Stinging or Soothing Trigger Warnings On Fanfiction

Stinging or Soothing: Trigger Warnings,
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Fanfiction, and Reading Violent Texts
CRISTINA VISCHER BRUNS
Abstract. This essay examines two contrasting cases of readers

engaging with violent texts: student requests for trigger warnings to
alert them to potentially troubling content in course materials, and
widely popular fanfiction writing and reading in which fans create
new stories within fictional worlds they love, sometimes adding
depictions of physical, emotional, or sexual violence. Violent material
is alternately resisted or is sought out and even created. Examining
these contrasting stances reveals a conception of fiction in which
violent content is central for its capacity to produce powerful, personal
effects in readers. With a measure of control over their engagement
with and response to texts they read, readers can use depictions of
violence to enable them to externalize, manipulate, and resolve their
own potentially overwhelming emotional states. This outcome is
obscured by the academic privileging of reading at a critical distance,
and it demonstrates a vital role for the personal in theorizing fiction
reading and pedagogy.
The battle over trigger warnings may be ending. In the last decade, students
began asking that faculty include in course materials warnings about
content that could potentially trigger or retraumatize those who may have
suffered past harm in order to enable students to avoid unexpected contact
with such “triggering” material. Opponents to this strategy for dealing
with potentially troubling content have argued that college campuses were
“coddling” students, promoting hypersensitivity rather than teaching
students “how to live in a world full of potential offenses.”1 Others have
Cristina Vischer Bruns, associate professor of English at LaGuardia Community

College, CUNY, has over twenty years’ experience teaching college composition and
literature courses. Her scholarship focuses on the experience of reading fiction and its
effects. She is the author of Why Literature? The Value of Literary Reading and What It
Means for Teaching.
Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 55, No. 3, Fall 2021

© 2021 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
16 Bruns
affirmed trigger warnings as a way to facilitate access “to difficult material

and for people with histories of trauma.”2 What finally might end this debate
are recent empirical studies providing evidence that trigger warnings have
no benefit.3 A statement alerting readers that forthcoming content could be
distressing may not demonstrably decrease those readers’ levels of anxiety

or negative affect, as these studies claim. However, underlying student
demands for trigger warnings is a shift in stance that remains worthy of
attention. Fundamentally, these students are asserting that the personal
susceptibility of some readers to some texts precludes the critical distance
considered a given of reading in academic contexts.
This sense of susceptibility toward texts is especially intriguing when
compared with reading practices in one of the settings in which trigger
warnings and other content tags have been the norm for almost three
decades: online fanfiction communities. Writers who craft their own stories
using the characters and story worlds of authors they admire are nothing
new, as works of Virgil, Ovid, and Dante make apparent. However, the
practice of fan-writing that emerged in Star Trek fandoms of the 1970s
and was shared through homemade, mimeographed “zines” has in recent
decades been increasingly popularized and democratized by the virtual
interaction that the internet makes possible, allowing anyone with internet
access to find readers for his or her creative adaptations of existing story
worlds. What is striking is that, in many works of fanfiction, fan-writers
have chosen to add scenes of physical, emotional, or sexual violence that
were absent in the source texts—subject matter that can motivate demands
for trigger warnings—indicating that such content is in these cases desired.
This contrast in readers’ choices between these two phenomena makes them
puzzling and ultimately illuminating for a fuller understanding of fiction
reading and the role of violent content. On one hand, some college students
are asking for warnings that would enable them to avoid unexpected
encounters with violent content in material they read; and, on the other, in
fanfiction communities, readers become writers, and some choose to add
violent material to fictional worlds where it did not previously exist. At
the center of these shifts, from passive recipient of texts to active rewriters
and from scholarly detachment to personal susceptibility, is this potentially
troubling material—scenes of physical, emotional, or sexual violence. What
might such content accomplish for those who choose to read (and write) it,
and when might it cause harm? Why do readers sometimes seek it out and
sometimes defend against it, and what does this suggest about its role in
fiction?
Others have explored the role of violence in literature, including Kathryn
Hume in her book Aggressive Fictions and Maggie Nelson in The Art of Cruelty.4
Both Hume and Nelson examine an array of texts and other art works that
seem created to shock or even repulse readers, works that “attack” readers,
Stinging or Soothing 17
a phrase Hume uses for texts that make “ordinarily competent readers
wish to stop reading” or “those who did read a book wish they did not.”5
But neither writer focuses on readers who seek out violent texts or want to
keep reading them, which would indicate that a potentially troubling text
does something a reader desires or feels is worthwhile. Perhaps because

of this omission, both Hume and Nelson offer merely tenuous conclusions
about what violent content accomplishes for readers. In interactive online
fanfiction communities, however, the discussions and reader feedback
make visible how fan-created works containing violent content affect
their readers, offering clues about what such content might accomplish.
Among these reader-writers, violent content is at times both sought out
and discussed, making fanfiction—regardless of its lack of perceived artistic
merit—an instructive source for an examination of the role of violence in
fiction.
In bringing together trigger-warning demands and fanfiction to gain
an understanding of what violent, troubling content accomplishes for
readers—when it might hurt or when it might help—I am doing what Toril
Moi calls, “[t]hinking through [e]xamples.”6 While most theoretical work
begins by establishing definitions of terms, Moi, informed by ordinary
language philosophy, advocates instead that one “focus on a specific
problem that troubles or confuses [one] . . . by looking at some examples.”7
In this formulation, according to Moi, “The work of theory would be an
effort to reach clarity—to find a clear view—of that problem,” in a way that
“never alienates us from concrete cases and actual experience” but “requires
the particular case.”8 The two examples of readers’ engagement that are
my focus here are each what Moi would call “an exemplary case: a case
that is good to think with. . . . [I]t will illuminate other cases.”9 Examining
these two “exemplary” cases—trigger-warning demands and fanfiction’s
incorporation of potentially triggering material—reveals a conception of
fiction in which violent content is central for its capacity to produce powerful,
personal effects in readers—either causing pain or being marshaled for
some desirable ends, either hurting or helping—potential outcomes that are
obscured by the academic privileging of reading at a critical distance.
In this essay, after a brief overview of fanfiction as a current phenomenon,
I will focus on the role of violence in the “hurt–comfort” trope often used
in a predominant genre of fanfiction known as “slash,” but this requires
examining the defining feature of slash: the romantic pairing of ostensibly
straight male characters. Others, academics as well as fans themselves,
have sought to explain the popularity of male/male pairing in fanfiction.
However, a condensed exploration of this issue, drawn from the extensive
body of scholarship in fanfiction studies, will prove informative for this
inquiry into readers’ engagement with violence in fiction. I will then return
to the matter of trigger warnings and the potential for hurt.
18 Bruns
Fanfiction, Intimacy, and Violence

Fanfiction exploded in popularity with the rise of the internet, leading Anne
Jamison to title her 2013 book on the subject Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking
Over the World. One of numerous websites devoted to fanfiction and one of
the largest, Archive of Our Own, as of early 2021, hosts over three million

users who have produced 7.2 million individual works in 42,000 fandoms.10
That the phenomenon is worldwide is evident in the site’s support for fan
works in seventy languages. Certain texts (or “media products”) inspire
much more fanfiction than others: Harry Potter, for instance, Marvel
Comics, the television shows Supernatural, and the BBC’s Sherlock. One can
find hundreds of thousands of works of fanfiction, or fics, online for each
of these texts. What prompts fic writers to choose some texts over others?
Henry Jenkins, an early “aca-fan” or academic who is also a fan and active
in fan communities, says that certain “media products . . . seem to hold
special potential as vehicles for expressing the fans’ pre-existing social
commitments and cultural interests.”11 While Jenkins points to a “degree
of compatibility” or “affinity” between text and fan as motivator for fic
writing,12 Ika Willis, another aca-fan, implicates the way certain texts draw
out but then disappoint a reader’s desires. She considers fanfiction to be
“the negotiation of painful gaps” in the process of reading, in her words,
“between the desiring subjectivity of the reader and the ability of the text to
sustain that subjectivity and those desires.”13 Certain texts that are culturally
sanctioned because commercially produced seem to evoke readers’ desires
but then leave them unfulfilled, so readers rework those texts to make space
for themselves and their desires.
Judging by the types and quantities of fanfiction produced, many of
those desires find their expression in sex between men. Of the more than
seven million works on Archive of Our Own, almost half are labeled m/m
(male/male), or “slash” as it is known in fanfiction communities. In slash
fanfiction, fans write and share online stories in which the ostensibly het-
erosexual male characters from their favorite book or television series fall
in love with each other and often have sex. The consensus among fans and
scholars alike is that slash, like most fanfiction, is written largely by women
or, in Anne Jamison’s words, “if not by women, then by people who are will-
ing to be (mis)taken for women.”14 The first such pairing was Kirk/Spock in
fan-written works of the early 1970s, shared in homemade zines. The “slash”
between their names eventually became the moniker by which the genre
is known. Other pairings include Holmes/Watson, Harry/Draco, and even
former One Direction bandmates Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson. In another
indication of its popularity, results of a 2012 survey of readers of One Direc-
tion fanfiction revealed that 98 percent of them read slash compared to only
15 percent who said they read het or heterosexual fiction.15 Although slash
is only one of many types of fanfiction, an examination of this genre—why

male/male pairing is so popular, as well as the role played by the violent
material that some slash includes—can yield insight into what violence in
fiction accomplishes for readers.
So why are some women so invested in creating and consuming

romantic, often sexually explicit stories that do not include women in the
romantic pair? Some of the first aca-fans answered this question by claiming
that writing male/male romances allows women to escape and subvert the
limitations of patriarchal society on women and women characters.16 Kirk/
Spock fanfiction circumvents constraints on women’s imaginative space by
portraying what Joanna Russ describes as “a love that is entirely free of the
culture’s whole discourse of gender and sex roles.”17 While sexual agency
and universe-saving occupations still remain predominantly the domain of
male characters, the current generation of young women have available an
increasing number of women heroes and superheroes who choose when,
how, and with whom to enjoy their own sexuality. And yet, judging by
its continued prevalence on Archive of Our Own, the popularity of slash
remains.
While it escapes patriarchal gender roles, much slash fanfiction also
emphasizes intimacy. Patricia Frazier Lamb and Diana L. Veith acknowledge
the role of intimacy in early Kirk/Spock stories: “[T]he consistent theme of
K/S is love: a psychological, emotional, and physical intimacy that includes
passionate sharing of sexuality and a giving of self.”18 Twenty years later,
Elizabeth Woledge coins a term for this as a genre—“intimatopia,”—though
she acknowledges that the world of slash is too diverse to fall uniformly
under this classification.19 In the words of one fan, “K/S has not been, and
never will be, about the sex. It is the intimacy of the sex they share that keeps
us [fans] all together.”20
In some slash fanfiction, including some of the earliest Kirk/Spock
stories, intimacy—both emotional and sexual—is precipitated by physical
violence. This trope, known as hurt-comfort, involves one member of a
pairing being subject to violent injury, requiring comfort and care from
the other, and often making the other aware of the depth of his feelings
for the injured partner and leading to sexual expression. As Woledge says,
“Hurt-comfort provides a plausible way for any author to depict increasing
closeness between two men, because when the hero is hurt, he is at his most
vulnerable.”21 But the violence depicted can sometimes be extreme. Author
and fan Cynthia Jenkins says, “Hurt/comfort stories often contain enough
gore to send shivers down the back of activists concerned with the conflation
of sex and violence.”22 However, she explains that the hurt is not itself erotic.
Instead, she writes, “It is as if the vulnerability of the physical body is being
used symbolically to illustrate the vulnerability of the emotional makeup of
men. The breakdown of the physical body leads to a breakdown of personal
20 Bruns
barriers, of emotional defenses. And this (in slash) leads to a breakdown of

physical barriers and to sex.”23 The violence is used as a mechanism to create
vulnerability, and the greater the vulnerability, the greater the intimacy it
makes possible.
Portions of a work of fanfiction inspired by the BBC’s television show

Sherlock illustrate both the hurt-comfort trope and the emphasis on intimacy
in slash. “All the Best and Brightest Creatures,” a thirty-three-chapter
work whose author, Katie Forsythe, uses the penname wordstrings, has
received 280,000 hits and over 5,000 comments, at this writing. Its central
characters, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, bear most of the same traits
as their television versions, but with the addition of a desperate love for
each other. Both characters realize the intensity of Sherlock’s love for John
in a scene where it appears John may have been killed in a fall, a version
of a hurt-comfort scenario. In this instance, John is the one physically hurt
and, initially at least, cared for by Sherlock; but Sherlock is so panicked at
the momentary thought that John has been killed that the hurt-comfort roles
are reversed, and John becomes the caregiver for an emotionally undone
Sherlock. Sherlock’s terror when he thinks he might have lost his friend
shocks him, as he realizes the depth of his love for John.
The remaining chapters of the story include vivid descriptions of what
becomes an intense sexual relationship between these two. However,
wordstrings shows unquestionably that it is the intimacy between them that
matters most by means of a monologue of John’s. Late in the story, John is
injured and Sherlock near death after an extended episode of torture (a scene
in which this reader at least found the emotional intensity of the dialogue
between John and Sherlock more affecting even than Moriarty’s use of a
bear trap and a nail gun on his victims). After both have been rescued, John
sits by Sherlock’s hospital bed and says to his comatose lover,
I used to fantasize about having . . . just somebody for the little things.

Not sex, that was sorted, but falling asleep in the passenger seat while
a person I cared about drove to the seaside. Staying over. . . . Knowing
someone well enough to fight over the telly. . . .
[Y]ou might have thought you were the one starved for intimacy,
never having had it, but I’m here to tell you that I had, and that
nothing compares to you. Nothing. Do you remember when you
snapped at me for using up my mobile data because it meant you
couldn’t download a list of significant eras in Chinese pottery, and
this after you’d pickpocketed my phone? That’s what I wanted with
you. It was madness. I still do want it, every cracked moment. And
I never told you, never explained that it was me all along who was
desperate.24
This desperate longing for intimacy that John expresses and the terrifying
vulnerability Sherlock feels when he thinks John might have died find
their fulfillment in the passionate, enduring love between them, making

this long piece of fanfiction a prime instance of intimatopia. The physical
and emotional suffering and fear of loss that each experiences, caused by
scenes of extreme violence, expose their vulnerabilities and deepen the bond
between them, which is the core of the story.

This heightening of vulnerability through violence, thereby intensifying
emotional intimacy, might explain the overwhelming popularity of
male/male pairings in fanfiction. The sociocultural prohibition against
demonstrations of weakness in men increases the barriers to such displays,
and the history of homophobia also typically increases the apparent resistance
between straight men to expressions of not only sexual attraction but many
forms of affection as well. The desperation created by both the scene and
the condition of violent physical injury pushes through typical resistance to
emotional vulnerability and intimacy. Henry Jenkins recognizes the appeal
of such scenes: “[T]he barriers between men must be intensified to increase
the drama of their shattering; the introduction of sexual taboos requires
greater trust and intimacy between the men before they can be overcome.”25
If emotional intimacy is ultimately the center of much slash, the vulnerability
and even desperation required for two straight men to proclaim their love
for one another and express that love sexually will be much greater than the
vulnerability required for such expressions between a heterosexual pair or
two gay men or lesbians. Perhaps, then, one reason that the (mostly) women
who write slash focus on straight male pairs is to intensify and heighten
the emotional power of their portrayals of vulnerability and the intimacy
it makes possible. If so, slash’s popularity may not only be influenced by
the gender norms that limit women’s agency but also by those that prohibit
men’s vulnerability. Emotional intimacy and the vulnerability that produces
it increase when the barriers to it are greater, and pairing straight male
characters is a way to exaggerate those barriers. Thus, this intimacy at the
heart of much slash fanfiction is intensified by the heightened barriers to it
presented by ostensibly straight male characters who are rendered radically
vulnerable through violence in order that intimacy between them be fully
and powerfully realized.
But not all slash emphasizes intimacy. In her analysis of a particular
genre of slash, literary scholar Laura Campillo Arnaiz challenges the
generalization that intimacy is what readers and writers of slash value
most. In this genre, writers impose on characters features of animal mating
practices, specifically the hierarchical roles seen in some primates and
canines that have been labeled alpha, beta, and omega, so the genre is
known as A/B/O or Omegaverse. Alphas in this fanfiction genre are the
masters—not usually by might as in some species but by biology—betas
are their assistants, and omegas lack all social status but serve the others
primarily for sex and breeding. These roles cannot be interchanged, making
22 Bruns
inequality and oppression the foundation of these fictional worlds. Some of

these stories, according to Arnaiz, contain especially violent content. Among
fan works focused on the television show Hannibal, Arnaiz writes, “[I]t was
very easy to find two extremely dark and extremely popular works which
feature an unequal, toxic and abusive relationship between its characters;

stories full of explicit, non-consensual kinky sex depicting mistreatment,
intimate partner violence and a satisfying ‘happy’ ending to the delight of
many readers.”26 In these “dark” Omegaverse stories, the omega character
is “condemned by his biology to a permanent state of helplessness,” having
“no control over himself, his heats or his behavior” and needing “a superior
alpha to guide his life.”27 Those “happy” endings consist of one partner, the
omega, content to submit himself fully to the other, his alpha or master, in
a form of biologically determined subservience. In place of intimacy and
mutuality, the enduring relationship at the end of these stories is made
secure by the absolute submission of one character and the absolute power
of the other.
Why would women take pleasure in writing and reading stories that
mimic in such exaggerated form the discrimination and maltreatment
that women still suffer in patriarchal society? Arnaiz proposes an answer,
informed by the work of psychotherapist and author Stanley Siegel: “[B]y
inviting and experiencing these eroticized feelings of submission, discipline
or humiliation as adults, as actively producing and consuming fans we
paradoxically gain control over them, turning painful memories and fright-
ening concerns into pleasurable experience in an unconscious attempt to
minimize their pain.”28 Creating and consuming these dark stories, Arnaiz
says, “[offer] the possibility of engaging with sexual fantasies to gain mas-
tery over a host of deep-rooted negative feelings. These feelings of help-
lessness, humiliation, worthlessness and unlovability.”29 Experiences that in
real life would be terrifying and destructive of selfhood are instead fully
controlled and manipulated by the fan-writer and transformed into sexual
fantasy. Arnaiz’s analysis of Omegaverse fanfiction suggests that, for some
fic writers and readers, the violence of some stories is not merely a technique
to intensify intimacy between ostensibly straight male characters by produc-
ing vulnerability. In these works, the intimacy is omitted, but it is the vulner-
ability itself that is exaggerated and seems essential, on one hand, and the
absolute power and control on the other.
One of the early scholars to study fanfiction communities, Camille
Bacon-Smith, offers evidence that confirms a crucial, even therapeutic
role for violence and vulnerability in fanfiction in her ethnographic study
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth.30 She
was intrigued by the hurt-comfort trope and asked fan-writers she met what
was going on in their lives when they wrote particular hurt-comfort stories.
She says, “In all cases when I asked about specific fictional stories I received
descriptions of real psychic pain.”31 For example, “One woman, who wrote
about a man losing his young son to leukemia, explained that she was
working out her feelings about an adult daughter’s drug addiction.” 32 In
another case, it seems that the comfort part of the hurt-comfort scenario was
unnecessary. That particular story ends with both protagonists “debilitated

almost beyond recognition” and “only the glimmer of hope that they are still
alive, together again. . . . Writing the story helped that author struggle with
suicidal depression. She told me that she had originally planned to write the
comfort part as a sequel but found that when her depression lifted she could
not go back to the story again.”33 It is unknown whether writing this story of
violence and suffering indeed contributed to lifting its author’s depression,
but it apparently helped her at least deal with the depression, and it clearly
was the only portion she was motivated to finish. This hurt-comfort story
without the comfort, and the dark Omegaverse stories that end in total and
enduring subservience suggest that what makes hurt/comfort slash stories
appealing and even therapeutic for fan-writers and readers is not entirely
dependent on idealized happy endings but on the portrayals of pain and
vulnerability.
In most hurt-comfort stories, however, the comfort and the intimacy
through which it comes do play a crucial role, one linked to the needs of
their writers and readers. In their 2012 book Fandom at the Crossroads, aca-
fans Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis connect what fanfiction stories
portray with the conditions and needs of their writers and readers. Focusing
specifically on the fandom for the television show Supernatural, Larsen and
Zubernis posit an instrumental relationship between story and author, as
they describe a prototypical plot arc in terms of this show’s fanfiction:
Supernatural’s Dean Winchester is the near-perfect embodiment of

a self fragmented by trauma, emotionally repressed and isolated,
expecting rejection and abandonment. The character of his brother Sam
as the only one he can trust or allow himself to love often represents
in fanfiction the longed-for supportive figure, and the author’s own
emerging resilient self, with the narrative gradually moving the two
toward reconnection and restored intimacy.34
They add, “The frequent use of hurt/comfort scenarios can be the beginning
of the writer’s acknowledgement of her own needs. Here the characters
occupy both sides of the writer’s longing—the need to express pain and the
capacity to receive comfort and consolation . . . it is the restored intimacy, the
sense of connection and completion, which conveys the rewritten narrative.”35
Writing and reading depictions of physical and emotional pain serve to
express or externalize distressing inner states while also exhibiting mastery
over them. Once expressed, writers can bring those narratives to a satisfying
resolution, imagining and articulating a “resilient self” and rewriting what
24 Bruns
may be the author’s own personal inner narrative. It is worth noting, based
on these examples, that the correspondence need not be literal between the
fictional circumstances producing those debilitating states and their real-
world counterparts. The rewritten narrative that matters is one of emotional
resonance, not specific events, and it usually features two contrasting states:

expression of pain or desperation and comfort or resolution, “Suffering and
Solace,” as Bacon-Smith titles her chapter on hurt/comfort fanfiction.36 (In
dark Omegaverse stories, however, the pain and vulnerability are resolved
in the security of one character’s total submission and the other’s absolute
control.)
The perspective of Katie Forsythe—the Sherlock fic writer who uses the
penname wordstrings—about the works she writes, as well as the responses
her work has received, confirms such a deeply personal use. In an interview
by Anne Jamison, Forsythe explains why she will never try to publish her
work by traditional means:
Because the stories aren’t for readers, they’re for me and my noisy,
noisy head, and then when people happen to read them and enjoy
them or even come away feeling a bit better, that’s a completely
unexpected bonus. . . . Sometimes I need to write these mad tales in
order to get rid of all the muck in my chest, and I’d never dream of
charging anyone money for the results. . . .
Writing someone who’s still madder than I am on the continuum,
really madder by far, seems to be good for my mental health. Which
is why I write them this way. They are little catharses wrapped in a
bow.37
Forsythe writes violent slash, focused on a mentally unstable Sherlock
Holmes and his desperate and entirely mutual love for John Watson, as a
form of catharsis for herself, to deal with what she calls her “noisy, noisy
head” or “the muck” in her chest. She considers her fic writing to be a way
to cope with her life, a way to ease, soothe, or manage her own inner turmoil
and distress.
Forsythe’s readers appear to use her fics similarly. Comments her readers
posted on her fic are so deeply personal they became troubling for her. She
says,
very kind people were sharing with me all sorts of aspects of their
own experience with mental health problems, addiction, and abuse,
and here I was trying to write the crazies out of my head for myself,
and the whole process turned into another animal entirely. I’ve had
multiple people inform me that I’ve stopped them from suicide.38
Eventually, Forsythe removed a series she had written from its LiveJournal site
in order to delete the entire body of comments because “the huge personal
response to her stories and characters had become too much for her.”39 In
an open letter posted on Archive of Our Own, Forsythe, as wordstrings,

directly addressed sometimes-demanding fic readers who “want more of
that one fic that will make you feel better”:
[W]hat you need to feel is not ever ever ever ever guilty for wanting
stories because all I want right now is stories and it hurts how much I

want stories and how much I want to give you mine and can’t and I’m
left with begging other people for theirs when in the end we all love
each other so why not stick to that and adore each other’s stories.40
What is clear in these remarks is that these writers and readers use potentially
troubling fiction, in this case hurt-comfort slash fic, to feel better, a phrase
that seems trite until placed in the context of a potential suicide when it
takes on the weight of life or death.
Forsythe uses the term “catharsis” to describe the function of the violent
slash fic she writes. A theory of catharsis developed by sociologist Thomas
J. Scheff, whose work focuses on emotions, elucidates this use of fanfiction.
According to Scheff, catharsis is the process of discharging otherwise-
repressed distressing emotion, bringing a sense of relief and feelings of
well-being.41 It is produced by reliving the distressing emotion at what he
calls “optimal distance” where “the individual is both participant in, and
observer of, his or her own distress.”42 Unbearable distress, Scheff claims, is
repressed, but one can bear it and relive it “in a context in which the person
knows that the pain can be escaped should it become overwhelming.”43
Recalling past distress, however, does not require rehearsing the literal
situation that produced the troubling emotion. Scheff claims that “verbal
recall” of the distressing events is not just unnecessary but is “ineffective
because it is over-distanced,” in that the individual is too much an observer
of the past scene. On the other hand, “exact reoccurrence of the trauma”
would be underdistanced, making the individual too much a participant
to allow the troubling emotion to be discharged.44 Thus, two elements are
necessary for catharsis to occur: that a person re-experience the emotional
but not literal content of a past traumatic event and, in undergoing that
emotional state, the person has full awareness that she is safely in control of
the experience. Writing an imaginative piece of fanfiction in which familiar,
heroic, relatively emotionless characters are undone by violence can be means
to recreate, re-experience, and express one’s own distressing emotional state
while also controlling the experience so that it is no longer overwhelming.
Finding such a story written by someone else can have a similarly powerful
therapeutic effect, to which Katie Forsythe and her readers attest.
So, fanfic authors rework existing fictions, intensifying their emotional
content. The book or TV series resonates—evokes a desire or an emotional
state—but incompletely, so then the fan rewrites the fiction, heightening
that emotion as a way to manipulate her own inner state, externalizing
26 Bruns
it, gaining distance from it, taking mastery over it. Typically masculine
characters who present strength and almost emotionless self-control in
the source material are undone by physical and emotional trauma, are left
defenseless, desperate, radically vulnerable, “wrecked” in the term often
used in the Sherlock fanfiction I referenced; and that terrifying emotional

state of near disintegration is resolved in equally radical emotional
security as the character is embraced in his partner’s intense, exclusive,
and unending love—or possession, in the case of those dark Omegaverse
stories.
This examination of slash fanfiction reveals an especially powerful and
personal use of violence in fiction. Whether we find them, create them,
or adapt them from others’ creations, stories like these can represent and
externalize the troubling emotional states that threaten to overwhelm us,
enabling us to manipulate those moods and anxieties and gain mastery
over them. Fanfiction thus serves as an especially vivid instance of the
relationship between pain and imagination formulated by Elaine Scarry:
“[P]ain only becomes an intentional state once it is brought into relation
with the objectifying power of the imagination: through that relation, pain
will be transformed from a wholly passive and helpless occurrence into a
self-modifying and, when most successful, self-eliminating one.”45 Far from
a fringe practice, fanfiction writing and reading appear, in light of Scarry’s
assertion, to be a recent iteration of an essential human process by which
one’s imagination transforms a state of pain into an object that can be
manipulated. The imagination, according to Scarry, “is simply, centrally, and
indefatigably at work on behalf of sentience, eliminating its aversiveness
and extending its acuity” and in forms that are “abundant, extravagantly
variable, and startlingly unexpected,”46 as unexpected perhaps as violent
stories of a desperate, erotic love between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson
that ease the pain Forsythe and her many readers experience.
Central in this unquestionably personal use of fiction to manage and
gain mastery over potentially overwhelming anxieties and emotions is the
troubling material itself, depictions of physical and emotional trauma and
vulnerability that capture, embody, and externalize an inner state and that
are precisely calibrated to match the intensity of that state and position the
reader at an “optimal distance.” That calibration must fit the individual’s
condition. Too much is unbearable. Too little is ineffective. Apparent in
these instances is that realistic fiction may fail to match the magnitude of
the anxieties being addressed. Powerful inner states call for heightened
drama, exaggerated affect, in which it is the emotional rather than literal
content of the story that matters. So, fanfiction writers adapt from existing
fictional worlds to fit their own need, and those who are especially skilled
at both the crafting and the calibration of such stories, like Forsythe, gain a
following.
Trigger Warnings and When Fiction Hurts

When the particular fit matters so much between a reader’s inner state and
the possibly troubling scenes that a work of fanfiction depicts, then readers’
choice of text is crucial, and her opportunity to make informed choices
may depend on trigger warnings and other content tags. Understandably

then, warnings have long been part of fanfiction communities. Although
the myriad warnings and tags in fanfiction can devolve into an attempt
to eliminate all that is undesirable in what one takes in, readers’ use of
fanfiction is indeed precarious because of the violent material it often
contains. The proximity of the distressing content, one catalyst for this
potential benefit of fic, to the negative emotion that already threatens the
individual means that using fiction to get what one “needs” is inevitably
risky. Warnings can aid readers in choosing what might help them manage
otherwise overwhelming anxiety, anger, or despair. Most fanfiction sites
currently leave warnings, ratings, and content tags to the discretion of the
writers, which means readers themselves have the choice of whether to read
works whose warnings outline their content or those that do little to shape
readers’ expectations.
In an educational context, instead of readers choosing what to read
according to their own pleasure, a teacher chooses material for the purpose
of their learning. So how does the use of warnings in fanfiction communities
relate to the context of college and university classes where students have
asked for them? In an essay on this question, Alexis Lothian locates an
apparent incommensurability between the two contexts:
In contrast to academics’ predominant concerns with surveillance,

academic freedom, and neoliberal commodification of the self,
fans’ arguments over triggers and warnings have tended to center
questions of pleasure, access, and art, working toward the creation of
counterpublic spaces online and offline that attend to the complexities
of affect and the interdependence of structural violence, pleasure, and
critique.47
Running through these contrasting emphases is that fans and academics
both seek a space protected from impingement. While fans seek a protected
space for participants, academics seek a protected space for subjects of
study. When fans step into the role of students, these contrasting concerns,
as Jennifer Malkowski observes, “have pitted students against professors,
falsely opposing the former group’s desire for self-protection from
disturbing course content against the latter group’s ability to teach whatever
is most educational” and resulting in what is assumed to be “a zero-sum
game, wherein professors ‘lose’ by considering student well-being when
choosing course materials or how to present them.”48 But this opposition is
not inevitable.
28 Bruns
Rather than avoiding or rejecting disturbing content, students’ trigger-

warning demands seem more about acknowledgment—seeking the
recognition, primarily from faculty, that some texts can potentially hurt some
students. Angela Shaw-Thornburg, an English professor, makes a personal
case for such acknowledgment. She recounts the difficulty she suffered in

graduate-school reading an assigned memoir of a Victorian man and his
sexual exploits, and she describes the letter she left for her professor about it:
When I stuff my seminar paper under my professor’s door weeks after

it is due, I attach a letter explaining that the narrator of the sexual
history shares an uncanny resemblance to the person who raped me
when I was 12, and that although I know the intellectual difference
between fact and fiction, between my story and the strangely
complementary story of this memoirist, I found myself so damaged
by the reading that I lost my capacity to write for a while. I never hear
back from her, but I do well in the class. It takes me months to right
my ship.49
As a professor now herself in a field that proclaims the power of words,

Shaw-Thornburg accuses those who decry the demands for trigger warnings
of arrogance and lack of compassion. She concludes her essay with this
challenge to those in her profession: “To blithely introduce powerful,
rousing images of violence into your classroom, to tell your students that
these words and images are worthy of thought and study, and then to deny
that such stuff might at least bruise those students is the worst kind of
hypocrisy for those whose stock in trade is the word.”50 She is demanding
an awareness from faculty that some texts will potentially inflict pain on
some readers.
One of the student-authored statements calling for trigger warnings
in college contexts articulates the need in terms not of avoidance but of
acknowledgment and making space. The student-authors of an op-ed
in Columbia University’s newspaper ask for trigger warnings as well as
training for faculty in strategies to handle conflicts in classrooms, ultimately
so that “professors will be able to aid in the inclusion of student voices
which presently feel silenced.”51 These students’ concern is not that the
rape survivor be excused from reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses but that
the professor’s focus on “the beauty of the language and the splendor of
the imagery” in the text not be the only perspective allowed and that the
difficulty the student-survivor had with the many scenes of rape in that text
not be “dismissed” and “ignored” by the professor.52 This dominance of an
authority’s view to the exclusion of alternative perspectives in the study
and teaching of literature is a pattern that Bogdan, Cunningham, and Davis
call the “centripetal fallacy,” borrowing Northrop Frye’s term but using
it to mean when one dominant viewpoint pulls all others into itself. This
tendency is both recognized and refused “by educated women, minorities,

and young people whose life experience, because it is different, resonates
with literature and the arts in a manner unlike that of their teachers.”53 Like
trigger-warning demands, this refusal to read in the manner of a dominant
view need not be seen as a resistance to knowing but, Deanne Bogdan claims,

as a “performative utterance”54 based in a “poetics of need” that “builds a
literary theory by taking literature personally and politically.”55 And that is
what this study of trigger-warning demands and fanfiction has attempted as
well, to build a literary theory drawn from the personal need that is evident
in both these exemplary cases of readers’ engagement with fiction.
Central to the use of violence in fiction is its capacity both to sting and to
soothe. A violent story can reawaken a terror or ease it. Whether it will hurt
or help depends on the reader’s ability to enter into the troubling material
while also maintaining a sense of her own power to escape the distressing
emotion it may evoke. But this may be impossible to anticipate, challenging
one’s capacity even to protect oneself. As Maggie Nelson acknowledges
regarding depictions of cruelty, “Of course one does not always know, nor
does one’s body always know, when to venture forth, and when to turn away.
When to abide, when to refuse; when to accept, when to intervene.”56 If the
choice to read or not to read is difficult to make for oneself, then teachers’
attempts to decide what content could be triggering may be futile. Perhaps it
is enough to acknowledge that particular texts may affect particular readers
in unanticipated ways. Then attending to readers’ accounts of those textual
encounters that sting or soothe makes space for students while it also builds
a personal and political “poetics of need,” which can articulate the potential
powerful outcomes produced by the engagement between texts and readers.
Trigger-warning demands and fanfiction both demonstrate the limitations
of the academic predilection for the study of texts abstracted from their use
by and effects on readers. Scarry implicitly criticizes this practice when she
claims that attention cannot stop with a created object like a poem because
it is only “a fulcrum or lever” that, once created, reciprocates back and
“remakes the makers.” She adds, “[T]he poet is working not to make the
artifact (which is just the midpoint in the total action), but to remake human
sentience.”57 This potential remaking of felt experience deserves attention
in the study and teaching of literature and other arts, along with the texts
that produce the effects. For scholars, teachers, and students of literature,
this means that our subject of study includes not only literary texts
themselves and what critics have written about them but also what readers
say happened when they read them. While trigger warnings themselves
may be futile since it seems neither beneficial nor possible to warn for all
potential triggers, faculty can still treat a classroom as protected space for
students as well as subjects of study, where students’ alternative ways of
reading—personal, affective, resistant—not only are allowed but contribute,
30 Bruns
not supplanting academic critique but informing it as they are also informed
by it. The painful, personal responses of readers, for which trigger-warning
demands seek acknowledgment, are not signs of weakness or naïvete but
are an essential part of what fiction reading does.
When readers maintain a measure of agency over a text, when they can

manage their engagement with it and are allowed their own response to
it, then a narrative depiction of violence can serve as a vital instrument in
their processing and mastery of their own troubling inner states, whether
the depictions are Homer’s, Dostoyevsky’s, J. K. Rowling’s, or wordstrings’.
However, when literary education ignores and excludes this capacity of
fiction reading, some students will remain disengaged in assigned texts
as their only means of self-protection, and the astonishing investments of
time and creative energies on exhibit in online fan communities will remain
entirely cut off from what students do in schools and colleges with texts.
Trigger-warning demands and fanfiction both serve as reminders that
fiction—whether “high” or “low,” sophisticated or popular—can meet a
human need sufficient to elicit these words from Katie Forsythe, speaking
for and to the writer-readers in her fic community: “[I]t hurts how much I
want stories.” Reorienting our attention to texts in the actuality of their use,
even their use in the present of our classrooms, renews their relevance to
human life and society.
Notes
1. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind,”
The Atlantic, September 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive
/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ (accessed January 28,
2021).
2. Alison Kafer, “Un/Safe Disclosures,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability
Studies 10, no. 1 (2016): 1–21.
3. Benjamin W. Bellet, Payton J. Jones, and Richard J. McNally, “Trigger Warning:
Empirical Evidence Ahead,” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental
Psychiatry 61 (July 2018): 134–41; Mevagh Sanson, Deryn Strange, and Maryanne
Garry, “Trigger Warnings Are Trivially Helpful at Reducing Negative Affect,
Intrusive Thoughts, and Avoidance,” Clinical Psychological Science 7, no. 4 (2019):
778–93.
4. Kathryn Hume, Aggressive Fictions: Reading the Contemporary American Novel
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty:
A Reckoning (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).
5. Hume, Aggressive, 8.
6. Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and
Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 88.
7. Moi, Revolution, 108–9.
8. Moi, Revolution, 109.
9. Moi, Revolution, 92.
10. Archive of Our Own (Organization for Transformative Works), https://
archiveofourown.org (accessed January 29, 2021).
11. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 34.
12. Jenkins, Textual, 34.
13. Ika Willis, “Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue)
at Hogwarts,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed.
Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 155.
14. Anne Jamison, ed., Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas: Smart Pop,

2013), 18.
15. V. Arrow, “Real Person(a) Fiction,” in Jamison, ed., Fic, 326.
16. Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, “Romantic Myth, Transcendence, and
Star Trek Zines,” in Erotic Universe, ed. Donald Palumbo (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1986), 235–55; Joanna Russ, “Pornography by Women for Women, with
Love,” in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts, ed. Joanna Russ
(Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1985), 79–99.
17. Russ, “Pornography,” 89.
18. Lamb and Veith, “Romantic Myth,” 238.
19. Elizabeth Woledge, “Intimatopia,” in Hellekson and Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and
Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, 99.
20. Quoted in Woledge, “Intimatopia,” 105.
21. Woledge, “Intimatopia,” 110.
22. Quoted in Shoshanna Green, Cynthia Jenkins, and Henry Jenkins, “Normal
Female Interest in Men Bonking,” in Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and
Identity, ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press,
1998), 33.
23. Quoted in Green, Jenkins, and Jenkins, “Normal,” 33.
24. wordstrings, “All the Best and Brightest Creatures,” Archive of Our Own, 2016,
chap. 31, http://archiveofourown.org/works/582059?view_full_work=true
(accessed January 28, 2021).
25. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 205.
26. Laura Campillo Arnaiz, “When the Omega Empath Met the Alpha Doctor: An
Analysis of the Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics in the Hannibal Fandom,” in The
Darker Side of Slash Fan Fiction, ed. Ashton Spacey (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2018), 134.
27. Arnaiz, “When the Omega,” 124.
30. Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of
Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
31. Bacon-Smith, Enterprising, 268.
34. Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis, Fandom at the Crossroads: Celebration, Shame
and Fan/Producer Relationships (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars,
2012), 109.
35. Larsen and Zubernis, Fandom, 110.
36. Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women, chap. 255.
37. Katie Forsythe, “The Slasher Who Is Not One (An Interview with Katie Forsythe
and wordstrings),” in Jamison, ed., Fic, 68, 69.
38. Forsythe, “The Slasher,” 67.
39. Jamison, Fic, 64.
40. wordstrings, “An Open Letter about Fic Writers to Fic Readers,” Archive of Our
Own, 2014, http://archiveofourown.org/works/2195070 (accessed January 29,
2021).
41. Thomas J. Scheff, Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama (1979; [Lincoln, NE]:
backinprint.com, 2001), 63.
32 Bruns
42. Scheff, Catharsis, 64.

45. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 164.
46. Scarry, The Body, 306.
47. Alexis Lothian, “Choose Not to Warn: Trigger Warnings and Content Notes from

Fan Culture to Feminist Pedagogy,” Feminist Studies 42, no. 3 (2016): 744–45.
48. Jennifer Malkowski, “The Bridge and Unteachable Films,” in Unwatchable, ed.
Nicholas Baer et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 315.
49. Angela Shaw-Thornburg, “This Is a Trigger Warning,” The Chronicle of Higher
Education, June 16, 2014, https://www.chronicle.com/article/This-Is-a-Trigger
-Warning/147031/?cid=at&utm_medium=en&utm_source=at (accessed Janu-
ary 29, 2021).
50. Shaw-Thornburg, “This Is a Trigger Warning.”
51. Kai Johnson, Tanika Lynch, Elizabeth Monroe, and Tracey Wang, “Our Identities
Matter in Core Classrooms,” Columbia Spectator, April 30, 2015, http://columbia
spectator.com/opinion/2015/04/30/our-identities-matter-core-classrooms
52. Johnson et al., “Our Identities.”
53. Deanne Bogdan, James E. Cunningham, and Hilary E. Davis, “Reintegrating
Sensibility: Situated Knowledges and Embodied Readers,” New Literary History
31, no. 3 (2000): 490.
54. Deanne Bogdan, “Censorship, Identification, and the Poetics of Need,” in The
Right to Literacy, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James F. Slevin
(New York: MLA, 1990), 128.
55. Bogdan, “Censorship,” 135.
56. Nelson, Art, 118.
57. Scarry, The Body, 307.

Stinging or Soothing Trigger Warnings On Fanfiction

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Stinging or Soothing: Trigger Warnings,

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CRISTINA VISCHER BRUNS

Abstract. This essay examines two contrasting cases of readers

Cristina Vischer Bruns, associate professor of English at LaGuardia Community

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 55, No. 3, Fall 2021

affirmed trigger warnings as a way to facilitate access “to difficult material

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Fanfiction, Intimacy, and Violence

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is only one of many types of fanfiction, an examination of this genre—why

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barriers, of emotional defenses. And this (in slash) leads to a breakdown of

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I used to fantasize about having . . . just somebody for the little things.

their fulfillment in the passionate, enduring love between them, making

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inequality and oppression the foundation of these fictional worlds. Some of

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Supernatural’s Dean Winchester is the near-perfect embodiment of

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an open letter posted on Archive of Our Own, Forsythe, as wordstrings,

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Trigger Warnings and When Fiction Hurts

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In contrast to academics’ predominant concerns with surveillance,

Rather than avoiding or rejecting disturbing content, students’ trigger-

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When I stuff my seminar paper under my professor’s door weeks after

As a professor now herself in a field that proclaims the power of words,

tendency is both recognized and refused “by educated women, minorities,

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42. Scheff, Catharsis, 64.

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