erinptah | Metatag survey results, part 1: The Tags People Use

I was planning to post a synthesis of the Quick AO3 Metatag Survey results once they hit a nice round number. And, hey, we got to 50!

Going to split this across separate posts, because each batch of answers is refreshingly long. Today: the answers to the first question.

(The AO3 upload of this post is now the definitive version -- any corrections/edits will be made there.)

The Question

“What fandom metatags on AO3 do you personally use? This includes any kind of use — as a writer, a reader, or both. (No need to get detailed about how you use them, just the tag name(s) are fine.)

List as many as you want! If the answer is “none of them”, go ahead and leave the answer blank.”

Process notes

I didn’t ask upfront for the exact canonical format of each tag. Didn’t want people to feel anxious about not being counted because they remembered wrong.

Some respondents typed the canonicals in anyway! (Special thanks to you folks, for going the extra mile.)

Whether or not you did, this roundup has matched all the mentioned metatags to their specific AO3 link. If I wasn’t sure exactly which tag someone meant, there’s a comment about the ambiguity.

Metatags that are very close in the same tree have been grouped together in this post. Feel free to rearrange the groups, and analyze them in whatever way makes most sense to you.

The Numbers: Metatags

24 total mentions of the higher-level Marvel tags: 13 for the film-and-TV Marvel Cinematic Universe, 6 for the most-general metatag Marvel, 4 for Marvel (Comics), and 1 for the individual comicverse Marvel 616

16 mentions of Star Wars tags: 13 for the topmost metatag Star Wars – All Media Types, 2 specifically mentioning Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) – All Media Types, and 1 for Star Wars Legends – All Media Types

13 respondents named Batman in some form: 9 for Batman – All Media Types, 1 for Batman (Comics), and 3 that just said “Batman” (probably meaning the AMT, but possibly the comics)

11 more named Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms. Not quite the top of the list, but it’s up here

11 respondents cited either DCU, or its direct subtag DCU (Comics)

11 more mentioned Star Trek. No abbreviations, no guessing about the format, everyone typed in “Star Trek” exactly.

9 total mentions of the Tolkien metatags to rule them all: 4 for TOLKIEN J. R. R. – Works & Related Fandoms, 3 for The Lord of the Rings – All Media Types, 2 for The Hobbit – All Media Types

5 respondents cited Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, or its direct subtag Doctor Who

Metatags that people brought up 4 times:

These were mentioned 3 times:

These came up 2 times:

Discworld – Terry Pratchett
Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Harry Potter – J. K. Rowling [functionally an AMT for the franchise; its subtags include spinoff movies and video games]
PIERCE Tamora – Works
Stargate – All Media Types
Twilight Series – All Media Types
X-Men – All Media Types and X-Men (Comicverse) [broader and narrower metatags respectively, 1 use each]

And these were in 1 response each:

The Numbers: Other Tags

Some responses brought up fandom tags that aren’t metatags, but they encompass multiple media types (the types just don’t have their own separately-filterable subtags).

Worth knowing! It indicates that wranglers shouldn’t split any of these unless we still have a metatag joining them:

僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia (Anime & Manga)
ヒカルの碁 | Hikaru no Go (Anime & Manga)
One Piece (Anime & Manga)
The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth – J. R. R. Tolkien [catch-all tag for multiple books]
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga) [this person might also have been trying to say they use the franchise metatag, Yu-Gi-Oh! Series]

Finally, the other non-metatags that came up.

Before anyone tries to write these off as “aha, it’s the infamous Users Who Are Confused About Metatags” — most of them are still pretty obviously relevant.

Two people brought up James Bond – All Media Types as a metatag they used, when it was a metatag. (It was decanonized in the same way that Holmes &RF briefly was, and is currently synned to James Bond (Craig Movies).)

1 person each cited these:

The Avengers (Marvel) – All Media Types [previously a metatag, currently synned to The Avengers (Marvel Movies)]
Bandom [previously a metatag; this one’s a special case, see the official update post on Tumblr]
The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth (2011) [a subtag of The Eagle | The Eagle of the Ninth – All Media Types; the submitter might have just meant the AMT]
Men’s Hockey RPF [might be a reference to the fact that more generic tags, like Hockey RPF, are synned to this]
Moon Knight (TV 2022) [might be a reference to the fact that non-media-specific tags, like Marvel Moon Knight, are synned to this]
Original Work [catch-all tag for a wide range of unrelated works]

Extra Thoughts

There’s a space at the end of the survey for more general Metatag Thoughts…but the responses were totally open, so some people threw in extra comments here.

A few that stuck out to me:

Multiple respondents said their list of “tags they use” wasn’t comprehensive. There wasn’t any kind of site tracking here, people were just going off their memories, so there were several variations of “probably other fandoms too that I’m not remembering.”

Three people brought up anime/manga fandoms as a blanket category, e.g. citing “any manga and anime fandoms that exist” as metatags they use. Overall disappointment with the splitting-up of Japanese (and Chinese) fandom tags will be a recurring theme, here.

Two people pointed out they use metatags differently when writing vs. reading. Although they tag their own fic with specific adaptations, they prefer to read from the fandom’s general metatag.

One person said “in general none exist for the fandoms I write for, or read fic from. If they did exist, I would use them.”

When tag wranglers do get our fandoms organized into metatag trees…people use them. People are happy to have them. The fact that we’ve put together this many useful connections is great!

And it is genuinely depressing that, at the same time, we’re still failing some users this hard.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You mentioned BNHA in a later question, this was a different respondent who put it in the first one!

Thanks for all the thoughts. It's really enlightening to see breakdowns of how many different issues can be important to a specific fandom tree. (And sad to know some users are explicitly thinking "I won't write to AO3 about this because I'm afraid wranglers will make it worse.")

Ah, my bad! I have been writing up some comments on the OW tag and FMA as well, but maybe i'll wait until your posts about the later questions, b/c they're mostly respsonses to specific survey responses to later questions (if that makes sense)

Anyways, in case I didn't already say it clearly -- thank you for running the survey! The collected response are giving me a lot to think about <3

Metatag survey results, part 1: The Tags People Use