Gee, what a good idea...

[branchandroot]

So, the issue having come up in my circle, I was gearing up to make a trigger map of Bujold's Vorkosigan books and solicit thoughts from my reading list.

And then I made the mistake of mentioning this to my spouse-the-librarian.

Who promptly said that it should be a Bigger! project, encompassing, really, all of literature, and wouldn't a user editable database, possibly using the Library Thing api as a base for this, be good, gee what a good idea for a sabbatical project!

So, real soon now, I will be asking my reading list to contribute trigger categories to seed this thing with, since, for maximum coverage, it should be heavily front loaded and the free-form tagging used to supplement that.

But for now, I do want to do up Bujold. So. Here are the ones that leap to mind for me.



Shards of Honor: Rape (does not occur onscreen, but it's a close call and the build up is explicit)
POW abuse (especially women)

The Warrior's Apprentice: Torture (brief passage, but sharp)

The Vor Game: Rape (not on screen, but explicitly referred to)

"The Borders of Infinity": Incarceration (the setting of the story is a fairly intense pow prison)

Mirror Dance: Eating disorders (almost half the book)
Torture (crosses with the eating disorders)
Rape (off screen and past, but explicitly spoken of)
MPD (not trigger material, I don't think, but something I'd surely want the vulnerable to be prepared for)

Memory: Suicidal depression (brief but intense)

Komarr: Domestic abuse (first half of the book)

A Civil Campaign: Child Custody issues (an issue throughout the book)


What else?

Comments

[tel]

Attempted on-screen child rape for Mirror Dance is the big one you're missing. On-screen child abuse by -both- protagonists, actually.

If you're counting the bit in Warrior's Apprentice as torture, Vor Game and Borders of Infinity both should also qualify. Vor Game also has a just-offscreen rape. The bits with Elena's mother in Warrior's Apprentice discuss rape. Barrayar also has suggested rape and the attempted murder of a helpless pregnant woman (the whole scene with Alys in the street is pretty bad, esp. with Bothari getting off on it), and mentions of past rape and child abuse.

Mountains of Mourning has infanticide and animal abuse.

[flourish]

"Labyrinth" involves Miles having sex with an underage person who I would personally categorize as a "child." I'm not sure that I blame him, but it could definitely freak some people out.

[flourish]

Oh, and A Civil Campaign brings up Mark's body image issues again, which could be triggery for some people (overeating on bug butter - this was brought up to me in damned_colonial's post and was a great point).

It might be worth warning for Shards of Honor including scenes of forced therapy/committal. I know that might be a little weird, but it actually affected me more than almost anything else in the series. Cordelia's inability to break free from the various therapists who just Don't Understand What Is Going On is pretty damned horrifying.

[tel]

...and that reminds me of the waterboarding torture that shows up twice in Shards.

[krait]

Cordelia's inability to break free from the various therapists who just Don't Understand What Is Going On is pretty damned horrifying.

Oh, I agree! *shudders* I found that whole thing so intense I could barely lift my eyes from the page, I was so desperate for her to find a way out, and I'm pretty trigger-free.

[tel]

With Taura, at least, it's reasonable that she's mentally accelerated as well as physically. Unlike the situation in Mirror Dance, where it's pretty clear that Miles is actually having some sort of sexual contact with a ten-year-old.

[damned_colonial]

I'd love to offer my work's database for this. I work for http://freebase.com/ and we already have most books published in English in our database. I could easily set up some structure for it.

[damned_colonial]

I roughed something out here: http://triggers.freebase.com/

[branchandroot]

*nodnod* That's about what I was thinking, yeah. Source, trigger, scope. Searchable by trigger or by source/author.

[damned_colonial]

I've made some saved views already for triggery eps of Buffy, Stargate, and books in the Vorkosigan Saga.

The editing interface is a bit of a bear, I'm afraid. Our developers broke a few things recently that screw up navigation in ways that are only slightly annoying for most people, but *intensely* annoying for this particular use case. However, I'm beating them with sticks to get them to fix it :)

[branchandroot]

Coolness! I'll see if this is the kind of backend he's thinking about. *wry* I do brainstorming, when it comes to the databases, he gets to do most of the structure wrangling.

[krait]

Not sure if it exactly constitutes a trigger, but "custody issues" (slash employee abuse/human rights) is almost the entirety of _Falling Free_; the Quaddies are property and only slowly starting to realise this when the entire project is threatened with shutdown.

(The "kindest" outcome of which is forced institutionalisation: "being forgotten to death" in a surface facility where they will be virtual cripples even before anything malfunctions. The VP of Ops would rather they be slaughtered, burned, and reported as "terminated post-fetal tissue samples" in the official report.)

Come to that, that VP is arguably a eugenist, having terminated four pregnancies for "defects"/mutations and being outright phobic of the Quaddies despite their being engineered, not in any way defective.

There's also forced sterilisation (threatened, narrowly avoided -- rather like Cordelia's almost-rape), and if you want to look at it that way, forced reproduction -- Claire's next child is "rescheduled" a lot earlier than it was originally planned, and it's clear she has no choice in this at all, not even in whom will father it. (For that matter, she had the first one in the same sort of circumstances.)

[krait]

Again, not sure if it's a trigger exactly, but in _The Vor Game_, where Metzov is going to command trainees to deal with the fetaine spill despite their having no adequate protective suits... and then, when refused, institutes a "discipline parade" which involves standing naked at gunpoint in the -40 degree outdoors? I'd call that abuse of authority and torture.