Some Justice OOC

[Eluvatar]

http://forum.taijitu.org/modern-national-role-play/some-justice/

I'm pondering what to do if/when I may need to add warnings. I won't explicitly show anything graphic, I'm quite certain, but I am very aware that even referring to some matters can be terribly upsetting.

Reading about the concept of trigger warnings online however it seems that they are mostly used for explicit descriptions, not presence in the plot.

Secondly, I would definitely like feedback. Constructive criticism, or even criticism of my even approaching this topic, is invited.

I'll brazenly fish for compliments, too, I suppose.

[Khem]

Well written as usual for yourself. As per the trigger warning explanation, you don't specify what sensitivities will be offended. I gather this is going to be about a rape trial. As someone who has experienced unwilling violation I have mixed feelings about this subject matter being approached. I mean on the one hand if done well with a sense of justice at the end of the tale I would feel cheated by reading of justice that I never got. On the other hand if the tale takes the trajectory of a typical trial of such it will be difficult to read due to hitting close to home. I'm torn on it and am unsure if I can read this story-line regardless of trajectory.

[Eluvatar]

The title should hopefully tell you what you know about whether you want to read it or not. (It is not sarcastic.)

[bigbaldben]

...white-wigged man gently rapped his high oaken desk with the ceremonial spear.

I read this thread and about the trigger warnings first, so I mistakenly read "raped" instead of "rapped."  Imagine my confusion.  Once I was able to clear that hurdle, I thought it was great.  Nice introduction to the characters, and I'm sure I'll refer back to it once the story gets going.

Re: trigger warnings, I always understood them to be as you said, Eluvatar, but like al' Khem said, the way it is approached in the story might make some difference, but not in a way you'd expect.  Has there been any consideration given to a warning tag system for triggers?  Not like a bazillion of them, but if you could do it in a non-offensive way.... or maybe there should be a new position in Taijitu - Minister of Censure.  Oh, I would be perfect for that.

  <snaps out of it>

What was I saying?  Oh yeah, good story, appreciate your concern for your fellow humans.

[Eluvatar]

Well, I used the exclamation point icon for the topic. Perhaps we could use that for RP topics where we're concerned the subject matter could possibly upset someone? That wouldn't be visible from the main index though, nor in subscription emails if somebody subscribes to the RP board.

I've seen many boards use square bracket tags for meta-information about a work of creative writing. We use them for dates pretty often. (I may add such a date tag to Some Justice if I decide on a specific date). Could also use them for special meta-information of this kind. I kind of hesitate to put the particular word in the topic title though. Ultimately the story is not about that, it's about, well, "some justice." Perhaps a neutral [Warning] tag that suggests that those who know that certain topics can be very upsetting / triggering for them check the appropriate OOC topic for whether it has the topic in question?

[bigbaldben]

That sounds easy enough.

I was thinking even more unobtrusively, like maybe a number or code like this:  NSF1

NSF - Not Safe For, which I think most internet folks know from NSFW...

And then a small list of the categories in some central location:

1 - Rapping
2 - White Rapping
3-  White Female Rapping
4 - Violence
5 - PTSD

...something like that.  Then when a reader is susceptible to some of those problems, they can immediately see which threads discuss something they would rather avoid - and thus avoiding having to read the actual word at a time they might not be expecting it.

So your thread would read, for example:

  Some Justice (1992) NSF2

Google link, of course, replaced with a page - maybe in the wiki?  Once it was set up, it wouldn't need much maintenance.

Just my stream of consciousness thinking here...

[Myroria]

I'll echo the above comments about how excellently this is written. The formal proceedings of the court intercut with the third-person narration being so short and curt creates a sense of unease. Creating tone has always been a strong point of yours.

Some aspects of your culture can be confusing or daunting. We in IRC know that people in court call the judge "father" because of their historical role as priests, but someone who doesn't already know that probably will be confused despite your offhand mention of it in a later paragraph. I prefer narrative exposition to dialogue exposition, but in the latter case a protagonist who may be unfamiliar with how Eluvataran court works can be explained things. Just an idea.

I can't predict exactly what you'll write in the future, but I think that the subject matter will become clear enough to the reader that once/if you do get more graphic, it won't be unexpected. In my experience, trigger warnings are usually applied to tumblr posts or other social media things where people might immediately start talking about their experience being assaulted or what have you. In these cases, a trigger warning might be put at the start of the post, then a couple line breaks, then a narrative picking up immediately at the traumatic event.

In longer, post-by-post pieces such as ours, where extensive warnings are given in the form of the prose, I don't know if this is strictly necessary.

I should also concede that I have never been sexually assaulted and therefore have no real idea what might upset people.

[Eluvatar]

Thank you Myroria for the tumblr background, I don't read much of it myself but I do know trigger warnings are "a thing" there. The context is helpful.

I hope that for this instance this topic would be enough.

I have a strong preference for showing rather than telling. Perhaps I could make the judge open with "In the name of Eru the ever-merciful" or a more appropriately secular-but-formally-religious line to help show what's going on with that?

bigbaldben, I think I'd prefer a generic [Warning] and a specific explanation in the OOC topic to coded tags. I'm not sure how necessary that is though, perhaps we should just have a community standard that anything we write should be safe enough as Myroria suggests (i.e. the beginning should be safe, and any potentially unsafe segment should not be a surprise). I'd still probably use the exclamation point icon for topics where the story involves potentially triggering subjects of course.

[Delfos]

I have brought this issue before. First i don't think there needs to be a warning but an OOC planning/explanation is important. imo Any "savagery" can be portrayed as violent as it comes, or even accentuated violence, we all ought to know that none of us really means to glorify those events, but rather portray, build and characterize a story, violent they may be. But after all, I can't ignore the sensibilities of our community, I think whoever may be affected should form a consensus about this.

about rape
I've planned to portray the Honto invasion of Boyen with immense savagery, very alike the Japanese invasion of China, and include rape as a demonizing aspect. I've been met with: "No. If anyone does a rape RP, I will leave." by our most active woman, so I think they have the last word, we don't want them to leave. But I think as long it's just a reference it may be no harm. For instance, I'm planning to RP about a famous pirate, his mother was raped by his landlord and he's the son of said landlord. I don't plan on RPing any further than just that reference, I don't think I'll be doing any harm, but let me know.

[Khem]

Referring to an event isn't something that is a trigger for myself (can't speak for others). These sorts of graphic details is obviously below our collective standards. No one is going to be writing pornographic or truly vile scenes (they tend to do little for story anyhow). Honestly the most difficult thing with this story is the fact that its taking place in court. Anyone who has gone through the process of attempting to seek justice for sexual crimes committed against them knows the awful reality and feel of such. I worry mostly that Eluvatar is going to do too good of a job at capturing this. Honestly had my anxiety levels through the roof just reading the opening. I am not against it being written but I am strongly in favor of having trigger warnings on any such threads. How hard is it to put [trigger warning] in the title of a post that one knows may have psychological impact on others? I know we haven't talked of this previously and I am not saying that Eluvatar was a naughty boy for not adding a trigger warning right away, in fact I appreciate him opening this thread for such discussion. Sorry for this being a bit rambling but such topics do not make for my thoughts being well ordered. In short I would appreciate a simple addition of [trigger warning] to the title of potentially harmful storylines and that we continue to adhere to our high standards of world building.

[St Oz]

I'd like to point out that while confused in areas, I enjoyed the tone you set for the story and the atmosphere of the court room. You set out the proceedings at dry, wordy, and official. The seriousness of the charges were all presented out ad nauseam like any court room, where the drama comes out in a unique way where it's case versus case. It's like watching a game of chess, if you just watch the last bits of it, you'll be confused as hell, but if you follow through since the beginning it's engaging and addictive, offering up the reader to draw their own conclusions.

That being said, the issues I had came from some ignorance of Eluvataran culture. You did a good job with showing that the justice is respected with the title "father". I got that right away. However, in particular, this line.

Of course not. The cachar wouldn't own up, but he wouldn't risk being oath-forsworn either. Whatever he did to her, breaking a formal oath would of course be much worse, after all...

I was in a mode that was trying to make sense of your world that you're painting. At first I didn't know I could hover over the word and look up what it was, but from the context, I figured "cachar" was a title or a position. Like Lord or CEO or some sort of noble, and that this oath-forsworn was like an oath "to tell the truth nothing but the truth so help me god" sort of thing. Then, that breaking this oath would be worse. Why? The narrator already told me what he's thinking 'Whatever he did to her', why can't he just tell me what breaking the oath is. Well people in IRC informed me about what I was wrong about, that this was a word that meant "shitbag" and that this oath thing is a penalty of death deal. Anyways, that brought up a bigger issue.

The narrator is telling us that he's a shit-bag who is guilty, and that he's thinking "whatever I did to her, I can't break an oath." The narrator shouldn't be telling us he's a shitbag, unless this is first person. The narrator should also back away and describe what he's doing, and if he's pretending to be stoic, and you want to be a revealing third person narrator, then you can say "but underneath he was shaken to the bones, what if he broke the oath" Also with a court room, everything has to be brought out for the case, so that makes exposition very easy to get out there. A judge basically is your exposition master. He can plainly spell out for the man, "so under oath do you understand the consequence of execution should you break the oath blah blah blah." There it is spelled out for us, and we can clearly understand by his fear and this exposition, that this man is taking a risk. Is he guilty? Yes or no? We don't know, but his life is on the line! Oh shit! Also this line numbs the drama of the court room. We now know that for sure he's 100% guilty, so now the proceeding narrative after this is how we nailed that shit bag. I think it's best if you kept the narrator objective, and let the reader develop an opinion on it.

The other issue I had with this, is the really long names, and then some of the names that are too similar to Tolkien characters. Suddenly my head associates one of the characters as That shitty king who wouldn't put the ring in the lava, instead of the doctor who is a witness in this criminal case that I'm reading. As for the really long names, over and over. I'm not reading the names, I'm skipping over them. All I need is a first name or a first and a last name, then repeat the first name more often or just the last name, but repeating out the full name makes the character forgettable. Russian literature already has a problem in translation for doing this. Often they add the patronymic after names, and while this is normal in Russian culture, to refer to someone with their first and patronymic, you have four full names streaming across the prose while some people already have trouble with two names. The names just have to cut shorter, because I'm not really following who is doing what towards the end, it's just this one really long name is interacting with douchebag LotR king really long name while really long name is being nervous. The shorter name will help us identify more with the characters instead of reaching for a bottle of ibuprofen.

Overall, great story, and while there's a discussion about triggers or whatever, I'm old fashioned in believing that people are more resilient than to be traumatized by prose, but don't take my opinion as fact because I've never had a traumatic experience and don't know what it can do to a person. As for its relation to the story, keep the tension up, keep the anxiety of the character, show not tell, etc. I caution you to be extra careful when writing more on this though, because it is such an easy topic to completely fuck and look like an asshole. So good luck C:

[Wast]

Note: apologies for the tangent in your OOC thread. If you want, this can be split to another topic.

It is good that we are discussing the trigger warning issue now that the RP section is so active. My opinion may not count for much since I don't actually write anything substantial here, but I'll give it anyway. I'm inclined to agree with Myroria's comments. My preference would be for the writer to include a warning at the start of the post (rather than in the OOC thread or the title of the post) if they feel the material might be unreadable/offensive to some and that the content may not be clear from context/exposition. I like to think our writing community is mature and considerate enough that this can be left primarily to the discretion of the writer.

A word of caution, though, about warnings through context: We're all very enthusiastic about reading others' work. The optimistic reader might expect some boundary to be respected even if the author hints at darker turns in the story, hoping that the author will not go further up until the point where they actually do. For example, if a character is repeatedly mentioned who murders cute fuzzy animals, I might not expect the author to include a scene from that character's perspective in which that takes place (even if the character becomes the focus) and read it anyway out of inertia. I still think a warning is up to the writer in this case (i.e. the risk is the reader's choice) but would encourage the writer to think very seriously about what warning might be appropriate.

[Eluvatar]

I'd like to point out that while confused in areas, I enjoyed the tone you set for the story and the atmosphere of the court room. You set out the proceedings at dry, wordy, and official. The seriousness of the charges were all presented out ad nauseam like any court room, where the drama comes out in a unique way where it's case versus case. It's like watching a game of chess, if you just watch the last bits of it, you'll be confused as hell, but if you follow through since the beginning it's engaging and addictive, offering up the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Thank you.

That being said, the issues I had came from some ignorance of Eluvataran culture. You did a good job with showing that the justice is respected with the title "father". I got that right away. However, in particular, this line.

Of course not. The cachar wouldn't own up, but he wouldn't risk being oath-forsworn either. Whatever he did to her, breaking a formal oath would of course be much worse, after all...

I was in a mode that was trying to make sense of your world that you're painting. At first I didn't know I could hover over the word and look up what it was, but from the context, I figured "cachar" was a title or a position. Like Lord or CEO or some sort of noble, and that this oath-forsworn was like an oath "to tell the truth nothing but the truth so help me god" sort of thing. Then, that breaking this oath would be worse. Why? The narrator already told me what he's thinking 'Whatever he did to her', why can't he just tell me what breaking the oath is. Well people in IRC informed me about what I was wrong about, that this was a word that meant "shitbag" and that this oath thing is a penalty of death deal. Anyways, that brought up a bigger issue.

I think the problem is that the underlining of cachar lets you hover your mouse over it and see a translation isn't obvious. Thinking of adding this to the top of the post:

Where you see words like this, they have a tooltip that you can see if you hover your mouse over the word.

The narrator is telling us that he's a shit-bag who is guilty, and that he's thinking "whatever I did to her, I can't break an oath." The narrator shouldn't be telling us he's a shitbag, unless this is first person. The narrator should also back away and describe what he's doing, and if he's pretending to be stoic, and you want to be a revealing third person narrator, then you can say "but underneath he was shaken to the bones, what if he broke the oath" Also with a court room, everything has to be brought out for the case, so that makes exposition very easy to get out there. A judge basically is your exposition master. He can plainly spell out for the man, "so under oath do you understand the consequence of execution should you break the oath blah blah blah." There it is spelled out for us, and we can clearly understand by his fear and this exposition, that this man is taking a risk. Is he guilty? Yes or no? We don't know, but his life is on the line! Oh shit! Also this line numbs the drama of the court room. We now know that for sure he's 100% guilty, so now the proceeding narrative after this is how we nailed that shit bag. I think it's best if you kept the narrator objective, and let the reader develop an opinion on it.

I tried to write in third person subjective limited: The narrator is not referring to Miriel as I, but is describing matters and narrating from her perspective.

I think I messed up in another way besides not giving documentation of the translation tooltips: I didn't provide enough of Miriel's perspective early enough to make this clear, and yes I've left what becoming oath-forsworn means too vague.

The other issue I had with this, is the really long names, and then some of the names that are too similar to Tolkien characters. Suddenly my head associates one of the characters as That shitty king who wouldn't put the ring in the lava, instead of the doctor who is a witness in this criminal case that I'm reading. As for the really long names, over and over. I'm not reading the names, I'm skipping over them. All I need is a first name or a first and a last name, then repeat the first name more often or just the last name, but repeating out the full name makes the character forgettable. Russian literature already has a problem in translation for doing this. Often they add the patronymic after names, and while this is normal in Russian culture, to refer to someone with their first and patronymic, you have four full names streaming across the prose while some people already have trouble with two names. The names just have to cut shorter, because I'm not really following who is doing what towards the end, it's just this one really long name is interacting with douchebag LotR king really long name while really long name is being nervous. The shorter name will help us identify more with the characters instead of reaching for a bottle of ibuprofen.

The full names are generally only stated once for each character. They're referred to, after that, by the first and last name.

I already reject using names like "Aragorn" for characters, perhaps I should extend the exclusion list farther.

Overall, great story, and while there's a discussion about triggers or whatever, I'm old fashioned in believing that people are more resilient than to be traumatized by prose, but don't take my opinion as fact because I've never had a traumatic experience and don't know what it can do to a person. As for its relation to the story, keep the tension up, keep the anxiety of the character, show not tell, etc. I caution you to be extra careful when writing more on this though, because it is such an easy topic to completely fuck and look like an asshole. So good luck C:

Thanks.

[Eluvatar]

It turns out the abbr tags were basically invisible in browsers other than firefox. I have edited the skin to fix this.