Thank you for the rec; it's delightful to see people still remember this all these years later! Not to mention new people finding it as well.
I slap 'Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings' on almost everything precisely because I had a bad experience with people complaining about unwarned-for character death. Before AO3 even existed, I wrote a due South story where the plot twist is that a certain character is ~a ghooooooost~ all along and several people told me that I should have put a character death label on it. Since I came from fandoms where the warning norms were extremely different, this seemed absurd to me. I mean, if people in X-Men comics fandom got upset every time a character died, we'd never be happy! (Charles has died about a dozen times in canon. Erik is dead right now! You don't see me complaining.)
So when AO3 arrived and I was uploading all my fic there, I just put Choose Not To Warn on everything rather than trying to remember which stories even had character death in them or trying to work out what constituted a 'major' character death anyway. The only stories of mine with archive warnings on them are the couple that do have very graphic violence and the one that's non-con. Brothers in Arms would definitely need one if I was doing them, because poor Warren Keffer is only in this vid during the shot where he dies horribly on screen.
(I have never needed the Underage warning because, well, we've all seen the characters I ship. The vast majority are closer to qualifying for a seniors discount than to getting carded when they try to buy alcohol.)
no subject
I slap 'Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings' on almost everything precisely because I had a bad experience with people complaining about unwarned-for character death. Before AO3 even existed, I wrote a due South story where the plot twist is that a certain character is ~a ghooooooost~ all along and several people told me that I should have put a character death label on it. Since I came from fandoms where the warning norms were extremely different, this seemed absurd to me. I mean, if people in X-Men comics fandom got upset every time a character died, we'd never be happy! (Charles has died about a dozen times in canon. Erik is dead right now! You don't see me complaining.)
So when AO3 arrived and I was uploading all my fic there, I just put Choose Not To Warn on everything rather than trying to remember which stories even had character death in them or trying to work out what constituted a 'major' character death anyway. The only stories of mine with archive warnings on them are the couple that do have very graphic violence and the one that's non-con. Brothers in Arms would definitely need one if I was doing them, because poor Warren Keffer is only in this vid during the shot where he dies horribly on screen.
(I have never needed the Underage warning because, well, we've all seen the characters I ship. The vast majority are closer to qualifying for a seniors discount than to getting carded when they try to buy alcohol.)