melannen | (no subject)

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?

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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.

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.

I think that's exactly what they're thinking, but they're forgetting that the tags are supposed to be for a broad audience and not just them. And you're completely right; not fitting with the original meaning of the term well at all.

Hmm, I mean...I am super not in the target audience for dubcon sibling incest, but both dubcon and sibling incest are fairly common fandom kinks I'm relatively inured to if I stumble over them.

I guess to me DDDNE does not so much indicate "here be extreme kink or dark themes" as "here be extreme kink or dark themes that you rarely come across in fandom, often graphic torture or eroticized horror tropes." Those are the stories that I still remember in way too much detail 20 years later from my indiscriminate teenage fanfic-reading years because the ways in which they were extreme was so far from fandom norm, whereas the incest and rape fic kind of blur together along with all the rapey 1970s/80s pro romance novels. (Two examples: one involved drugging a character and performing amateur dental work while getting off on it; the other involved the alien from the Alien movies and kind of scarred my young brain. I have no idea while I clicked it, but I can never unclick it; I think that author may have ended up switching to writing pro horror novels. Both were also nonconsensual and otherwise dark as fuck, but it was the out-of-fandom-norm horror bits that made them stand out to me.)

DDDNE still pretty useless as a DNW, but I do think it usually implies something more/different than other common warnings/content labels do.

I have no similar examples because I did not read adult-rated fanfic until I was 18. :P (I know, I'm weird.)

I do kind of feel like "involves the Alien form the Alien movies" is one of those things I would assume you go expecting certain horror tropes (in the same way there are fandoms where sibling incest is super-common and/or canon, and some where the idea that you might ship second cousins causes fainting.)

I really think any DNW that assumes other people will understand what you mean by "rare" or "common" or "part of an understood category of extreme content" are a bad idea in general, because very few people are going to deliberately write unrequested extreme content for someone, and those people are assholes who will abuse a vague DNW anyway - the trouble comes when people disagree on what *is* rare or extreme, so a DNW that relies on that helps nobody.

Oh well, someone has now written a kinkmeme fic where the dead dove warning is for actual dead doves (and graphic scenes of gamebird preparation). And it was a lovely fic! So I'm happy. :D

I do kind of feel like "involves the Alien form the Alien movies" is one of those things I would assume you go expecting certain horror tropes

Mmm, I mean, yes, but in this case it was prrrrobably not one I would have expected from the movies, had I seen the movies at the time. It gave me an extremely specific squick regarding the human digestive tract that I would never have thought of on my own. Seriously, I do not know why dumbass teen me clicked.

But yeah, absolutely - "common knowledge" DNWs don't work because there is increasingly no such thing as common knowledge. I have been feeling more and more lately like I have to list things as DNWs that have long been generally treated as opt-in for exchanges (I moderated one exchange where someone wrote unrequested noncon, and I still feel really bad for not catching that before reveals). I just mean that as a "genre," Dead Dove Do Not Eat suggests something different to me than "dark fic" or "extreme kink." But not in any kind of firmly pinned down, universal way.

Oh well, someone has now written a kinkmeme fic where the dead dove warning is for actual dead doves (and graphic scenes of gamebird preparation). And it was a lovely fic! So I'm happy. :D

That sounds more like Dead Dove Do Eat (After Cooking), haha.