It’s a meme from an old episode of Arrested Development. You’ve seen it here on tumblr, but not always with the original context.
The character sees a paper bag in the fridge labelled “Dead Dove Do Not Eat.” He takes the bag out of the fridge, opens it up, makes a disgusted face, and then the famous “I don’t know what I expected.”
There really was a dead dove in the bag.
When you see a fic tagged with “dead dove do not eat” it basically means, “this fic is clearly labelled (tagged) indicating content that some people will not want to read. If you read it anyway, it’s your own fault. I warned you.”
It can also be interpreted as “See those tags and warnings? I’m not joking around. Pay attention to them.”
The way I understand it then, it’s basically just a more amusing way of saying “don’t like don’t read”?
I would say it’s best understood as an intensifier to Don’t Like Don’t Read.
Just for example, say a series has some implied cannibalism in it.
A given fic for this series might tag with “cannibalism warning” just because it’s in the canon and the fic acknowledges or discusses it. Some people might be okay with discussing it in the abstract, even if they don’t want to see it represented explicitly. Others might be uncomfortable with just the concept, and the author might add “don’t like don’t read” to remind those people that they may not want to engage with the fic at all.
But if you see both “cannibalism” and “dead dove do not eat” the author is telling you that in the course of this fic, a character is going to straight up chow down on some dead bodies, onscreen.
To refine on that “intensifier” concept slightly, I interpret “dead dove: do not eat” as an intensity modifier. Thepresence of a tag itself doesn’t necessarily tell me exactly how that content is going to be handled (which is not to say it’s not useful, just that it’s incomplete information). “Dead dove: do not eat” suggests to me that it’s going to on the darker, more serious end of the spectrum, and I shouldn’t read it if I’m not prepared for what may be a psychologically intense or harrowing treatment of the tagged material.
You know what! This conversation has gotten me thinking about the concept of “intensity modifiers” all this morning, and I think it’s actually a fascinating subject we should talk more about!
Because I started off by thinking “DDDNE serves as an indication of subject intensity, which is an important purpose and it’s a shame that we don’t have other things like that” but then I realized, we do! They’re just slightly less formalized than other kinds of tagging systems modern fandom tends to work with.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of intensity scales in common use in modern fandom.
The first is the violence/sex intensity scale, which tends overall to be conflated with or used as a shorthand for the intensity/maturity rating of the fic itself. And people have talked in detail about the difference between an M and an E rating, in terms of how explicitly the sex act or violence act is described.
But sex and violence are not the only topics that warrant an intensity scale. There are plenty of topics that people (myself included) are okay with when talking about in an abstract or general way, but if the narrative starts to dig down into the real nitty gritty of the topic I might only want to read it if I’m in the right headspace, or not at all.
And though there isn’t an official G to E scale, fandom has implicitly recognized this need and filled it with canonical tags – such as Implied/Referenced X, Canon-Typical X, or Dead Dove Do Not Eat.
1. Implied/Referenced X tells the reader that topic X is going to be discussed, but not shown explicitly on-screen. Unless the whole broad topic is a trigger for a reader, it’s probably okay for them to read.
2. Next step up from that is Canon-Typical X, which can generally be understood as the base or standard level of intensity for topic X in fandom Y. Exactly what level of intensity that is varies from fandom to fandom – ‘canon-typical violence’ for The Avengers is probably going to be a different level of intensity than ‘canon-typical violence’ for The Witcher, just to name two offhand. But it is generally understood that if you’re reading fic for fandom Y in the first place, the level of X present in the work is probably not going to be too much for you.
3. And then at the far end of the intensity modifier scale is Dead Dove Do Not Eat, where a topic is explored in such detail and intensity that even fans of Fandom Y will have to decide whether they’re okay to read this today, or maybe at all.
see this is the kind of quality content that keeps me coming around here on tumbler dot com.
mc1303 