Content Warnings, yay or nay?

I’m not an easily startled person. My day job, unfortunately, involves a lot of death and things that normal people would puke at, but I’m most certainly not immune to being affected by some of the more grotesque and disturbing things life has to offer.

I was having a conversation with my partner-in-crime the other night. I asked them about content warnings. It’s been something I’ve been having to wrestle with a great deal recently, with the advent of Ember’s release on the horizon. We had a movie on in the background, one that had popped up quite commonly on my YouTube feed, reviewed by content creators that typically cover the macabre and disturbing.

For the half an hour while we were cooking, and every moment I poked my head out to look at the TV, I was met mostly with bloody corpses and cars on fire… One instance a dead animal that had been shot repeatedly.

I sat down and stared at the screen. I hear my partner calling out to me, “Did the dog die?” And I’m like, “Yeah, but if it makes you feel any better it looks like a stuffed toy,”, and because the model had been so poorly made, it didn’t jostle me the way the topic usually would (“I Am Legend” upset me so much, by the way).

But it got me thinking… Ember deals with some pretty heavy stuff. More-so the further along in the series, but it definitely covers and explores themes that can be particularly upsetting for a lot of people.

I’ve been skimming through some more renowned authors and reviewers on their opinions on content warnings, my greatest gripe a fear of spoiling my books, but I think there’s a silent agreement in the self-publishing world that content warnings are a nice little heads up for the readers, so I’ve decided I’ll be including it in the beginning of Ember. Because the book is ‘technically’ lumped into the dark urban fantasy genre, it’s a bit darker and grittier than your typical urban fantasy and young/new adult titles, I thought originally people picking it up would expect some disturbing topics, but reading through it, I’ve sort of visualized that – if – it were made into a movie, or a series, it would certainly bear with it an R-rating without a doubt.

The only trouble with literature as a medium, is sometimes you’re too far in before you realize something awful is going to happen. You can’t exactly close your eyes and the book will read itself for you (unless it’s an Audible… I guess).

I remember when I was in my tween years, my mom refused to buy me Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, because she’d watched some pitch on prime-time television saying that the game caused kids to act violent because of its horribly offensive and violent themes and content. Obviously untrue, but knowing what I was getting myself into made me a little bit more aware of the things to expect.

Other mediums, such as movies, I suppose are harder to discern. Arthouse pieces like ‘Antichrist’, I guess no sort of warning can prepare you for Willem Da Foe’s friend being… well, er, I won’t say it out loud, but if anyone’s seen that film, then if you know, you know.

My greatest fear is that content that is meant to be disturbing, perhaps their effect can be muted if we have a heads up, if we know what’s coming, such as ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, didn’t affect me in any way because I knew what was going to happen, and I wonder if the film would have affected me differently if I’d gone into it blindly…

But not everyone is as cold-hearted and soulless as me. So I will be putting a content warning on my books.

I’d like to know your thoughts on the subject. I haven’t encountered many books where I’ve been explicitly warned of their content, even American Psycho… It was shrink-wrapped with an R-18 (You need to show ID to purchase this book) but nothing on the cover or inside alluded to the sort of things the book included… Not by a long shot. But I’m one of those awful people that enjoy being disturbed. I like things that keep me up at night, thinking about it… But I also don’t want anyone to walk away from reading my books, swearing to never want to read them again because it was too difficult to do so, or because I caught them off-guard in the worst way possible.