With the new game coming out soon, I’ve been on a bit of a Star Ocean craze. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is certainly one of the better games I’ve played for the PS2, but one of the things it lacked was LGBTQ+ representation. Fanfiction to the rescue.
Trigger warning for rape and trauma after the jump.
Recently Saika and I started watching Sense8, the Wachowski siblings’ new Netflix offering. I’d been hearing great things about it in the news and on Tumblr—so far I’ve avoided spoilers about its more problematic parts, so please no spoilers—and I was pretty pumped to start it. Within the first few minutes of the first episode, though, I quickly figured out that, like Hannibal, this was not a show that I could go into blindly. I scoured the internet to see if anyone had put up lists of trigger warnings for Sense8, and I was thrilled when I found an entire Tumblr dedicated to helping out TV fans with triggers.
Games are art. I don’t think most people will disagree with me that the medium has rightfully gained such a status—if you do disagree, you can take that up with the Smithsonian. Unlike the artworks in museums, however, games share a trait with their counterpart, film, in which they’re rated depending on the content within said games—an aspect more commonly known as an ERSB rating. While these ratings can be good for a general sense of what content someone buying a game may need to look out for, the system itself has its own shortcomings. A T or M rating might let the consumer know that there’s violence or sexually explicit content, but there’s nothing in these ratings that allow for, say, warnings of spiders. Smaller phobias, or even more descriptive break-downs of larger warnings (e.g.: distinguishing “situations of sexual assault” from “appearance of naked breasts” under the umbrella of “sexual content”) simply do not have a chance of being expressed on a small black and white box on the back of a game box. This is where today’s web crush comes in.
Because I secretly hate myself, I read yet another fanfiction about Ramsay Snow, which I’m going to share with all of you right now. Yes, this is yet another darkfic.
Ramsay’s character fascinates me for a lot of reasons. I don’t like him and all of his scenes rightfully make me uncomfortable. But I’m still intrigued by his character, and in some ways I’m thankful that Martin included him in the series. Mostly, however, I’m intrigued by how other fans perceive him.
A Short-Learned Lesson is probably one of the creepiest fucking things I have ever read. For starters, any story about Ramsay always comes with warning labels. This one is no different. Despite the horribleness of this fic’s content, though, I recommend reading it.
Trigger warning for rape, child abuse, and all the usual Ramsay stuff after the jump.
With the advent of the Internet and the ability to find the answer to every question you did or didn’t want to know with the click of a button, I thought I’d look at whether or not spoilers enhance the reading/watching experience or take something away from it. Lord of the Flies, Harry Potter, and Prometheus spoilers after the jump.
This post is going to be a little different than the norm. While I was inspired to write this after reading a really bad piece of fanfiction, which pertains to geekdom as all our posts should, my research into the topic led me away from geekdom. And one of the first sites I found was an article attacking feminists and calling trigger warnings a “feminist online fad”. So in order to properly explain why I believe trigger warnings are important in fanfiction, blog articles, television programs, etc., I’m going to look at and try to debunk some of the numerous reasons why other people believe trigger warnings are counterproductive.
There seems to be a wide range of opinions on this topic, and some of these opinions are, quite frankly, rude and rather sexist.
Trigger Warning: rape, abuse, PTSD.
Lady Geek Girl and Friends 