Subject: Let me try to be clear. (potential trigger warning)
Author:
Posted on: 2014-10-29 02:06:00 UTC

A few PPCers have written missions involving heavily NSFW material, but that doesn't mean the entire community can handle it. In the initial post, you brought up all of three missions, one of which could not be completed by the authors because of how disgusting it was. There are literally hundreds of PPC missions now, nearly all of which are roughly PG-13ish; and only a handful of the missions of higher rating handle the really offensively squicky material you're talking about. To put it bluntly, missions like that are not what the PPC is about.

Now, the community doesn't have any rules against that sort of mission, and it's fine to write and publish them; that's not what's being discussed here. The problem is that this community may contain:
a) underage people, who should not be exposed to the kind of visuals you brought up in your initial post, and
b) people who, for whatever personal reason, may be emotionally hurt and made uncomfortable by that kind of material. This is called "triggering."

So, how do we protect our fellow internet users from accidentally seeing such material when they don't want to? The difficulty lies in the fact that you and I don't know off-hand who can safely read potentially sensitive and inappropriate material just by looking at their screenames. So we put warnings on such material when we post it to a public viewing area, such as this Board (or any similar message board; this is general internet courtesy, not a PPC-specific rule), so that each person can decide for themselves whether they are comfortable in clicking or not. For example, I added "potential trigger warning" in parentheses to the top of this post, as I am discussing triggering situations. I'm actually being careful not to get too explicit with anything here, but I added the warning just in case, because I don't know who will be reading this, and I am afraid of hurting anyone, or exposing underage PPCers to info they might not yet be mature enough to understand. You'll also note that the missions you referred to, and the wiki pages about their targets, are labeled "NSFW" themselves, for the same reasons.

So, to summarize: Yes, some (many!) PPCers are disgusted by sexual violence, and really only a small fraction of us have dealt with it directly in missions. (Even for those of us who have, this hardly constitutes a "regular basis.") Bringing up this kind of topic can still be hurtful for some people, even when it's only used as examples in discussion. And as for "how would people react?" Well, some people would react by not reading it, and that's okay, because they wouldn't have been comfortable reading it, and they deserve the respect of being given the tools to avoid things that could potentially hurt them.

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