Thirty Days of Fanart Meme: Day 15

15 – Warnings – Do you put warnings on your art, and if yes, what do you feel it most important to warn for, and what's the strangest thing you've warned for?

I don't warn on my own website, but in part that is because I so rarely post anything that would need warnings in the first place. In my journal I use headers with a warning field because some of the newsletters and communities ask for that for linking, and overall I've come to see that kind of header field mostly as "content labels" rather than the more negative "warning". And with art that you see all at once there isn't even the issue of spoiling any twists.

What I think is most important to warn for would be anything that has sex/sexual nudity with underage characters, because in some locations such art can count as "childporn" even if drawn, and even if it is teenagers and not young children, so you don't want to download it accidentally. Also labeled IMO should be the fannish equivalent to shock images, and I think if there are preview pictures for such art they should not show that part of the picture but instead use text warnings. So I'd warn for extreme violence and gore, violent sexual imagery, and animal harm in pictures, and probably be specific about what is disturbing so people can avoid specific squicks, e.g. I'd label for "gory medical instrument torture" or "explicit eye injury" rather than just "gore".

Obviously I'd also warn for serious spoilers for the canon, especially if something is still new, as a fannish courtesy.

On the next level of importance I'd put labels for explicit sex, sexual nudity and such that's merely NSFW but not disturbing, and character death. Anything else I'd probably put more under useful, but optional, detailed content labels (anyone who has seen my delicious account will guess that I have a strong preference for detailed labels) to help fans find what they like and avoid what they don't like.

As far as warnings that I have actually used myself go, there haven't been many, and nothing unusual. My art is overwhelmingly harmless. I've warned for drug use once for regular fanart, and for animal harm twice I think in drawbles, and I tend to indicate nudity or sexual activity even when mild, e.g. "PG for clothed, sexual kissing". Really it's all very tame.

X-Men musings

This occurred to me when I commented in another journal, but one of the reasons why I like XMFC fix-it scenarios where the beach scene isn't the moment when Erik embarks upon an ideology of genocidal mutant separatism is that I can't imagine how Erik would even be able to make a sound judgment at this early point that a mutant-only society is a viable future option.

All the mutants Erik knows seem to be first generation mutants, presumably with regular human parents, and at this point none he encountered have reproduced. I'm no geneticist but it seems to me that just then they have nothing but hope that mutants will produce viable and fertile offspring with each other, who will also be mutants on top of that. And it's all well and good for your ideology to hope that you are the next evolutionary step rather than some dead-end (like Charles does too), but it's somewhat premature to burn all bridges to the larger genetic base when you haven't even seen the first mutant-mutant baby be born and reach puberty.

For all they know the mutations that give them awesome powers might lead to illness and early death kind of birth defects when two mutants have children, or they could be infertile, or just have a really high chance of either. It's probably best not to think too much about how Marvel's "X gene" is supposed to work in terms of real genetics, and I don't know much about the latter anyway, but still. I can't imagine anyone would just assume these mutations would breed true and without complications.