on warning at Vividcon

[arduinna]

So, like many people on all sides of this issue, I've been frustrated by the recent discussion on warnings at Vividcon. Part of it for me is because I look at the list of things people want specific trigger warnings for, and I think about Premieres, and all I can think is: "warn for ALL the vids?"

I keep seeing what seem to me to be assumptions that of course many (or at least several) vids will be marked "no warnings apply," while some vids will have specific warnings and some will have "choose not to warn," and the end result will be that people with triggers will be able to enjoy a large portion of the show. And that just doesn't match my memory of what Premieres is like.

So I popped in my VVC 2009 DVDs today, and got out a notebook. I put columns for everything asked for in thuviaptarth's post on the subject, which seems to be the baseline people are now talking about.

This is the relevant part of her post, with the specific triggers she wants people to warn for:

• Choose not to warn
  
• Common PTSD triggers
  
  
  
  • Explicit violence (assault, self-harm, suicide, gore, explicit medical procedures)
    
  • Sexual violence (rape, sexual assault, noncon, dubcon)
    
  • Sounds of gunshots
    
  
  
• Common physical triggers for migraine or epilepsy
  
  
  
  • Bright flash
    
  • Strobe lighting
    
  • Quick flashing microcuts
    
  • First-person "shaky" cam
    
  • Abrupt changes in sound volume
    
  
  
• No warnings apply
  

I checked off each PTSD and physical trigger for each vid as I watched the Premieres show, so I could get a feel for what sort of things actually show up, and just how safe the show could be if properly warned for.

There were 38 vids in the Premieres show, including the intro vid. (This is purely a collation of numbers; I'm not naming any vids.)


Vids with PTSD triggers

• Explicit violence: 30 vids


• Sexual violence: 4 vids


• Sounds of gunshot: 0

Vids with physical triggers

• Bright flash: 32 vids


• Strobe lighting: 27 vids


• Quick flashing microcuts: 20 vids


• First-person "shaky" cam: 5 vids (but see caveat below)


• Abrupt changes in sound volume: 28 vids

Vids with no triggers

• No warnings apply: 1 vid.

The breakdown

• 1 vid had no triggers at all that I could see or hear


• 37 vids had triggers, of which:
  
  
  
  • 30 vids had PTSD triggers, of which:
    
    
    
    • 1 vid had only PTSD triggers
      
    
    
  • 36 vids had physical triggers, of which:
    
    
    
    • 7 vids had only physical triggers
      
    
    
  • 29 vids had both PTSD and physical triggers
    
  
  
• 146 total trigger warnings on 38 total vids
  

So here are the caveats:

This is my personal take these vids. I don't have any of those triggers, so some things probably slipped right past me, particularly things like fast cuts (I honestly don't know how fast "quick flashing microcuts" need to be to count, here, and cutting in general gets faster every year).

Someone else going through and doing this will come up with different numbers, because different people judge things differently.

"Shaky cam" is under-represented in my numbers, I believe, because there was very little actual source shaky cam like someone running, and I was going with that as my baseline as that seems to be what's being asked for in the above list.

But there were several vids where it looked like the vidder shook the footage in an effect that I wasn't sure should count, so I didn't. There were also several vids where the vidder accidentally exported the file with the wrong field order, so some or all of the vid was jerky. So while technically I think I reported an accurate number of source-shaky-cam, or vidder-shaky-cam if it looked sufficiently like that type of shaky cam, assume anywhere from 5-10 more vids that include jerky footage that could be similarly triggery.

For "strobe lighting", I may have counted things other people wouldn't, as it's my understanding that the sort of strobes that affect people can vary wildly (color, intensity, speed, etc.), and I wanted to cover as wide a field as possible. For what it's worth, in most vids, any strobey light is of very short duration, a few seconds at most.

"Abrupt changes in sound volume" was really dicey, because the sound volume changes throughout Premieres; each vid has its own volume, and there's silence between each vid on the DVD, but during the con the audience applauds at varying intensity and for varying durations. If a given vid has a lower gain than the surrounding vids, the VJ generally tries to increase it once the vid starts so as to even things out, but that means that there's an abrupt change within that vid even if the song itself stays relatively even.

Anyone attending with audio-change issues should be aware that really, the sound levels go up and down all night, and there's almost always a brief silence before a vid starts; sometimes a song fades up slowly, but it's equally likely to come in very abruptly, very loudly.

For the sake of this, I went with what a vidder would be able to warn for, and assumed the switch from silence to sound at the opening to a vid didn't count, even if the credits were over silence so the audience would also be silent; nor the switch from sound to silence at the end of a vid, likewise even if it included credits that the audience would be quiet for. If those things count, basically every single vid is affected.


This vidshow felt like a standard VVC Premieres vidshow to me -- not overly bright or flashy (in fact a little less flashy than some years), not overly violent (again, less violent than some years).

The weighting also feels accurate/standard to me according to past Vividcons.

On the PTSD side, there's generally a lot of violence, but fighting and such is much more common than rape or noncon, and I don't think I've ever heard a gunshot in a vid (doesn't mean there hasn't been one, but usually the audio is a musical source) (ETA per this comment ETA 2 per this thread) gunshots are vanishingly rare, with possibly only one two vids in eight years having one.

On the physical trigger side, vids are made with lots of flashing/flickering lights and fast cuts (faster every year), and lots of vidders want a song that has audio "motion" to it, which often means changing audio levels. I'm really not surprised that only 2 vids out of all 38 had no physical triggers, given the nature of vids.

I was going to wrap up with a comment about my own take on all of this, and my take on warnings on vids, but I think I'll leave it at this. I think this is information that a lot of people are lacking, and that might help. So here it is.

Anon and openID commenting are on, but I reserve the right to turn off anon commenting if needed.

Comments

[par_avion]

I don't think I've ever heard a gunshot in a vid

Flying Home.

But it's very rare, I can't think of another.

[arduinna]

Wow, I'd completely forgotten that somehow. Thanks! I'll amend that bit.

[deathisyourart]

There is also Haldyon_shift's "Natural Blues" which showed at VVC in 2008.

[klia]

Thanks for doing that. The results don't surprise me, frankly.

Btw, here we go again over on astolat's latest post: ...I find it basically impossible to not read that as, "we have weighed it up, and we've decided vidder egos are more important than the accessibility needs of people with disabilities."

So, yep, no warnings = insensitive asshole.

[dragovianknight]

Yeah, it always comes back to that in every warning debate.

[anatsuno]

Yes. I've also already seen a lot of pro-warnings = politically correct whiners and/or childish pwds with no sense of personal responsibility - it seems to me there are idiots prone to make offensive statements on every possible 'side', wouldn't you say?

Arduinna, this is a very interesting post, thank you.

[arduinna]

It was really interesting to do, and really eye-opening, actually; the numbers were even higher than I expected them to be.

[morgandawn]

I like this. Context! Real life examples. Something we can use to frame discussion. Thank you.

[arduinna]

Thanks! It was really bugging me, not having any concrete context for the conversation.

[ratcreature]

This is interesting. I watch so few vids that I have no representative ideas about them, but I'm surprised that so many have extreme violence in them. I mean, I assumer "extreme" means worse than PG violence? (which I think of as the regular action movie kind)

[melina]

The original list Arduinna posted says "explicit" violence, which to me means any violence actually seen on screen (as opposed to violence which you infer from context but isn't seen). That would include PG-13 movie violence, such as Star Trek 2009 and Lord of the Rings-type fighting, since it includes "assault." Whacking someone with a sword or hitting them in the face, even if there's no blood, fits in this definition.

From my memory, the number of vids with "extreme" violence is fairly low.

[eatsscissors]

This is a very interesting post, thank you for making it. It seems, based upon this breakdown, that the best that the VVC mods could do would be to put forward a blanket "Choose Not to Warn" policy over the entire con (EDIT: unless of course, the author hirself chose to get more specific, though I do not know what kind of practical difference that would make), which wouldn't be terribly helpful to those who had only one or two of the triggers on the list*.

*Several things directed not at OP but because increasingly an explication upon one's background and privilege is necessary in fannish debates: no, I'm neither a vidder nor an attendee, so I don't have an actual dog in this fight and have been mostly watching and reading a lot; yes, I do have emotional triggers, specifically towards gunshots and/or military violence, but no physical trigger issues.

[norabombay]

Which was basically the entire situation in the first place. Choose not to warn unless there is a request for specifics, or the vidder chose.

Arduinna, thank you for putting this together.

[arduinna]

I see norabombay has answered, but yep, to confirm, that was the original con policy, which I've always felt was the best bet. We'll see how it all shakes out, I guess.

Several things directed not at OP but because increasingly an explication upon one's background and privilege is necessary in fannish debates:

This trend also makes me sad. We shouldn't need to produce credentials to have an opinion, dammit.

[seperis]

Thank you for this post. I like having concretes as well as abstracts to work with.

[arduinna]

I was really feeling the lack of concretes in the conversation!

[lazulisong]

...I guess I'm mostly sitting here boggling at the thought that someone who has problems with flashy lights and noise choosing to take part in the section of fandom that specializes in them. I mean. That's just not common sense, dudes.

(My twin sister has epilepsy btw.)

[ariadne83]

As arduinna pointed out, the level at which people are affected varies immensely based on color/intensity/speed etc, not to mention how the person is feeling on any given day.

Like me, for example: I get severe headaches from blue-spectrum lights, so while there are a wide range of vids I can watch and enjoy I would think twice about watching a vid if it had a warning for strobe lighting.

And if I'm tired already, watching shaky cam makes me nauseous. It depends on what I've been doing that day, physically and socially. If I were already feeling worn out and the vid had a warning for shaky cam I'd probably choose to come back and watch it another day.

As for the label "chooses not to warn" sometimes I'd take the chance and watch anyway, but sometimes I wouldn't. It varies depending on how I'm feeling and whether I think I have the spoons to handle it.

So yeah, I take part in vidding (as an enthusiastic audience) because I love it as a form of expression, even though sometimes I have to be careful.

[heresluck]

This was fascinating to read, and also made me think about my own Premieres vid from last year. Had I been asked to label it, I would blithely have said "no warnings," because, hi, mellow vid about Shakespeare (and not even Titus Andronicus). But when I rewatched, there were those bright flashy lights! And this speaks to your point in the follow-up post, I think: vidders are not necessarily going to be reliable judges of our own work.

So now I'm wondering about my premieres vid for this year. Football tackle: explicit violence, definitely, but does it count as assault? In the context of the source, it doesn't; it's part of the game. In the context of the vid and the vidshow, I find that I no longer have any idea.

[morgandawn]

not to be flippant, but after reading this I feel like we need a warning on the warnings: Warning, YMMV. Or: Warning: (FP)TMDCT(FP) (Flips Page) The Manual Didn't Cover This (Flips Page).

The next logical step (and one I am *not* advocating no sireee, not me) is create a fan board that reviews fanworks to come up with warnings standards which they then apply. Only way to get reliable and consistent results.

Or we can keep doing what we're doing which is discussing & pondering and basically muddling about with the hope that our best efforts are going to be allowed to be good enough.

[arduinna]

Yeah, that's exactly it - I think we're actually sort of terrible judges at it, because we're too close. We understand our own intent, and so many of the triggers are just the tools we use to convey that intent.

Like, flashing lights can be the same as a rolling drumbeat in the audio, ratcheting up the intensity of the vid. And someone grabbing someone by the wrist and hauling them around is a great piece of energetic, angry circular motion to come out of the bridge, as you heighten the emotional intensity going into the final verse - it's not *assault*, it's motion and emotion. Except it's assault, too. So.

In the context of the vid and the vidshow, I find that I no longer have any idea.

Yeah. Going through last year's show, I had a few problems with vids where it was clear to me from the context of a show that I recognized that a clip was meant to do one thing, but where I could see that without the context... maybe not so much.

[owlrigh]

Thanks for going through last year's vids with an eye for warning and checking them off; this is a very valuable post. As heresluck says, vidders are probably not going to be the best judges of their own work, should they be inclined to warn. A measure of personal responsibility should come into play, if one *is* triggered by things in vids, because even if say, heresluck didn't think her Shakespeare vid was triggering, and so there was no label, but it had to potential to...and someone was? That raises the possibility of lots of other vids out there which might have the same problem.

Now that I think on it: have there been cases of people who've been triggered--not disturbed or hurt, but actually triggered, in a PTSD or physical sort of way? Or has this discussion been theoretical so far?

[zvi]

Celli was. Her cut tag on that reads triggery for sexual assault and PTSD; please read with care, I am linking uncut.

[elucidate_this]

Thank you for posting this. I appreciate the concrete breakdown in what has so far been a very abstract discussion.

[hellpenguin]

Because I am avidly curious, what triggers did my vid require? (Cassandra, the messed up version)

I'm guessing strobe lighting because I had chosen a filter that had a slight light flicker.

[arduinna]

Oh, so much sympathy on the messed-upness, seriously. I once sent in a vid that was 2 seconds out of synch. There's nothing quite like realizing that as the vid plays up on the big screen in front of everyone, eh? *facepalm*

I had you down for many things, as it happens! *g* Explicit violence, bright flash, strobe, quick cuts, shaky cam, and audio changes.

I just rewatched to check for some specifics, and the shaky cam is right in the opening bit; the strobe lighting is all over the place because of that filter; the bright flash is a little borderline, but there are a few spots where I thought that in a darkened room they could possibly be a problem; the violence is the fighting; and the audio change is partly where the volume rises and rises (I thought it was probably fast enough to count, but I have no idea) but also where it abruptly dropped off back down to quiet. The quick cuts I missed this time around because I forgot to pay specific attention to them, but I suspect the light-flickery effect added to it.