Kasia wrote: "But you can skip the trigger warnings same way you're advising people to skip the book sections you don't like, works both ways. If it helps someone then that's a good thing, if you don't need them then lucky you."

Precisely - which is why I find it absurd that people whine about the inclusion of trigger warnings. If you don't need them, skip ahead and get right into the story.

The majority of us (myself included) do not come from a background of trauma that would necessitate the inclusion of trigger warnings. For those not thus privileged, trigger warnings are important. There's no disadvantage to including them - so why not make reading more enjoyable for everyone?

Fatman wrote: "Kasia wrote: "But you can skip the trigger warnings same way you're advising people to skip the book sections you don't like, works both ways. If it helps someone then that's a good thing, if you d..."

Someone in the thread mentioned that it's good when trigger warnings are on a separate page so it's easy not to see it if you don't want to, I personally appreciate that.

This is kinda relevant, I remember watching a Youtube video review from Regan (PeruseProject) and I love her videos but she was reviewing a book about a sports team in a small town and bluntly started talking about trigger warnings, like without a warning and said what the trigger was and I was shocked because that spoiled the whole book for me, I had no idea that event was part of the story, just came out of nowhere, and it wasn't even one trigger word, she talked about it for minutes... I dont want to read this book now, she kinda ruined it for me. I wish she put time stamps or clarified that it would be part of her review so I could skip it.

I was so sad :(

Fatman wrote: "Precisely - which is why I find it absurd that people whine about the inclusion of trigger warnings. If you don't need them, skip ahead and get right into the story.

There's no disadvantage to including them - so why not make reading more enjoyable for everyone?"

I love all the conversation that's been had on this. It's a very interesting topic, indeed!

I will respectfully disagree that there are no disadvantages though. If you are interested, I shared an article link explaining studies looking at this from a meta-analysis in my previous post.

Certain people may benefit, but ubiquitous overuse is not benign, according to several PhD research psychologists:

The results show, in effect, that both extremes in the debate over trigger warnings are misguided. Trigger warnings are neither necessary nor devastating for those who receive them. “Existing research on content warnings, content notes, and trigger warnings,” they write, “suggests that they are fruitless, although they do reliably induce a period of uncomfortable anticipation.”

This study is unlikely to be the last word on the issue. Future studies may well find that trigger warnings are reliably helpful for certain people under certain circumstances. Yet until such evidence for their effectiveness is produced, we may do well to heed the authors' concluding recommendation: “Trigger warnings should not be used as a mental health tool.”

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl...

Kasia wrote: "without a warning and said what the trigger was and I was shocked because that spoiled the whole book for me."

This is exactly why more people should be aware of the research b/c most people think that are really doing a good thing by mentioning all kinds of perceived TWs. Most often they are spoiling the entertainment and element of natural surprise!

Reading books is a solidly proven good thing for mental health, but TW overuse remains controversial. The path paved to hell is paved with good intentions Lol

I'm very anti trigger warnings. Especially with the horror genre. I feel they are often as good as a spoiler and the genre itself hints at bad things happening.

I really have no feelings on trigger warnings. If they’re there, fine. If they aren’t, okay. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don’t. I will say the only time I do appreciate them are trigger warnings involving children. While these will not necessarily stop me from reading the book, I do like to be prepared for any harm that will occur to kids. Ever since I became a mother, I feel a need to protect children.

If I want to stay surprised by a book, I'll skip reading any type of trigger warnings so nothing can be spoiled. If I'm interested in what to expect, trigger warnings can help me figure out if this is my flavor of the day.

Heck sometimes I don't even read the back of the book, the less I know the more fun and interesting it can be, I mean depends on the book but I do that often.

Kat wrote: "I really have no feelings on trigger warnings. If they’re there, fine. If they aren’t, okay. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don’t. I will say the only time I do appreciate them are trigger warn..."

I had the same problem about a year after I had my son, he's three and a half now, I would get physically ill reading anything baby/child related in a horror book where harm came to them, it took me sooo long to stop having such visceral reactions, I think with me it was the hormones that stay in your body post partum for about two years. Luckily I'm handling it well now, but yeah I struggled for sure.

* but now that I think about it I did not look up trigger warnings lol, guess that didn't change

This is an interesting discussion.

I don't need trigger warnings for anxiety producing situations in any book. Especially in horror. Horror is supposed to produce dread, anxiety, and dismay. I hate animal abuse, especially when it seems excessive and gratuitous. But I can skip over those parts if the book seems worth it. If not, I blame the author and shut the book.

That said, my personal trigger is rare and I never see a warning. It's sometimes ill used as the twist in a mystery. Anger and anxiety ensue. I deal with it.

I'm with the others above, I don't need trigger warnings but anything to do with harm or death of children is something I do want to know about because I have two kids under 3 and just can't deal with it right now. But I don't need them to be in the book itself I just glance over reviews and people usually write about it there. Or if I read something and it starts to be about a subject matter I don't care for I just stop reading.

I personally do not like trigger warnings at all. But then again - I like being shocked! It is understandable, that not everyone does.
Going a little deeper into the matter - the trigger warnings may be over-exagerated in a way, that even the slightest mention of the topic in the content may then close the book out from the reader all together. This is a real shame... It does limit the reader's palette quite a bit, by today's 'sensitivity' standards. I can't imagine one book that would pass without trigger warnings at all.

The sticky debate nested within this one is, which things deserve trigger warnings? There's a fine line between graphic violence and comedic violence. Is it meaningful to put a trigger warning for a depiction of, say, a head in a jar talking about its last experience before decapitation?

Austin wrote: "The sticky debate nested within this one is, which things deserve trigger warnings?"

If a decapitated head is telling the tale of his secret romance with the princess before he was caught and beheaded ... Perhaps that needs to be in the book description. I'd want romance in the description, just as a romance reader needs to be warned about a grotesque beheading and a horrific conscious life spent in a jar. A book's description should be accurate.

Maybe it depends on accurate genre category and marketing. The description should steer you toward or away from books you will, or won't, enjoy. Books shouldn't be misrepresented within their marketing, unfortunately, they sometimes are.

Netanella wrote: "I think that trigger warnings are only really necessary for books that are not intended to shock or terrify the readers. For example, a book that is categorized as horror should not need to contain..."

I agree about 99 percent. If I am reading something other than horror, I like to see what a book deals with to see if it is something that I do not want to read about. However, I read horror to stir the emotions, be scared and entertained in the process. One way or another, the book is going to shock me; if it does not, they did not do a good job. And if something really grosses me out, it is even better.

The only small exception to this rule, honestly, was in Goth by Otsuichi. This one contains graphic depictions of animal cruelty, which I thought really crossed the line.

If "distressed" people can close the book so they might avoid a problematic book, why people triggered by a trigger warning could not flip the page so they might avoid a problematic section of the book?

But they are probably introduced by the words: "this book/story contains depictions of xyz, reader discretion is advised", so you can easily identify it and ignore it. Even if you cannot, is not like these 3 words would spoil all the story for anyone. I'm pretty sure that a story is made of a lot of things besides the summarized content of the story. It's made of dialogues, characters, intelligent usage of words, rhetoric, figures of speech etc.

@Robin - Are you talking about trigger warnings in book reviews here/online, or trigger warnings in the introductions to the books themselves, in either digital or physical form?

I appreciate when books have trigger warnings. I'm pretty okay with most content but I know that some readers wish to avoid or be forewarned about specific themes. I'll never forget this one time I was reading a book with no trigger warnings, and it depicted sexual abuse to children in graphic detail and it was horrible. I still think about that book to this day and I do wish that there had been trigger warnings listed at the beginning of the book because it may have made me rethink about whether I wanted to read it.

It's something I try to avoid because people have a way of taking warnings to ridiculous extremes, such as the trigger warning on the film Wicked.

I never used to think trigger warnings were necessary... and maybe I still don't, but I've read a few things lately that have softened my take on them a bit. I just finished Witchcraft for Wayward Girls and while I cringed a lot, I was ok. But I immediately thought of a couple of friends that would have had a really hard time getting through it. It's still up to them to read it or not, but if they asked me, I would definitely warn them. I know a lot of people disagree with TW, but I think I'm ok with sparing people from potential trauma... especially if the TW isn't a spoiler. (In Wayward Girls, I don't think it is)

Rafael wrote: "If "distressed" people can close the book so they might avoid a problematic book, why people triggered by a trigger warning could not flip the page so they might avoid a problematic section of the ..."

Thank you, this. If people don't want trigger warnings, don't read them. If you think the purpose of horror is to shock and traumatize, great, you do you, not everyone agrees and horror is a large tent.

If your argument comes down to "I don't like trigger warnings, so they shouldn't exist", you have an inflated sense of your own value. For context, I don't read trigger warnings. I also don't like mild salsa, but that doesn't mean I demand all salsa must contain ghost peppers because salsa is meant to be hot and if you don't like it, too bad.

I don't need or read trigger warnings, I can read anything and it doesn't bother me. I just ignore them and skip to the story. I was watching a video on youtube the other day for dark romance books and one of the books had a 2 page list of trigger warnings. At that point I think it's excessive. Imagine you can tolerate everything on page 1 but then something on page 2 is too much, like.. really?? 🤷‍♀️

What really bothers me is when a book does have warnings and then people rate the book really low (1 or 2 stars) and write a review complaining the book contained "x" even though they were forewarned. Why did they even bother reading the book??

I’ve been reading horror books for forty years. If you need a trigger warning then you shouldn’t be reading horror in the first place

It might simply be context related. Say, for instance, you've picked up a book called Night at Deathgore--well, it turns out the jacket blurb speaks of horrible murder, gore, chainsaws ripping off legs, etc. On the other hand, you have Comfortable Bunny Farms--which speaks about the wonderful rich tapestry of bunny society and warm cuddles. One of these books advertises its actual contents well. The other one, Comfortable Bunny Farms, has a downer ending where it turns out the farm is for a furrier and all of the bunnies meet grisly ends strung up on hooks being skinned and tossed in a fire.

Feel like that one might merit a content warning. Possibly.

Where trigger warnings become a slippery slope is when someone tears apart an author and/or publisher for either not having them, or even worse, for having them but not including every possible trigger out there. And when I say tear apart, I’m talking using social media and mob mentality to go after the author and publisher. In a matter of hours, they can destroy an author’s livelihood and in some cases, cause a publisher to go out of business, all while there are no repercussions for the attacker’s bad behavior.

Trigger warnings can be a useful tool, like film and video game ratings, so they don't bother me per se. I do find them somewhat silly in certain contexts, such as horror and novels about serial killers, etc. What do people think happen in such stories? Also, I've been a voracious reader since I was 11 or 12 when there were no trigger warnings, and I read all kinds of stuff I would have avoided had I known what was coming (like Deliverance, which I read at grandma's house surrounded by the Manistee National Forest!). I still turned out (mostly) OK.

Kenneth wrote: "Where trigger warnings become a slippery slope is when someone tears apart an author and/or publisher for either not having them, or even worse, for having them but not including every possible tri..."

There are any related cases that an author career or a publisher was destroyed in a matter of hours for a minor deed like that?

Rafael wrote: "Kenneth wrote: "Where trigger warnings become a slippery slope is when someone tears apart an author and/or publisher for either not having them, or even worse, for having them but not including ev..."

I'd also like to see an actual case where someone's career was ruined or a company went out of business because they didn't provide trigger warnings.

Trigger warnings are like table of contents to me, I practically skip them every time. However, it doesn’t detract from the story, nor does it lead to a less enjoyable reading experience. While I don’t care for them, I see no issue with having them for others that may be overly sensitive to TW like material.

If you don’t like them literally skip it and move on.

I guess they don't hurt, but it does start to feel a little patronizing at points. I see a lot of trigger warnings on Webtoons specifically that make me, as an artist and writer, start to feel like I have to tag everything that could be a trigger to someone, and that's not tenable. Literally, I'm not being hyperbolic here, anything can be a trigger to someone. Often, triggers are highly specific and contextual. The contextual part is key; if you open up a comic that has zombie apocalypse themes on the cover, you know what you're about to read is probably going to have a lot of violence, blood, and gore, and you don't need a trigger warning for that being a feature of the story; it's already established.

The worst trigger warning I've ever seen was one where the author warned the readers that there would be a cold-weapon (i.e. weapons that aren't firearms), in the case of the comic, a kitchen knife that was used for the precise purpose a kitchen knife is supposed to be used for - to chop vegetables. It's moments like that that make me go, "this can't become the standard. It is literally setting authors up for failure, because we cannot predict everyone's triggers."

I say all this as someone who has recently had an emotional breakdown triggered by something I read. In that instance, it was my responsibility to close out of the article and stop engaging. It was not the author's fault, especially because they did provide a content warning for the article. I'd never been triggered by discussions, even detailed ones, about said thing before, but as it turns out, if it's close enough to how said thing happened to me, it's a trigger. As I said, oftentimes, triggers are too specific for authors to really reasonably account for.

Mads wrote: "I guess they don't hurt, but it does start to feel a little patronizing at points. I see a lot of trigger warnings on Webtoons specifically that make me, as an artist and writer, start to feel like..."

I think we're seeing what inevitably happens when a term with a precise, psychological meaning becomes popular and watered down to near meaninglessness. A trigger is something that can cause true psychological harm to people who have experienced trauma, not just something that someone might find upsetting. (There's some evidence that trigger warnings may actually be worse for people who are truly susceptible to that kind of flashback trauma, but that's a different discussion.)

Then, because we live in an outrage society, you have people that take it too far, and demand that they need to be warned about every little thing they may find unpleasant.

I've said before, I'm all for trigger warning (they really should be called something else in the case of things like "death of an insect"), and I'm all for putting them somewhere that it's reader's choice if they want to read them. I am 100% against making them mandatory, as that will invariably lead to discrimination against certain types of works. Because America.

Look! You bloody well know what kind of books you're getting yourself into...so trigger warnings shouldn't be needed... that's my personal opinion anyway...and if you think you do need trigger warnings then maybe you should be thinking about changing the kind of books you're choosing to read 🤔

Kenneth wrote: "Where trigger warnings become a slippery slope is when someone tears apart an author and/or publisher for either not having them, or even worse, for having them but not including every possible tri..." Amen!

I tend to think woke stuff like this is a virus, but there are a few exceptions. I've lost 3 family members to suicide, and I have to say that I prefer some warning if there is going to be a graphic representation of suicide in a book or tv/movie. I would ever attack an author who didn't provide one. I think it's the reader/viewer's responsibility to find out before you engage with the material. For TV/movies, there are websites like Does the Dog Die? where you can check before you watch for trigger warnings. It puts the responsibility back on the reader/viewer, and that's where it should be to begin with.

Kasia wrote: "Pisces51 wrote: "I do read trigger warnings if present but honestly I read extreme horror enough of the time that it is redundant. The only subject that will cause me not to read a book is animal cruelty..."

I totally agree with this! I am so sick of animal cruelty/death being used as a plot device for showing the mental instability of the antagonist. I hate it in movies/TV too. There are so many other ways to show this, scarier ways, it's just lazy writing! (And animal cruelty is something I think there should be TW's for, of course I'm biased, I help run a micro rescue)

Erika wrote: "For those who enjoy psychology research there's a lot of research going on about this topic: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/bl......"

I have a background in psychology, and where I do agree with TW fatigue, and how it can create snowflakes, I also know there are a lot of people walking around out there, barely holding on. "They've seen some things and some stuff, and they wouldn't recommend it…" With that in mind TW's for rape, child/animal abuse, and suicide can be necessary to prevent a serious regression in damaged people.

Kasia wrote: "Cal wrote: "Trigger warnings aren’t needed… Just skip over something if you don’t like it, like Alan said. It’s like blocking people, if you don’t like something, just remove it lol don’t whine and..."

That's an excellent point about CC, and I'm going to remember it, and might even quote you…

Vanessa wrote: "I tend to think woke stuff like this is a virus, but there are a few exceptions. I've lost 3 family members to suicide, and I have to say that I prefer some warning if there is going to be a graphi..."

So, you don't agree with "woke stuff" unless it affects YOU personally? If someone said that your personal issues with suicide was a "snowflake thing" would you say that this person would be right or wrong?

I guess I just don't see the point of them for fiction genres, at least. People functioned fine without them before everyone started warning for everything. If you are going to read genres like crime fiction or horror (especially horror), you should be prepared for material that could entail trigger warnings. Lots of things can be upsetting - animal death, animal abuse, death of a character (a child for example), burglaries.

It is your job as a reader, at the end of the day, to curate your own reading. If you don't want anything objectionable in your books, stick to cosy fantasies and sweet romances. Or simply put down the book if it gets to be too much.

Rafael wrote: "So, you don't agree with "woke stuff" unless it affects YOU personally? If someone said that your personal issues with suicide was a "snowflake thing" would you say that this person would be right or wrong?"

Yep it's all fun and games until it affects them personally.

Tanu wrote: "I guess I just don't see the point of them for fiction genres, at least. People functioned fine without them before everyone started warning for everything. If you are going to read genres like cri..."

Totally agree.

Tanu wrote: "I guess I just don't see the point of them for fiction genres, at least. People functioned fine without them before everyone started warning for everything. If you are going to read genres like cri..."

The trigger warning would help the readers to curate their own readings, don't you agree?

Kasia wrote: "Yep it's all fun and games until it affects them personally."

It seems. But maybe we got it wrong, right?

Rafael wrote: "Tanu wrote: "I guess I just don't see the point of them for fiction genres, at least. People functioned fine without them before everyone started warning for everything. If you are going to read ge..."

In some circumstances, I suppose, but nothing a quick search of reddit ("Recommend romance with no sexual assault") wouldn't achieve.

So, to read a book a reader should depend on an external source of information? What about less trendy books? What about people that have no interest or knowledge about reddit or any other social network?

I'm not really interested in a debate.

This not surprises me.