ExtraPenguin

8. Squicks - What are some things that squick you in fandom - not necessarily "icky", though it can be. From anything involving blood, to bad grammar.

Well, a squick is by definition something that makes you go "ew", so ... I, uh, disagree with the posing of this question! It is, however, something that I do think about semi-regularly, as I participate in fanwork exchanges and part of that is figuring out what are the things that I Do Not Want in my gifts. (On a side note, it ammuses me immensely that the whole term for DNWs comes from Backstroke of the West, the bad back-translation of Chinese subs for Revenge of the Sith into English. Do Not Want is the big NOOO Vader gives after waking up in the suit.) So I'm going to just navelgaze about my DNW list.

My current set of DNWs is:

• Setting change AUs (eg: Hogwarts AU, Coffee Shop AU)
• Christianity, mentions of "sinning".
• Humiliation, especially public.
• Unrequested incest, including foster/adopted relationships.
• Stories about motherhood.
• Unrequested het between humans or humanoid creatures. (Dolphins are fine, spiders are fine, people having parents is fine, the fabric of society being canonical and het-enabling is fine.)
• Requested characters being presented as/rendered utterly helpless; the "damsel in distress" trope; woobiefication.
• Stories about mourning unwelcome changes to/realizations about the body, with "body" defined broadly, (ex: acquiring a disability, infertility, weight gain) and the associated grief/angst.
• Stories about mourning a dead person.
• Requested characters dying.
• Stories where the characters have never loved or could never love anyone but each other, incl. soulmates, demisexuality, single-target sexuality, etc.

This is a mix of things that I never want to see again (e.g. Christianity), squicks (e.g. the mourning changes to the body one), stuff that will make me feel bad (e.g. mourning dead people), and stuff where the likelihood of squicking me is so immensely greater than the reward from threading the needle that people should just Not (e.g. soulmates). Most exchange fandom's people's DNW lists are some mix of the above.

This isn't the complete list of things that squick me – merely the ones I really really hate or judge likely someone would in good faith try to give me. There are several sex kinks that I dislike, for instance, but I seriously doubt anyone's going to write me scat, say. (If they do, I'm just going to add that to my DNWs next time.) Also a lot of the things that squick me are less tropes and more nebulous things, like ... well, it has taken me a lot of introspection and figuring things out to get some of those DNWs into a shape that covered at least most of the squick and made sense to people who were not me, like Stories about mourning unwelcome changes to/realizations about the body, with "body" defined broadly, (ex: acquiring a disability, infertility, weight gain) and the associated grief/angst.

There's also the question of DNW exceptions – after some rather hilarious meme doom-mongering about "DNW unrequested relationships" I've added the caveats to my het DNW, since I just don't like het and don't want anything that is or should be tagged as F/M on AO3. I guess I could add that walk-on extras for casefic can also be in a heterosexual (un)happily ever after, but lbr, I'd rather the whole universe be gay. Though not to the extent that the author needs to spend 2k establishing that children come from vats or something. (...maybe this is the actual reason I like Anakin Skywalker, lol. The product of asexual reproduction!)

Anyway, that's the tl;dr for the day! Maybe it inspired you to rephrase a DNW better, maybe you have had a good laugh at my neuroses, but as long as you had fun, it's okay.

(list of questions)