(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

[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.