Warnings - the final frontier

[rheasilvia]

I have a story up on AO3 with a "rape/non-con" archive warning. Today, I received a (very polite and not at all flamey!) comment remarking that the rape was difficult to read, and that a trigger warning might have been a good idea.

Incidentally, I also thought that a trigger warning would be a good idea for this story. That's why I used the archive warning.

Now I'm wondering - did the reader overlook the warning, or did she feel there should have been another warning within the text itself to mark the passages in question? I suspect I'm not entirely up to date on the eternal "warnings" discussion.

Comments

[carose59]

What kind of warning did she want? "Rape, and not the regular, not-upsetting kind, but the kind that might disturb you"?

[rheasilvia]

Good question... I think I'm going to ask, nicely. At this point, I'm assuming she simply didn't see the warning.

(The other theory I came up with was that she was expecting a different character to be raped. Sometimes that makes all the difference to readers... but not wanting to see certain characters in certain roles is a different issue entirely, and one that I will certainly never warn for.)