Dubious Consent - Not quite sure where to draw the lines with this one, interested in seeing examples of how other sites institute it, if any folks have specific examples they like.
Nobody seems to have offered potential criteria for this, so I'll take a crack at it.
I don't have a specific example of how other sites institute it, but in my mind there's three main categories that fall under Dubious Consent:
1. Situations where it is narratively ambiguous and unclear to the audience whether something is consensual or not; it can be read either way.
2. Situations of compromised consent (e.g. "consent" under conditions of coercion, manipulation, extreme power imbalance, altered mental states, etc.) that would generally be considered de facto nonconsensual irl, but where the narrative uses its ability to "see inside" characters heads to reassure us that the character being coerced or manipulated actually does want to consent, or otherwise takes a "no harm no foul" narrative approach.
3. Situations where both characters involved are being coerced, are under altered mental states, etc. (e.g. fuck-or-die scenarios, Escape Room setups that put narrative emphasis on reluctance or coercion, some stories involving aphrodisiacs).
Don't have examples to hand for the other types, but Even If It Was Just Once, I Regret It seems like a good example of case 2 where a Dubious Consent warning would be nice. Some "fluffy blackmail" stories might fall under this category too, at least in the early chapters.
That said, there are some other setups that I would consider clearly dubcon that don't quite fall under any of those three categories (e.g. Character A is mind-controlled into propositioning Character B, Character B accepts without realizing that Character A is being mind-controlled), but I'm having trouble formulating a general rule that includes all of them.
last edited at Dec 23, 2022 4:05PM
