One thing to always remember: Unless you manage to do something exceptionally horrific without warning, the vast majority of the criticism you get about “sensitive” subjects will be from a tiny, yet very vocal minority of your readers. Most people who don’t like the way a story is going will just stop reading it. It takes something of an inflated ego to face the world from a direction of “Everyone else must always do things the way *I* want them done.”

So write what you want to write. The people who like it will read it. The people who don’t like it won’t. The people who don’t like it and insist on reading it anyway and then complaining about it can be politely invited to pay you to write something different or go away.

Personally, I had no idea what was coming when I initially read this chapter.

Now, granted, at the time, I was in a toxic long-distance relationship with a control freak who routinely threatened suicide in order to keep me glued to my phone and isolate me from others. This affected me to the extent that I would routinely cancel my plans and even skip meals in order to (I thought) pacify them, and thereby “protect” them from themselves. All while hurting people I ostensibly cared about (including me), by isolating myself.

At the time, I could sympathize, perhaps too well, with the thought I was somehow a horrible person for wanting out of that situation by any means necessary, being too afraid to put in motion a more self-preserving end to things myself, and instead wishing someone else would save me (perhaps lethally) from my panic over the dilemma. I would also have accepted this GA scenario, and Byron’s point of view, as perfectly valid and not unhealthy or troubled.

Reading it now, I know what’s coming, and I can see Byron’s misstep in logic for what it is. I cannot, however, read it without thinking back to the damaging relationship I’d been in that made me feel so genuinely helpless, even though the scenario is not at all similar. (And I’m also aware that I’m lucky my situation didn’t have a truly traumatic effect on me and a more tragic, eventual resolution than “I ended that relationship for both our sakes”.)

However, I do understand that it’s difficult to target the kind of reader I am now, with an appropriate warning about what Byron is about to say. Which is why trigger warnings such as “discussion of suicide” are as vague or general as they are; it’s more a shotgun style of targeting than a rifle style.

I agree about not letting it hold you back from exploring such themes. One webcomic I follow, with intermittent serious/triggerworthy themes, instead of posting a trigger warning on each page will instead warn before a series of updates that there is content coming up. (For example “The upcoming scene deals with suicide and family rejection. Approx 6 pages”) Then in their rss or text along with the page just adds a minor note about the scene being ongoing. That does rely on the readership being regulars to see the note at the beginning of the scene.