(no subject)

[melannen]

I have been lurking some prompt memes lately, and I keep seeing "DNW: Dead doves" on anon kink prompts

I don't...

"Dead dove" means "this fic is clearly labelled and fully warned for, so if you open it you know what you are getting." DNW: Dead Dove means... that you want your fic to be badly tagged and unwarned so that you're blindsided by things? I don't understand.

I guess I can see a meaning drift where people are reading "dead dove" to just refer to all of the content that usually needs to be thoroughly warned for, but I've seen dnw: Dead Dove on some pretty kinktomato-flavored prompts. "DNW: Dead Doves" on a prompt for dubcon incest is even less comprehensible than it would be generally.

Does it mean "The only fucked-up content I want in my fic is the content that is already tagged in my prompt"? But that's what dead dove means. If you only want the fucked-up stuff that is clearly tagged you are in fact asking for a dead dove fic.

Can fandom please, in advance of the winter exchange season, please just agree that "dead dove" is not something that makes sense to list in your DNWs? Please?

Comments

[pauraque]

What boggles me about that is like, even if "dead dove" did mean "general bad stuff", that would still be a 100% useless and unenforceable DNW!

[melannen]

I'm mostly seeing it on kinkmemes, which aren't enforceable in the same way as an exchange, and "DNW: anything yucky" kind of makes sense if your prompt is for, like, flower crowns in a field of fluffy bunnies. But I have definitely seen it on prompts where "general bad stuff" makes 0 sense as a DNW, even for an informal prompt collection. And I dread that it will start showing up in, like, yuletide, which you are right, would just. not.

[ellen_fremedon]

Last Yuletide, my recipient asked for "nothing that needs a trigger warning."

That's...not...how triggers work.

[melannen]

People really, really, really don't understand triggers and it makes me sad. But that one is probably a lost cause in fandom at this point. D:

[kalloway]

I have definitely seen this turning up in exchanges and was a bit baffled. "You don't want your gift to be tagged for exactly what it is?"

I've appreciated the phrase as a shorthand for a notably-darker "what it says on the tin", but apparently that meaning is being lost somehow.

[melannen]

Yeah, it's a fun way to say "What it says on the tin"! But you can't DNW "being what it says on the tin". I mean, I suppose you could, it might even kind of make sense if you wanted, idk, noncon roleplay in an established relationship? But that is definitely not how people are using it.

But I feel like even then phrasing it as "write me a fic with deceptive warnings" is going to go poorly.

[seekingferret]

Maybe it's literal.

[melannen]

Sadly it is not in a fandom with canonical or fanonical doves, so it's unlikely. Canaries or peacocks, *maybe*.

...I would be kind of delighted to find out there were people were reading it as a synonym for "animal harm," though.

[noxelementalist]

I haven't seen it much in the fan corners I do, but when it has popped up it seems to be taken as a shorthand for f*cked up material broadly (so like "DNW: Dead Dove" would mean "I want nothing incredibly problematic and/or for the prompt to be done in a way that is as minimally problematic as possible.) The conotation of accurately tagging seems to have completely vanished.

That said, if I ever got that as a DNW, I feel I'd have to see it in context to figure out what would be considered a problem for that person? It feels like a strange reference/descriptor in general to me, and I wouldn't be able to interpret it in isolation.

[melannen]

Yeah, that's the only thing that makes any sense at all. I see it get used in the "what it says on the tin" sense on fills for the same kinkmeme though, so it's not like that sense has disappeared.

The way it seems to be used in the DNWs is "my weird kinks are okay, but all those other weird kinks are dead doves" since, as mentioned, it's often appearing on prompts that have weird kinks in them. Despite the fact that part of the original meaning was "we all acknowledge that these are weird kinks and that's okay."

Why is fandom so bad at DNWs.

[ratcreature]

I actually was not aware of this extensive labelling meaning of "Dead Dove". I kind of thought it meant that it's a darker story and there's going to be a bad, unhappy, bleak or depressing ending for the characters that most readers would dislike, even if they like the other labels.

I almost always avoid these even if the other tags seem attractive, because I thought it told me to expect some sort of horrible twist at some point or an author who likes to mess with their readers.

I guess I thought it kind of meant almost the opposite of what you say it means, in the sense that I thought it was supposed to mean something that will make you feel bad after reading, even though your expectations from all other context clues (like the other tags) are good . This explains though why when I ignored my apprehension for authors I usually like, where the other tags looked intriguing, the stories seemed perfectly nice to me, and not twisted at all.

Fandom labels being based on injokes and obscure references is just confusing.

ETA: To illustrate what I thought the tag meant, I've mostly seen it on MCU stories with Bucky/Hydra Agents pairings. So the difference I assumed was that if something was tagged say non-con/rape and torture, had both Bucky/Hydra Agents, and Bucky/Steve as pairings, and then for example a longer list of sex related tags that may or may not squick readers (like gags or bondage or whatever), normally in the absence of explicit "partner rape" or "partner betrayal" tags or such, I'd expect the Hydra Agents to be responsible for any non-con in such story, and the Steve/Bucky part to be consensual with Steve not torturing Bucky, and a chance of a happy ending for them. With a "Dead Dove" tag on top of the previous ones, I'd be wary that maybe Steve is also doing horrible things to Bucky, traumatizes him, and that it all might end in some sort of horrible bleak place, and I wouldn't want to risk that.

[melannen]

I absolutely get how someone, trying to figure out the meaning from contextual usage, would take it to mean something like a combination of "darkfic", "extreme kink", and "squickfic". (I miss having a word for squickfic....)

But like I said, I'm seeing it DNW'd on prompts where the prompts include things that a lot of people would consider darkfic or extreme kink? And as you learned, what it's actually tagged on can be a wide variety of things. (I don't think I've ever used it, and I probably won't ever, but if I, say, ended up writing another 7-fandom crossover for Yuletide this year, I could see myself tagging it, because crossing over seven fandoms is absolutely the sort of thing I might want to label "I refuse to apologize for doing this even though you might think I should.")

So I was hoping it was being used in some other specific meaning, and not just people being really sloppy with their DNWs, but I think that's probably what it is.

Being cutesy and in-jokey with DNWs is usually a bad idea regardless, but if you want to use them, at minimum you should google them first to make sure there isn't another meaning!

[dragoness_e]

AFAIK, "Dead Dove: Do Not Eat" means "take my tags SERIOUSLY, they are there for a reason". Presumably as opposed to "tags are just CYA, it's iffy whether the thing tagged for really happens, or happens in a serious way".

[author_by_night]

Maybe they want to be shocked? But not all of the readers will.... sure, it's a fest with gifts, but other people will also be reading it.

[melannen]

I can definitely see someone wanting something like "please CNTW my gift fic, I don't need any warnings and I prefer to be surprised", though I suspect it would get you on the wank comms even if you stated it that clearly. And for a kink meme where everybody can see the prompt already even that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Or even the sort of fic where terrible things or extreme kinks happen, but in the end it was all a dream/sex fantasy! So you're saying I'm okay with a fic which would need all these warning tags as long as it isn't actually what the warning tags imply it is. That kind of fic can often be really good, and I have been known to post kinkmeme prompts that end with "This might be more IC if it's a roleplay or masturbation fantasy and I'm there for that."

I don't think DNW'ing Dead Dove will get you that, though, no matter how logical that would be.

[vicki_rae]

I read it as a general prompting for a fic that the author wouldn't be tempted to tag Dead Dove. Which would mean no kinks unless specifically asked for?

Like, not a kink, but if someone said in a prompt DNW: Canonical Death, that would mean they don't want Canonical Death. Not that they want you to just not tag for it.

If I'm understanding the Dead Dove Do Not Eat tag, it's for when the author clearly tagged for something that's likely to be a DNW for some people, so they're telling those reader easy fix is don't read the fic and then complain? But if it's a prompt, and the author included something not asked for? They're not saying it's a trigger for them, they're saying don't include any common trigger warning content.

Dead Dove isn't specific, or a general no trigger warning content either, but I can see where it came from. Especially with the way the tumblr hellscape is borking tagging.

[melannen]

Yeah, I can definitely see where it came from in that reading, but honestly "No common DNWs/triggers" is a pretty bad DNW too (especially if you are requesting a common DNW in your prompt! Which makes it clear that your definition of common DNWs is not necessarily the same as the author's.)

I feel like a lot of people use those kinds of really broad and vague DNWs because they're afraid that being clear will make them look picky or something, but honestly if you really only want vanilla fluff you're better off saying "I only want sweet vanilla fluff" (I have put that in YT prompts a lot), and if you don't really only want vanilla fluff you probably shouldn't be using a blanket DNW like that.

At the very least I wish people who make extensive use of broad or vague DNWs would include an "unless explicitly prompted for" in their DNW section. And maybe that's specifically what people are going for with DNW:Dead Dove? But that's really changing the base meaning a lot. (I have been in situations where an exchange had enforceable DNWs and the prompt we matched on was, like, "backstory from their childhood" but they had "kidfic" in their DNWs.)

[superborb]

Wow, I totally osmosed the opposite meaning for dead dove from its common usage in the Untamed fandom. The first time I encountered it was in quigonejinn's fics where it is combined with CNTW to imply "usually this would be warned for and is dark, but the suspense is part of the point."

[melannen]

Wow, so there are now people using the Dead Dove tag in two *exactly opposite* meanings. Ah, fandom!

...all the more reason you should definitely not use it as a DNW.

[stellar_dust]

DDDNW was a question in one of the recent "let's find out about generational drift in fandom spaces" surveys. To the best of my knowledge I had NEVER encountered it before that, except for maybe like, once in passing as a reference to the original source. Did that survey ever post results? I would be curious.

It seems like a very bad idea to ask for anything in a prompt/exchange by way of weird references and abbreviations unless you are 100% sure that the entire community agrees on the meaning. Like, please don't even use a smush name to request a ship unless it's a fandom-specific event!

[melannen]

Clearly that means you are now officially an Old. :P

It's a relatively new piece of jargon that I think mostly came from tumblr, but it's been spreading faster recently, as evinced by all these comments.

At some point you've gotta have some agreed-upon jargon or language doesn't work anymore - I wouldn't expect someone to, like, explain the entirely of a/b/o in every signup where they dnw it - but if you are prompting a wide audience, you should at least drop it into google to see if there's a clear meaning in context! And some pretty standard DNWs can sometimes trip people based on context, especially in large exchanges where not everybody is immersed in the jargon - i.e. maybe reword your standard watersports DNW if one of your prompts is for a beach trip.

[trobadora]

and I keep seeing "DNW: Dead doves" on anon kink prompts

Wow, that is confusing indeed!

[melannen]

I'm pretty sure it's the perpetual problem of people wanting something they can put in DNWs that just means "none of that icky stuff that we all agree is too icky". The problem being that there will never be one subset of stuff that we all agree is the too-icky stuff, so that will never work for DNWs.

[cuddyclothes]

Just staying that this is a great discussion.

[bemused_writer]

Oh, that is super confusing. At first I figured they must mean they didn't want anything that could usually fall under Dead Dove Do Not Eat, but if they're also asking for material that still falls under that... Really not sure what they're asking for.

[melannen]

I think for a lot of people something like dubcon sibling incest doesn't fit their personal definition? Like I think a lot of people are thinking, extreme gore, major underage, that kind of thing. But there are people who would consider incest worse than extreme gore! And given the original use of Dead Dove it's really not helpful.

[lea_hazel]

I once saw a prompt that said "no squicks". That's like the inverse of the semi-regular complaints that "this isn't a kink meme, it's a vanilla porn meme". I feel like that goes against the whole purpose of fandom's defining everything as a potential kink or squick, specifically to avoid labels like "this is normal sex, and this isn't". Meh.

[melannen]

The whole point of "squick" is that it's intensely personal and different for everyone!

...okay, for awhile there I remember the concept of "squickfic", where people wrote fics that were intended to squick out everyone deliberately, so that's probably the idea (very similar to the way some people seem to be using Dead Dove really) but that is still not good for a DNW.

[luzula]

I have been in fandom since 2007 and have never come across the Dead Dove expression at all, in any of its meanings, until this post! So I guess that's another data point for you. : )

[melannen]

It's a pretty recent, mostly tumblr- and twitter- thing that comes from an Arrested Development gifset, so I'm not surprised! Yes, another very good reason it's a bad way to phrase your DNW.

[satsuma]

I was part of a discussion yesterday where we determined that of the four people involved, there were four different interpretations of what "dead dove" tags mean & it made me think of this post haha