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Metatag survey results, part 4: Final thoughts
Previously…
In September 2024, AO3 tag wrangling admins synned the tag for “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms” to “Sherlock (TV)”, shocking and horrifying Holmes fans of all stripes. After an unprecedented backlash, they put it back. (Or should I say…put it Reichenbach. /rimshot)
(Trivia: When somebody needs to dump a huge task on the tag-indexing part of the servers, admins will turn off wrangling-in-general for the rest of us while the huge task is being processed. For the Holmes reinstatement, “we’re turning it off” was announced in wrangler chat at 11:28 PM on September 4, and “it’s back on now” at 12:45 AM on September 5.)
A post on the official AO3 Tumblr announced that no further changes would be made to metatags until we had a committee-wide discussion about how/if the Fandom Metatag Policies should change. Meanwhile, I threw together a completely-unofficial survey to ask how people use metatags.
And now: one last post about that.
(The AO3 upload of this post is now the definitive version -- any corrections/edits will be made there.)
Questions 1 through 3
The survey itself is closed, you can’t look at it directly anymore, but the previous writeup posts have the full text of the first 3 questions:
1: What fandom metatags on AO3 do you personally use?
2: Do you have fandoms with separate tags that you wish had a metatag?
3: Do you have fandoms with separate tags that you wish were combined?
You can also browse a copy of the raw survey results, with the answers to question 5 redacted.
A note about attribution:
The original survey said that responses would be public. Question 5 gave respondents the option to identify themselves by AO3 username, and said you should leave that answer blank if you wanted to stay anonymous.
Nobody who took the survey gave any feedback (either good or bad!) about this. But when I shared the results with other people, they would often be concerned that not all survey-takers realized the responses would be public, and might have wanted to stay anonymous but left their usernames anyway.
If you were one of the 16 people who identified yourself, and that was on purpose and you want your username un-redacted, comment and let me know! If not, carry on.
And now, Question 4
Any other thoughts about fandom tags?
(Example: if you’re in any fandoms with combined tags that you wish were separated, you can mention them here.)
This was totally open-ended, so I’m not going to try to quantify the results and give you numbers or statistics. Just going to pull out some common themes, with relevant quotes.
In general…users like fandom metatags. They really like metatags:
“As a writer I appreciate umbrella metatags for giving me a convenient way to categorise adaptational AUs unconnected from specific stories within a canon.”
“I don’t browse fandom tags if there’s multiple series/canons and no umbrella metatag, it means I have to use multiple search tabs and rapidly becomes an organisational nightmare.”
“Metatags take non-trivial work and resources to maintain, but IMO they are the single most useful feature on the AO3.”
“Tag trees are great! I think entirely separating fandoms (of straightforward adaptations) without an AMT tag for spoiler reasons violates the spirit of an archive.”
“Honestly, for all my biggest fandoms I only ever browse meta tags because nearly all of them have a lot of continuities/alternative universes/different versions and I want a catch-all.”
“AMT serves a purpose both to readers and to creators. Taking it away does nothing but cause greater confusion.”
“The complete opposite of removing All Media Types should happen. If something has more than one canon version it should get one.”
Several people gave more detail about why they want/like metatags for specific fandoms they’re in:
“Every single one of [the Graverobber’s Chronicals/the Last Tomb] shows takes a different chunk of the story (with some overlap) sometimes even using the same actors and there is no. Umbrella. Tag. Its incredibly annoying to tag fics for this bc not only do you have to remember the name of all the different shows, you have to remember what happend in which show if you really want to tag accurately. I have a fic that’s tagged for 4 shows with no other fandom involved, and I’ve seen and read fics with many more tagged.”
“The Adventure Zone fandom tag should really be split into several tags; the podcast has grown to be more like an anthology series, where every campaign is a different story set in a different and entirely unconnected universe. This is not unique to this show, though. Almost all actual play TTRPG shows like Dimension 20, Critical Role, and Friends at the Table, among many others, have the same anthology structure when they go on for long enough.”
“I really wish that fandoms where the canon is itself an original work on ao3 wouldn’t have the fandom name synned to “”original work””. eg Superstition Hockey. and Silver in the Wood, and Winter’s Orbit, before they became professionally published.”
“i’m in the bbc sherlock fandom but i’m very heavily on the mormor side of things (jim moriarty/sebastian moran) except sebastian moran doesn’t exist in bbc sherlock canon, he exists in acd canon and several other adaptations. for me i like it because the stories i’m looking for are harder to define as one singular “show” bc without the “other related fandoms” tag, one of the characters will just not exist in either direction”
A few existing metatags that people had more-mixed feelings about:
“I a little bit wish Baldur’s Gate wasn’t under the D&D metatag, but it’s trivially easy to filter out from results.”
“I also think a lot of fandom metatags are badly/confusingly named but still useful, and also that a lot of the larger/older metag trees have confusing levels (why do we have both Doctor Who and Doctor Who and Related Fandoms? No, well, I do know the answer, I was there, but it’s a stupid reason.)”
“Not a huge deal, I guess, since you can use filters to exclude the Hiveswap tag [from Homestuck] if you REALLY don’t want to see Hiveswap fic, and Hiveswap has way fewer fics so it’s not like it’s clogging up search results too much. But it is a little annoying. Though honestly Hiveswap is closely related enough that I’m not sure it should be separated out any more than it is anyway? I don’t know, mixed feelings.”
People have nuanced thoughts about the issue of “Anime & Manga” combo tags:
“I initially put Naruto (Anime and Manga); BNHA (Anime and Manga); and Bleach (Anime and Manga) in my answer to the first question because, while they don’t have any subtags, the new phrasing (“”Anime and Manga””) makes it sound like they could be meta tags if the wranglers decide to make separate anime and manga tags. […] I still wanted to list them, because I am worried about the Tag Wranglers splitting them up.”
“I can see the utility in keeping (Anime) and (Manga) tags in some cases, as some people may have only seen the anime and want to filter out fics likely to contain manga spoilers. Even in that case, there should still be an (Anime & Manga) tag for people who have read the manga and want to see all of it. Although, it may not be the most necessary, since most authors write in the tags or summary that their fic may contain manga spoilers.”
“I feel like any ongoing adaptation of an existing work, where there’s more source material than the adaptation has covered (yet) (so like a manga that’s currently being adapted to anime but the anime isn’t caught up to the latest manga plot) should definitely have separate tags with a broader metatag above it, so that folks looking to avoid spoilers can search for adaptation-specific content, folks who want stories focusing on later spoilery stuff can search the source material’s tag, and folks who don’t care/just want to see everything can search the main metatag.”
Also, thoughts about when fanworks get popular enough to have their own distinctive sub-fandoms:
“I also wish there was an easy way to split between Undertale-related fic focused primarily on canon versions of characters and fic based on the expanded fanon universe or on fan-created games like Undertale Yellow. I’m probably just being whiny, but at this point, it feels like the vast majority of Undertale fic is about some alternate version of Sans or another, probably involving at least one other alternate Sans, and I would really like to be able to find fic that focuses in on the canon characters more easily.”
“I’m in the Homestuck fandom and kind of wish fics for fan adventures like Vast Error (which has entirely different characters) weren’t lumped under it”
“This fic has a small fandom around it, with over 600 fics on AO3. People are pretty good at tagging it “”Rigel Black Chronicles – murkybluematter”” however if you click that tag, you don’t get those 600+ fics, instead it brings you to the Harry Potter tag, which is fairly useless. There are often times when synning tags makes sense in 90% of situations, but for that 10% it would be nice to not have the syn.”
Ending on a high note, at least one fandom-tag wish has been fulfilled since the survey was posted:
“I wish that Pokemon Horizons had a separate tag from the rest of the Pokemon anime – it has completely different characters/plots” –> Followed up in this thread: “When they got back to me they had not only canonized the character and relationship tags but said that they were giving Horizons an entire separate fandom tag”
Nice!
…and that’s a wrap on these writeups!
Look, obviously this survey isn’t a statistically-random sample. It wasn’t peer-reviewed, results are not comprehensive, and if anyone wants to show me up by releasing a better one, I’d be thrilled.
But I’m really glad I did it. Got to read a lovely range of opinions, some of them dealing with tag situations I might never have thought of, involving fandoms I’ve never been in. Extra thanks to those of you who wrote long detailed responses. Even if we’re not on the same wavelength about a thing, I appreciated having a chance to read it.
I know there’s no single AO3 tag policy that will make every user happy. But I really hope it can shift into something that’s more functional, for as many of you as possible.
Still arguing the Anime & Manga tag splitting lol
I have encountered this argument frequently over the past 7 months, but I don't find it particularly relevant or convincing. For one thing "what is spoilers" is a moving target for serialized media (often two or more moving targets for animanga franchises, if the anime, manga, light novel etc. are all still updating); canonical fandom tags are a crude method to track those moving targets. Is it really worth making search harder for the rest of us for all the future years, just to have an (implicit, crude) spoilers filter now?
[Also, not everyone is keeping up with things as-they-update. Personally all of my "oops, spoilers" moments on AO3 have come from years old TV shows that I'd like to watch but haven't gotten to yet.]
My other concern is that I'm not even convinced it works as a crude spoilers filter. Sure, it will probably catch *most* of them (that "likely" in the quoted bit). But it's not gonna catch them all, and it only takes one mention slipping through to spoil you. Maybe a fic author is only writing for the anime but they react to manga spoilers in their author's notes -- I've seen it happen before. And moving beyond fanfic fandom, I've seen the drama around manga leaks. Frankly if you're that concerned about spoilers the best thing to do is to avoid the internet as a whole, AO3 included.
Sub-fandoms for fanworks
2. I definitely don't have the full story here, and poking around Fanlore and various Dreamwidth comms hasn't elucidated matter so far, but I think in 2018 or 2019 Dreaming of Sunshine fandom tried to get nominated on Yuletide?? Nowadays it would be a moot point, they're over 1k fanworks I'm pretty sure, but back in 2019 this probably wasn't true. It's hard to say though because all DOS tags are synned to Naruto, of course >.>
Honestly though the undertale situation sounds much more frustrating than these two, though, because it's *multiple* recursive fan communities you have to filter out. (There's other Zelda and Naruto recursive fandom communities but none nearly so big, at least afaik.)
EDIT 2: [I'll put this here instead of making a third post] I don't know if I've said this yet, but THANK YOU TIMES A MILLION for both running this survey *and* writing such detailed, comprehensive analyses of the results!! I also feel like I've learned a lot that has helped inform my thinking on fandom tags (and, I'm just some opinionated yay-hoo, but now my opinions are *somewhat more broadly evidence based*!)