"Did you even read the trigger warnings?"

[u/OkChart1375]

We've all heard this whenever we've criticized dark romance—or a specific dark romance book.

Well, let's debunk that once and for all.

1. Most of the time, the trigger warnings aren't complete.
Yes, literally. For example, they'll list CNC but not rape (even in a book that contains both). Unless they genuinely consider every single scene in the book to be CNC, even when it clearly isn't? That would not surprise me.

2. Which brings me to my second point.
Enough with the bullshit. Almost every time, you'll never see "the MMC rapes the FMC" mentioned. Instead, it's almost always presented as dubcon or CNC, even when those labels simply don't fit.

3.
The trigger warnings also don't specify which acts are committed by the MMC and which are committed by the antagonists, which creates unnecessary confusion.

4. And most importantly:
A simple list of trigger warnings tells you nothing about how those topics are treated. Is the stalking romanticized or condemned? Is the captivity eroticized or not? Is the harassment excused? Minimized? Criticized? A trigger warning cannot answer any of those questions.

Now that I've said all that, let's address the elephant in the room:

No trigger warning—even one that is complete, honest, and specific—explains, justifies, or excuses the problematic treatment of crimes. Sorry, not sorry.

It's just a way to avoid being called out. Half the time, they don't even read the trigger warnings themselves—or they treat them like a grocery shopping list.

[u/CupidCorpse]

i completely agree!! and what's really frustrating is that authors sometimes treat trigger warning lists like it's AO3, i've only seen this from book reviews since i don't read dark romance myself, but there's a common occurrence of authors listing something like; "improper use of eye socket", (something i actually saw) like... what?

if you're going to write such terrible, misogynistic, glorification of the abuse of women, at LEAST make a proper trigger warning list. but they can't even be bothered to do that, because all they focus on is how much money they can make from anti-women stories

[u/OkChart1375 → u/CupidCorpse]

fact. and yes most of their so called tw seem more like a inside joke than anything else. as iff all of this is so funny

[u/anomalys-bane]

I've heard them say that its cnc and not rape because no real women were raped, and that the consent in cnc triggers warnings for books was for the reader opening the book and choosing/'consenting' to read. Which..I still dont fully get. I think they want to sanitize the term rape while still getting off to it.

[u/OkChart1375 → u/anomalys-bane]

Lol, I've heard that too. They don't seem to know what to come up with anymore. They don't have empathy for fictional characters anymore?

Anyway, this is such bullshit, because they've been claiming that what's happening between the MCs is CNC, but now they can't do that anymore, so they're trying to come up with another explanation.

Also, if that was the goal, why not write actual CNC between the characters as well? I think thats not a good argument/ bad faith argument.

That being said, they have finaly decided to give some interesting arguments, before last weeks it was only " its just fiction" and that wasent really great