Lovely People aka 'the bunny comic'

[Vulpes]

About trigger warnings – this gets discussed a fair bit in academia, perhaps not so much in my area (biology and environmental science), but I do hear about it. I'm not a fan of them in academia – after all, a lot of learning involves grappling with ideas that you don't like. In general, the topic of the course and the content of the syllabus should function as sufficient trigger warning.

To be honest, considering some trigger warnings I have encountered, I'm not sure how someone who needs such warnings can deal with many ordinary news stories. But I do think that it's reasonable to expect an accurate description of a course, or a work. The description of SSSS includes "some horror, monsters and magic" so someone encountering it for the first time is forewarned and can decide for themselves whether this is something that they are interested in reading. Similarly, the syllabus for the invertebrate biology course I teach mentions spiders. Arachnophobes still take the course, but they are braced for that section.

I don't think that the description of LP is particularly accurate, and I do think that you have to consider the context of the works that we know Minna from. I don't think that what should've been provided would be a trigger warning, exactly, more of a heads up that this is a departure from what we're used to. Jitter's analogy is an excellent one - if my friend who reliably gave me fruit juice suddenly handed me a screwdriver without telling me what it was, I would be annoyed, regardless of how much I might enjoy screwdrivers. There are a few things that it is (at best) rude to do people without warning - give them alcohol, show them a nude artwork, and I would argue that proseletyzing is also one. Especially if it's coming from someone who, in your experience, does not proseletyze.

[Sc0ut]

To be honest, considering some trigger warnings I have encountered, I'm not sure how someone who needs such warnings can deal with many ordinary news stories.

Plenty of people stay away from the news because it tends to be so negative, regardless if they're aware of having any triggers or not.

My understanding of triggers is that they're a courtesy, a way to make a space more accessible to people with trauma or other kinds of mental suffering. In the same way that maybe an old person with limited mobility can climb a set of stairs, but they will have an easier time if the stairs have a railing. And if the "railing" is as easy to install as writing a few words, it's kind of a jerk move not to, right?

I feel like trigger warnings, and the people who push for them, are often misrepresented through claims that people will always avoid engaging with content with trigger warnings. That's not true - like you mentioned about arachnophobes, they are just better prepared to deal with that content. For instance, I myself don't have any triggers, but as someone who's generally empathetic and rattled by a lot of descriptions of suffering and unfairness, I really appreciate content warnings when they exist because they help me know whether I'm in an appropriate mental state to read that content, or if I might want to save it for another time.

[Jitter]

SkyWhalePod, you are right that some people would likely dismiss it as not the same thing. But I specifically wanted to choose a physical thing to perhaps demonstrate the point to someone who doesn’t understand emotional hurt. Also it may be that consuming a little alcohol is not causing you actual harm (except in the cases Grey mentioned, I actually meant to put the recovering alcoholic one in but forgot) but it is something many people want to decide for themselves.

If people did understand, and if mental ailments and divergences would be taken as seriously as physical ones, the world would definitely be a better place! For everyone, I dare suggest.

[Yuuago]

Plenty of people stay away from the news because it tends to be so negative, regardless if they're aware of having any triggers or not.

My understanding of triggers is that they're a courtesy, a way to make a space more accessible to people with trauma or other kinds of mental suffering. (....)

I feel like trigger warnings, and the people who push for them, are often misrepresented through claims that people will always avoid engaging with content with trigger warnings. That's not true - like you mentioned about arachnophobes, they are just better prepared to deal with that content.

Yes, this.

To bring up another example from a class, when I was in university, I took a class where we discussed the Black Plague. One of the presentation slides had photographs of plague infection, and before going to that slide, the prof gave us a heads up about the content before proceeding. That is in fact a trigger warning, even if this was before the term was in use. And it was useful even for people without ptsd because we could prepare ourselves for the (gross) visual first.

Which is why I prefer to think of this as describing content than as trigger warnings per se.

As for re: news... Vulpes: the answer is, like Scout suggested, the news is avoided, or people carefully curate where they get it. Or they do things like turn off images before reading news.

In my case, I’m more likely to experience problems when walking down the street than browsing anything on the internet, because my triggers are audio and scent-based. Not everyone experiences this stuff in the same way.

[tzelly]

Trigger warnings also get more attention cause they tend to stop the viewer for a moment to inform them that something they may not be prepared for about to be presented. Descriptors can be easily skipped or missed all together.

Sometimes I just skip the description if its an author I trust cause I want to go in blind (or my adhd kicks in and I just don't want to read a small text wall when reading a comic) and let the story speak for itself. Trigger warnings get my attention far better and make me take a moment to consider what I'm about to read.
I read a lot of news, but I am not always mentally capable to handle it and avoid it for a time. Sometimes I'm into disturbing content, other times I would feel physically sick just from a glance.

Sometimes I want to read something that challenges my beliefs, other times its too painful and will spin me into a depression episode (like LP did for about a week). Even if you don't need them, others might. Even if its just a warning cause its "one thing too many" kinda day.

[thorny]

Here both the Friday and Monday are public holidays

Yes. The details vary from state to state, but the basic concept of "stille Feiertage" where everybody has to respect the Christian wish for, well, solemnity spans the entire nation. [ . . . ]
Literally "interdiction to dance", actually a ban on public events ranging from "dancing/music and sports" to "OK, we'll allow gastronomy, for one, but no music playing there!"

Thanks, both of you.

Much as I often think the USA is so imbued with Christianity that many people don't even notice that it is, a ban on anybody dancing in public in an entire state because Christians (or anybody else) wanted to be solemn on that day wouldn't wash. And neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday are public holidays. Easter isn't either; but I suspect that's because it always falls on a Sunday, and here "public holiday" means only that government offices and jobs are closed down, which they are anyway on Sundays. Christmas is our only legal holiday that's explicitly based on a religious celebration, but I think that if Easter changed days of the week it probably would have been also.

[ETA: Of course Sunday closures are also originally religious; but they're pretty much down to optional except for government offices, and most people are in favor of The Weekend theoretically off work for secular reasons, though fewer and fewer people actually get that.)

I am here because of SSSS yet I'm not here for SSSS.

This community seems to be one of those hidden oasis you sometimes stumble upon in the vast wilderness of the internet full of thoughtful, caring people. That's rare. And as far as I can tell a big center of gravity of the forums is lies in storytelling, art, and languages, with a dash of roleplaying; all things I cherish and don't get enough of.

Is that odd to say I'm looking forward to see the post-SSSS era? There's always the danger of this fizzling out, but there's the chance of it becoming something else. I'm curious about what it'll be—and I must admit that after this incident hanging around makes me uncomfortable.

I also post on the Straight Dope boards. Recently, there was a thread on those boards asking what other surviving message boards people thought were worth going to. And I thought immediately of this forum; but I thought, also, that I wasn't sure I wanted to recommend a board that in its origins and title was focussed on a particular comic and on its author, when that author has been behaving in a fashion that would cause controversy over there also. (Warning: if you go look at Straight Dope, for reasons utterly unclear to me a significant number of people over there seem to find it important to be able to swear, including sometimes in thread titles. Also there is sometimes quite a bit of controversy.) I almost wound up posting to recommend this forum but with a warning about the comic, but while I was trying to think about wording it the thread dropped out of current use and at least so far I haven't resurrected it.

It seems like everyone can agree that we should respect people's physical health and their choices regarding that. If we physically hurt someone, or feed them something they can't/are opposed to consuming, we apologize. I think that's universally considered good behavior.

I wish that it were. But there very unfortunately are people who will feed hidden meat to vegetarians, or hidden ingredients to people who are avoiding them for health reasons, on the grounds that they think the people doing the avoiding shouldn't be doing that.

Someone (not Minna) actually said in the stream that people just need to take responsibility for what they read. This was an argument against trigger warnings.

As you say: that's an argument for warnings, not against them; because it's not possible to take responsibility if you've got no idea what's in there.

Quite a lot of the people sneering at content warnings are the same people who were arguing vehemently for warnings (if not outright prohibitions) on movies, magazines, etc. with sexual content; or even with non-sexual human nudity.

I also came up with an analogy for this.

I think that alcohol analogy is actually a pretty good analogy, and will point out another way that it works, in addition to what's already been pointed out: Some people avoid alcohol for religious reasons, even if it wouldn't do them physically any harm.

To be honest, considering some trigger warnings I have encountered, I'm not sure how someone who needs such warnings can deal with many ordinary news stories. B

Some people can't deal with ordinary news stories. (I'm not sure any of us could deal with some of them and still function, except by having a sort of shunt in our brains that takes the edge off.)

But I also think that a lot of the problem may be in how people understand the phrasing "trigger warnings", which seems to generally be the term used by people objecting to them, though people using them often (not always) seem to use "content warnings" instead. I think that some see/hear the phrase "trigger warnings" and think 'people are saying that if they ever happen to read/see this they'll be thrown entirely for a loop and may be seriously long-term injured!' and while yes, for a relatively small number this can be true, for a much larger number of people the usefulness of the warning is not so they can be permanently protected from whatever's being described, but so that they can choose whether to deal with it at that particular moment and/or in that particular format. Expecting to see arachnids in a biology course with that on the syllabus is one thing; going to have lunch with somebody you think is a friend and finding them all over the tablecloth would be something else entirely. It might well be worth it to you overall to take the biology course, even if you never want to have lunch with that person again.

I guess we can all predict how that'll go in the long run: She'll find that she did nonetheless, because people will start to take her name on it as a trigger warning.

That's a very good point.

[Draco Probabilisticus]

Well, if there was one good thing about that comic -- it's that I learned about the existence of this forum. This is some really insightful discussion, well worth reading.
On that note, hi.

As for the comic itself, I have to admit I couldn't be bothered to read through all of it. There's just... nothing to it, no new ideas, it is indeed just an episode of Black Mirror with a religious flavour additive. But the afterword... ooh boy. I never really had much personal experience with religion, but it seems to me that nearly anybody, regardless of their religious views, would feel very concerned after reading what Minna wrote. If not for themselves, then at least for her. Her attitude is just plain unhealthy, such levels of self-condemnation over simply being human never lead to anything good. I can only hope she has someone by her side to help her climb out of this mindset.

[Jitter]

Much as I often think the USA is so imbued with Christianity that many people don't even notice that it is, a ban on anybody dancing in public in an entire state because Christians (or anybody else) wanted to be solemn on that day wouldn't wash.

Finland used to have similar restrictions, restaurants, bars, movies and everything considered “fun” was closed on Good Friday. The Finnish term is Long Friday, maybe it felt longer with all the Solemn everywhere Nowadays public offices, schools etc are closed but stores, bars etc can be open. Shops tend ro have shorter hours than a normal Friday, and many small specialty shops are closed. Also Alko, the state-owned liquor store (yes, anything stronger than beer is sold exclusively by Alko, and in restaurants for consumption in the premises) is closed on Good Friday as well as Easter Monday (and all Sundays).

I think that alcohol analogy is actually a pretty good analogy, and will point out another way that it works, in addition to what's already been pointed out: Some people avoid alcohol for religious reasons, even if it wouldn't do them physically any harm.

Another thing that crossed my mind at some point. This bothers me a lot, I seem to have given it a lot of thought. “This” here being inability to understand what and why is a trigger or content warning.

[Draco Probabilisticus]

And I really don't understand the Christian trinity.

Well, the entire religion broke in half over the Trinity question at one point, so I think it's fair to say nobody really understands it.

[moredhel]

This community seems to be one of those hidden oasis you sometimes stumble upon in the vast wilderness of the internet full of thoughtful, caring people. That's rare. And as far as I can tell a big center of gravity of the forums is lies in storytelling, art, and languages, with a dash of roleplaying; all things I cherish and don't get enough of.

Yes this little internet lehto is an extraordinary place. In the internet's constant battle and yelling, Its chaos and looking for the maximum allowed insult there is this place. Where the talk is civilized and respectful. I felt accepted immediately. I truly feel like a safe zone citizen here. At this special place, nobody seems to think different oppinions should be corrected immediately. Here every different voice enrichens the choir.

And creativity and inspiration are here in an ammount and quality I do not know the correct superlative for describing it.

[Vulpes]

Sc0ut, Yuuago, tzelly, thorny - thanks, you each make good points. I knew that someone would come along and broaden my understanding! I do get that some people avoid the news (come to think of it, I often do), and I suppose my problem is what thorny describes, interpreting "trigger" as something deeply harmful rather than something that it would be nice to be braced for. I'm all for giving people the ability to prepare themselves for something they may find unpleasant - when I cover parasites in lecture I try to remember it's coming up and let people know! Yuuago, that must be quite challenging, reacting strongly to scents and sounds. I find certain smells quite evocative, but fortunately they only evoke good memories. I had a student who couldn't deal with the smell of vinegar (a side-effect of chemotherapy), which must have complicated his life.

[SkyWhalePod]

Yes this little internet lehto is an extraordinary place. In the internet's constant battle and yelling, Its chaos and looking for the maximum allowed insult there is this place. Where the talk is civilized and respectful. I felt accepted immediately. I truly feel like a safe zone citizen here. At this special place, nobody seems to think different oppinions should be corrected immediately. Here every different voice enrichens the choir.

And creativity and inspiration are here in an ammount and quality I do not know the correct superlative for describing it.

Totally agree, I've only been here a week (?!) and I feel completely welcome, it's incredible. I probably would never have posted even as much as I have already if everyone wasn't so considerate. Very grateful to everyone here.

Also as an aside: Jitter, I'm just now watching the vod from Minna's latest Twitch stream and seeing the conversation you and a few others tried to have there re: an accurate description of LP. Boy, that could have gone better. It's true that if one is expected to be responsible for what one reads, one should at least be able to see what's on the tin, so to speak. I was covering my face and "oh no"ing the minute you said that it was wrong to misrepresent LP in its own description because I knew that Minna's response wouldn't be charitable, and it wasn't. I've never felt so tense and stressed during one of her art streams before -- simultaneously wanting her to address the multifaceted concerns people had about the comic, and not wanting her to address them because it probably wasn't going to be open-minded. Thanks for at least trying to represent the portion of Minna's audience that is really uncomfortable right now, and doing it in a calm way.

Yes, the world would be a much better place if we took each other's pain seriously, physical and mental.

[JoB]

[...] Good Friday. The Finnish term is Long Friday, maybe it felt longer with all the Solemn everywhere

The names of those holidays and the etymology thereof are a science unto itself, and no, the variant "Long Friday" did not need any Finnish midnight sun to come into existence.

(FWIW, Germany follows the model of making Easter Fri+Mon national public holidays and Sat+Sun "just a normal weekend", only with the "silent holiday" extra rules for Fri and two states making Sun an official public holiday on top.)

I suppose my problem is what thorny describes, interpreting "trigger" as something deeply harmful rather than something that it would be nice to be braced for. I'm all for giving people the ability to prepare themselves for something they may find unpleasant - when I cover parasites in lecture I try to remember it's coming up and let people know!

I'm of mixed opinions about that. If I were aiming strictly for a description of (out of average) content, without using a (subjective, of course) concept of what might or mightn't actually "trigger" someone, I'd have to mention stuff down to "I do references, as well as run-on sentences and nouns" ...

Spoiler: show

(Whereas "I occasionally put a German term when I can't find an equivalent English one offhand" could very well be a proper trigger warning for some ...)

Yuuago, that must be quite challenging, reacting strongly to scents and sounds. I find certain smells quite evocative, but fortunately they only evoke good memories. I had a student who couldn't deal with the smell of vinegar (a side-effect of chemotherapy), which must have complicated his life.

Being the evolutionarily oldest senses, olfaction and (to a lesser extent) hearing use nerves going straight to the deeper layers of our brains, and are thus much more likely to trigger emotions, which also tend to inhabit a more central abode than the neocortex.

[Umbral Reaver]

Apologies for the previous post of another author joking about the situation. I did not mean to share it as mocking, but to inform that this was how another prominent artist was responding. I should have been more clear.

[Jerry B.]

Took me long enough to realize that "Alizongle" in the story is actually Ali Baba, the Chinese e-commerce group.