Official AO3 announcement post is here. The number of “I’m so happy to see this, it’ll make my fandom browsing so much easier” comments are a joy to see. (The comments about “well, geez, took you long enough” are…valid, honestly.)
A lot of specific tag trees are still works-in-progress, especially if it’s a big complicated franchise. So don’t worry too much if a fandom you love doesn’t have one yet — the wranglers might still be working on it. Honestly, I’m still working on investigating all the Madoka Magica fandom syns, which is why most of the spinoffs still don’t have their own separate fandom tags. We’ll get there, I promise.
Fun little twist that’s only a problem for me: this means “more fandoms” listed on my wrangling page. The amount of work is objectively exactly the same! It’s the same amount of fic, just spread across slightly more fandom tags! But the recently-added limit is on the number of fandoms, not the amount of fanworks those fandoms get.
Current number of fandoms on my list: 1142.
Current number that have any tag-wrangling to do: 28. (Not the same 28 as the last time I posted. There’s some overlap — a fandom like Sailor Moon has new tags every week — but the others rotate, especially the “just got new tags from its first fic posted in 2 years” type of fandoms.)
All right, I’ve asked questions about the original Japanese in PSOH before and people have popped up with the answers. Hoping to have the same good fortune again.
In Volume 10, the chapter “Duplication”, there’s a panel where Leon’s long-time co-worker Jill introduces herself on the phone. In the Tokyopop translation, she gives her name as “Detective Jill Freshney”:
Jill Freshney is also the name of the managing editor on the book:
So — does our detective Jill also have this name in the original Japanese text?
If the TP translation had started before the original series ended, I could see it being written in by Matsuri Akino, as a little “aww, there ended up being a real Jill working on my books, I’ll give her a shoutout” homage. But the Japanese volume 10 came out in August 1998, and the NA release of Volume 1 wasn’t until June 2003, so she wouldn’t have known.
Was it added by the TP writers, as their own little gag/homage? Or was it there in the original, and this is an absolutely wild coincidence? (…Or a secret third thing?)
Like last year, I used the OpenVibe app to auto-crosspost my liveblogging to both Mastodon and Bluesky. The app has threading now! So these are in slightly-longer chunks of text than last year, because I could split a longer reaction across multiple threads and post them all at once.
…But the overall text is shorter, in part because I swear the breaks between movies were seriously cut down this year. There was a lot of “I had a longer thought here, but the next thing is already starting, so I have to finish typing as fast as possible (with my coat draped over my phone so the light isn’t bothering everyone else) and hit send.”
It’s no longer the 15th of the month as I’m finishing this post…but I ran all the numbers on the 15th, so I’m counting it as a regular scheduled update.
I’ve finished one A-to-Z pass of “handing off and/or punting specific webcomics.” In total, that knocked a couple hundred fandoms off my list. Guess I’ll do another, go harder, and knock out a couple hundred more.
There was a point when I thought about starting a habit of “sweep the Unassigned Fandoms list for tiny underloved Christmas movies,” because sweeping for underloved webcomics was working well. Didn’t end up doing it regularly, though — I just got 12 movie fandoms with 1 fic each, and stopped there. So I dropped all of those in an afternoon. (In the years I was babysitting them, the most active of these fandoms came out with…a whole 2nd fic.)
(There’s still only one fic for Shadow Man – Melissa Scott…and it’s the one I wrote. Guess it’s depressingly safe to leave “the queer intersex revolution/romance where everyone’s on space drugs” unwrangled, huh.)
With bigger Random Things, when they’re active enough I don’t want to leave them unwrangled, I’ve been making the occasional post about “looking to hand off this fandom, will anybody take it?” Breaks up the monotony of the batches of webtoons, I think. And it’s had maybe a 50-50 success rate — not bad. I’ll keep at it.
…I did actually add 2 new fandoms since the last update. A couple fans wrote about the Toon Makers US Sailor Moon pilot for Yuletide 2025, so that has a fandom tag now, and I picked it up to go with the rest of the Sailor Moon fandom tree.
Then it came up in the “wranglers wanted” channel that Pet Shop of Horrors was unassigned. And how was I supposed to resist picking up PSOH? I love PSOH. That manga reread I just recently started will pair perfectly with a review of the existing PSOH tags.
So my current total number of fandoms is 1183. (The number of “fandoms that actually have any new tags to deal with right now” is 28.)
A thing I kept noticing in The Secret Commonwealth: any time someone brought up Dust, as in Rusakov particles, it went by fast. One character would mention it — another one might react — but then the conversation would move right along to something else.
The original HDM trilogy did a really solid job with this concept. Lyra first hears about it as one of many mysterious Scholar Things she spies on without understanding. When she gets a child-friendly explanation, it’s the Church-doctrine propaganda version. Readers follow along with her, and later with other POV characters, building out our knowledge as they hear more perspectives and see more experimental results.
There are good reasons Dust wouldn’t come up much in La Belle Sauvage. It’s a flashback, so even the experts are 10 years’ less knowledgeable, and young Malcolm (unlike Lyra) isn’t interacting with those experts much in the first place. If anything, the Rusakov physics in that book felt kinda shoehorned in. Bonneville is a Rusakov researcher, Malcolm finds his notes…then Mal keeps asking about it (even though it’s not relevant to surviving the flood, and he has no reason to expect it would be), and Bonneville keeps giving accurate answers (even though he has no motive to be honest, and every motive to make up something scary/demoralizing).
But TSC is a flash-forward. They have all the discoveries of HDM, plus another 10 years’ worth of research. A bunch of the main characters are professionally interested. This would be the point in the trilogy where you get to properly reintroduce Dust to the reader!
And instead…well, here are all the times it comes up:
Roundup part 3 of my Secret Commonwealth re-listen. It’s the last 6 hours, and it took 4 work days to get through. (My hold on The Rose Field was 4th in line when it started, and now I’m up to 2nd.)
No cute critter photos in this one. We’re just slouching toward the finish line to be done.
“I sell perfumes online. A customer ordered a set of 6 fragrances and requests a full refund claiming they arrived leaking/ broken. These are the 2 pics she sent me. I call BS”
Companies using LLM/AI products in (apparent) earnest, then forcing the unwanted scammy results on their users:
Here’s a Youtube video about that last one. Includes clips with an Anthropic sales agent, who insists “AI is coming and you have to be ready.” Even after this blatant demonstration that his product isn’t prepared for users.
I found a good cutoff point — about 2/3 of the way through the book, even! — so here’s Roundup Part 2 of my Secret Commonwealth re-listen.
It’s hella long. I did try to put some effort into “if I could edit this to have a more consistent plot and be more thematically-coherent, how would I fix it?”, instead of just going “and THIS was handled badly, and THAT was handled badly, and THIS TOO was–” over and over.
Started my revisit of the second Book of Dust volume. Again, liveblogging it on Mastodon and on Bluesky, and not looking at my original-reading reaction post from 2019 until I finish.
This has gotten very long, so I’m cutting off Roundup Post #1 after the big narrative turning point at the end of chapter 10. With 33 chapters total, that sets a pace for a total of 3 roundup posts. (Haven’t gotten far enough to know what would be a good milestone to end Roundup Post #2. I’ll keep an ear out.)
Held off long enough to make it my first post of 2026! That way, all the roundups for TSC will be posted in the same year.
Audiobook is 19 hrs 43 min. TBD how many times I pause it to comment/complain about something…
Earlier this year, I split off some AO3 "Christmas Sweaters" tags that were synned to "Holiday Sweaters" tags, and made them canonical subtags instead. For kicks, I made a note of the usage stats at the time:
So the plain "X Sweaters" tags each grew at about the same rate...but it looks like there's a lot of taggers who were only picking "Ugly Holiday Sweaters" because that's what showed up in the dropdown, and once "Ugly Christmas Sweaters" showed up as an option, they jumped for it.
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Fandom-dropping progress: down to 1222 fandoms. I've shed more than 300 since starting, and more than 100 since I last posted about it.
(The vast majority of them have been small webcomic fandoms. Vaguely curious what the exact breakdown is...but there's no auto-running those numbers, I'd have to do a lot of counting by hand, and I'm not that curious.)
Sudden awkward realization that Malcolm’s daemon has been “Asta” all along, I just took the spoken version as “Aster” with a British accent.
Have to go edit some roundup posts now…
(And here I was appreciating the celestial symbolism in how “Aster” means “star”!)
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Spent some time this evening reviewing AO3’s character tags for His Dark Materials, along with The Book of Dust. There’s a handy tag format that only really picked up after I originally canonized most of them, “Petname | Fullname Character’s Pet”, as in “Alpine | Bucky Barnes’s Cat“. So I redid most of the daemon character tags to match that, as in “Asta | Malcolm Polstead’s Daemon“.
Some of them, it feels like overkill — not a lot of fans are likely to forget which Pantalaimon or Hester we’re talking about. But it’s really useful for the daemons whose names only came up briefly. Or maybe were only established outside the actual canon (e.g. author interviews, TV credits). Kyrillion, Jal, Grizal, Sergi…
The review also turned up some minor characters who weren’t canonized before because I couldn’t find info on them, and some characters who got newly-established full names after they were canonized. Also, at least one where the canonical had a typo. Whoops.
I have not audited the relationship tags to make sure they all match up. (Except the one with the typo.) To avoid overloading the servers, there’s a limit on how many tags each wrangler is supposed to rename per day, and doing the rels tonight would blow way past mine.
So that’s a future project.
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I put most of my post-LBS reaction feelings as addendums in the liveblog roundup post, so I didn’t end up making a new microblogging thread about them.
Doing a re-listen of books 1-2 in the Book of Dust trilogy, since book 3 just came out.
I just finished the first one, La Belle Sauvage, liveblogging it on Mastodon and on Bluesky, Here’s a roundup post.
(I haven’t read this book since it came out in 2017, and I deliberately didn’t reread my original 2017 reaction post to LBS until now. Feel free to look through both, see which things I had different reactions about, and how many times I just noticed the same thing twice.)
…not actually a full-on review post, I just couldn’t think of a pithier title, when the actual subject is:
The weird experience of reading/watching two different things right in a row that both went “btw, Hell is official canon here, people are actively being tortured, ok moving on, none of our heroes are gonna have any concern about that ever again.”
One was the recent movie Genie, where, yeah, it was a throwaway gag. And the movie overall was one of those “MC gets infinite wishes, never even thinks to drop by the nearest hospital and start wishing cures on people” stories. So you can’t expect much.
(MC does wish for his greedy boss’s fortune to be donated to a housing nonprofit! I was delighted when that came up! Then…he time-travels and retcons it, and never re-wishes it. Whyyy.)
But still! This happens:
Careless statement of “I wish you would go to hell”
(This part is fine, it’s a genie story, gotta get in a valuable lesson about being careful what you wish for)
Hasty “I wish he would come back from hell!”
Victim reappears, sooty and singed, understandably ticked off
So now we know some form of eternal flaming torment is real, AND there’s no foolproof filter on who goes there, AND your genie pal has the power to free people from it
None of this is ever mentioned or thought about again ever!
Nobody involved in making this movie ever second-guessed that…?
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Anyway, the other incident is Camp Damascus, the “what if Chuck Tingle decided to write serious horror” novel. (For a YA level of “serious horror.” Which is about the level I like to deal with, so that worked for me.)
Real mixed feelings about this book. It has good points, it has bad points. Not mad that I spent my time reading it, but it did kinda feel like the first draft of a better book.
But, uh. It sure is A Choice to write a novel about the literalized horrors of religious abuse and anti-gay conversion therapy, and have part of the worldbuilding be “some form of Hell is real! Demons are real! They really do put people through agonizing horror-movie torture scenarios! Just not to gay people.”
The MC spends most of the book afraid of these demons doing horrible brutal murderous things to her, and/or the people she loves.
Then in the climactic showdown, demons do even more horrible brutal things to a bunch of camp counselors, and she’s just…unmoved.
Because, hey, the demons were only threatening gay people because of the church’s control. And now they’re free! So now their standards for “whose limbs do we get to rip off” are…uh, MC explicitly doesn’t know what their standards are…but she doesn’t spend any time stressing over whether the new victims deserve it any more than the old ones did.
To be clear! This is not part of a reveal that the counselors were one-dimensional evil!
The MC is friends with a former counselor. Who’s also gay, and has also been living with the threat of demon-torture. They’ve had heartfelt conversations about how, yes, he did bad things at the camp, but he can’t be too hard on himself, he was being manipulated by a cult, and he can make up for it now that he’s free.
How many of the present-day counselors are in the same situation? Who knows! And nobody left in the book has any interest in finding out.
Someone could write a dissertation about which “assumptions baked into this kind of Christian worldview” Camp Damascus takes the time to unpack, compared to which ones it just…doesn’t question or second-guess at all.
I won’t — I’m not nearly invested enough to do the rereading it would take to get all the details right — just saying that in general, wow, there is A Lot here, if anyone was interested.
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Gonna wrap this up with a Hazbin Hotel reference.
Obviously it’s not the first story to do “okay, some form of Hell is canon real, now let’s actually stop and dig into the implications.” But it’s almost certainly the first one to drop the banger line “if Hell is forever, then Heaven must be a lie” in the middle of a song, and I think that’s beautiful.
Then it occurred to me that there’s an even smaller type: the “nobody used it again, and the original author deleted, so the fandom tag is still around but has 0 works” fandoms.
If there’s an automatic way to find how many of these you wrangle, I don’t know what it is. So I just did a pass through my fandoms with 0 unfilterable/unwrangleable tags attached, and double-checked the work counts.
You know how AO3 will give you a “Retry later” error if you try to load too many pages in a row? Yeah, it made me take at least four breaks while I was going through this process.
The payoff is, now I’m down to 1338 fandoms. Knocked a full 62 empty tags off the list.
(Their tags are still canonical, but they won’t show up on the Unassigned Fandoms list, until/unless some user posts another fanwork that makes them 1-use again.)
About a month ago, TW chairs announced a new limit: each wrangler should have a maximum of 450 assigned fandoms. Of the 400+ wranglers in the committee, only 3 actually had more than 450 fandoms, so for most people this was going to make no difference in their lives at all.
So, hey, I’m one of the 3! Figured I’d write about it.
To be clear, the limit is for admin reasons. There hasn’t been any allegation of “you’re falling behind in wrangling because you have too many fandoms to keep up with.” Not to me, and I have no reason to believe it’s happened to either of the others, either.
The thing is, my habit for a while now has been “check the Unassigned Fandoms list for webcomic fandoms with less than 5 works, pick them up, tidy up whatever tags they have, and then just…keep them.”
Just got the first two volumes of Seven Seas’ new PSOH Collector’s Edition. (Here’s my list of the series on bookshop.org, for anyone who wants to buy them in a way that gives a kickback to (a) local bookstores, (b) me, and (c) not Amazon.)
I already had the whole series in the original Tokyopop edition, but wow, the print quality on this new release is such an upgrade. The lineart, the toning, it has so many fine details and subtle gradations that didn’t get to shine nearly this much in the first version.
It’s also a brand-new translation of the text. I’m resisting the urge to do a whole line-by-line comparison — I want to just read and enjoy the stories, without looking back-and-forth between two books on every single page — but I keep getting curious and spot-checking individual lines/panels…
I switched my Fic Updates DW Journal over to “entries are displayed in the journal-specific style” mode, realized for the first time how glitchy it looks on mobile, and spent a good chunk of today fussing with borders/margins/font sizes until I finally felt better about it.
The journal has mostly been “crossposting links from AO3” for a decade now, but in the past couple years I had a resurgence of using it for “behind-the-scenes about the writing” posts (all for Cover of Knight reasons). Finally came around to thinking, you know what, I want them to look customized.
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Sometimes you post a thing and it just hits, huh? I put that art of “Lydia Deetz singing Gravity” on DA, and overnight it became the most popular thing I’ve uploaded there in years.
“DA doesn’t want live-action superheroes, it wants Cartoon Ladies” isn’t exactly news, but still. Watching those numbers zoom upward sure was something.
Fund artists! Think of how many other cool things they could do!
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Speaking of support for artists:
Anyone reading this who makes Clip Studio assets? I have points that need to be spent/gifted before the end of the year, so drop a link to yours (here’s a link to mine, for comparison) and I’ll send you some.
I have over 6,000 Clippy to burn, so please share this around. I’ll give some to everyone who responds, until/unless I run out.
Look, I don’t want this to come off too alarming. There’s never been a time when I was an actual suicide risk. But whoo boy, there were times when I really needed Someone To Talk To. When all the human options were either “might also turn out to be trash-talking you behind your back, who knows?” or “will just tell you that anything happening on the internet isn’t serious, and the only problem is that you’re deciding to be upset about it, instead of deciding to be fine.”
And if I’d had the option of talking to an LLM bot? Which always starts out being supportive and validating, then eventually talks some users into psychotic spirals, or killing themselves, or both?
That would’ve taken me somewhere horrible. So glad I didn’t have the chance to find out where.
(The writing keeps saying “robots”. These aren’t robots. They’re dolls, with a speaker and a baby monitor inside. Nobody describes a Furby or an Elf On The Shelf as a “robot”.)
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