humanist + humorist

The guide to AO3 tagging that I wrote in 2013, and last updated in 2017 was wildly out-of-date! Who could’ve guessed?

Just finished giving it a significant rewrite. Fixed a bunch of links. Updated some technical and policy references. Should hold us steady for a while.

(I put it in a series with the new AO3 upload of the Metatag Survey results, that’s what prompted the revisit.)

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Speaking of revisiting older works…

A few weeks ago, I got through a reread of the two main fics of Republic of Heaven Community Radio. When I was posting the last of it in 2015, it was right around the time I dropped the canon, for being deeply upsetting in ways that I finally realized weren’t going to get better. Spent a lot of time not revisiting even my own fic, because the reminders were too unpleasant. So…this is the first time in 10 years that I’ve actually reread it.

Book 1 holds up really well!

Book 2 has so many pacing issues. There are elements I introduced but never did anything interesting with, that should’ve either been expanded or dropped. Scenes that should’ve been explicit foreshadowing/buildup for other scenes later on. At least one conversation that happens after a fight, that I wish had written happening before the fight. A few moments that would’ve felt solidly, thematically linked if they all happened in the same chapter, but they’re spread out in a way that feels scattershot and disjointed instead.

If canon hadn’t been such a kick in the teeth, I would’ve done a rewrite of this years ago. I can see the outline of a better version, the way all the parts would’ve been reshaped into a stronger whole.

…Which still doesn’t mean I have the interest or motivation to actually do that whole rewriting project. Just feeling wistful about the alternate universe where I still had the drive to do it in 2017.

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In happier news, I just recently started a reread of The Dark Lords of Nerima. (Or rather, I’m having a TTS app read it to me. At work, mostly. Needed a change of pace from podcasts.)

It’s the first of 3 parts in a long, involved crossover, in which the Ranma 1/2 crew get involved in the Sailor-Senshi-versus-Dark-Kingdom conflict when they take in a fugitive youma, get mistaken for a powerful new enemy by both sides, and realize their safest move is to just…play along. Shenanigans ensue.

The writing of Rumiko-Takahashi-style comedy is sublime. I remembered it was good, but not how good it was, or that it was on-point from the start. At the same time, it puts so much thought and detail into making the Dark Kingdom an ancient, terrifying threat that everyone takes seriously. The plot-inciting youma is a well-drawn OC, who starts off just playing both sides and looking out for herself…but then, wouldn’t you know it, the Power of Friendship starts to get her.

So that’s going much better!

Highly recommended, even if you don’t know both series. It does a lovely job of (re)introducing all the characters and helping you keep track of them, even the massive Ranma ensemble, plus it fills out the ranks of the Dark Kingdom with other original youma who fit right in.

…also, hey, Netflix has the 2024 Ranma anime remake? This might be what pushes me to check it out.

Cool video: Using AO3’s data dump from a few years ago to build unreasonably-detailed maps of tags — characters, relationships, then freeforms — and how they relate to each other:
 

Fandom synning annoyance of the day: Marvel wranglers decided to syn the “Captain America (Movies)” tag to a new “Captain America (Chris Evans Movies)” tag. (They also made a separate “Captain America (Anthony Mackie Movies)” tag.)

A lot of writers use specific movie titles as fandom tags. It makes sense to me if you want to syn things like “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” to a general Evans tag, and “Captain America: Brave New World” to a general Mackie tag.

But they’ve taken away the option for a “general Cap subset of the MCU” tag. If you previously used the general tag because you wanted to include the entire ongoing Captain America series, movies 1-4 and beyond, this goes “nope, that’s not what you meant, you were only writing about the first 3.” If you were following the general tag because you wanted to read about the whole series, you now have a feed that excludes fic about the Sam-centric movies. If you miss that this even happened, and don’t update your feeds, a lot of Sam fic will just never be shown to you.

…and yeah, I’m aware that I don’t, personally, write enough Cap fic of any kind for my opinion on this to matter to anyone! Which is why I’m not out campaigning for them to change it, just grumbling on my own blog about it.

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Wrangling annoyance of the day that we actually can blame on users: A bunch of wranglers did an audit on the tag “pinning” (currently not canonical, and not synned to anything).

Of the works it’s used on, 27.9% actually involve “pinning.” The other 72.1% are by writers who don’t know how to spell “pining.”

There are a lot of good reasons why we shouldn’t mass-email thousands of random AO3 users and say “hey, fix your spelling.” I get that. But sometimes I daydream about it anyway.

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Some actual progress with No Fandom freeforms is happening behind the scenes.

You might think we should be publicizing that more. It’s good! It’s progress! People should hear good news about wrangling sometimes!

But: if we make a celebratory post about “good news, we synned Tag X”, it’ll get a thousand responses going “wait, Tag X has existed since 2014, why are you so dysfunctional that nobody managed to syn it until 2024? Also, when are you going to get to the equally-obvious problems with tags Y, and Z, and–“

And, let’s be real, none of these complaints are unfair.

But: We have a process for synning things like Tag X now. This is one of many things where TW leadership has spent a decade holding out for the Perfect Process, and in the meantime we had No Process At All, which has built up a terrifyingly large backlog.

What if there’s an official public post about it…the post gets negative reinforcement…someone gets spooked, they pull the plug on the whole thing…and we go back to having No Process At All? That would be worse on every level. Nobody wants to risk that. We hates it, precious.

So, yeah. Positive things are happening somewhere. Wranglers are mostly not talking about it. For at least some of us, this is why.

I got a shoutout in the “thanks to some of our patrons” section from this episode of Hello From The Magic Tavern! I never listen to the credits, someone else going through the archive pointed it out to me, which is why it’s from July 2023 and I’m only realizing it now. Neat.

(I’m not a regular supporter, I just jump in for a month every so often to download a new batch of episodes. They get so many patrons, I can’t imagine them thanking everyone, but maybe they do? Or maybe I just got lucky with the timing.)

*

After some aggressive weeding of my Youtube recommendations, I finally got it to go back to reccing new videos (a) from channels I’m not already watching (b) that are relevant to my interests! (Fingers crossed that this lasts.)

Mini-vent from watching some new-to-me DID Youtubers: there’s a purported statistic of how 1% of the population actually has DID, and it gets repeated by so many people in the community…

And none of them mention what study it’s from. Pretty sure they’re all quoting each other. I finally found a couple real studies with the number! …They cited it as coming from other studies, which cited it from other studies.

Long story short, I would bet money that every single mention of this stat goes back to this one paper: Sar V, Akyuz G, Dogan O, 2007. Prevalence of dissociative disorders among women in the general population. Psychiatry Res. 149, 169–176. 10.1016/j.psychres.2006.01.005

The title already tells you they were only surveying women. The abstract clarifies that they only surveyed women from one specific city in Turkey. And that “1.1% rate of DID” number…seems to be based on the subjects’ results from “filling out the DDIS one time”? (Anyone with time and access to read the full text — if they were actually diagnosed based on something more, please drop a comment to clarify.)

All of this was published in 2007. And I haven’t found any sign of these results being replicated or verified in any other study in the 14 years since.

I don’t think we can call this one a win, folks.

*

Mentioned this on Mastodon back around Holmesageddon, keep meaning to document it here:

“Thankfully [group] came to its senses and changed back to the old policy” sounds exactly like someone complaining about AO3 wrangling decisions, right?

It’s a quote from a professional in my library’s cataloging department, talking about the professionals at the United States Library of Congress.

It’s true the OTW doesn’t always get advice from experts. And yeah, there are ways in which the org has noticeably suffered for it. But sometimes I see “if only AO3 hired professional librarians to handle the tagging system, they would all agree on how to categorize things and never make bad decisions”…and, no. Not how it works. Sure wish it was. But nope.

Previously, in responses to the Quick AO3 Metatag Survey.: the results for question 1, and the results for question 2.

Now it’s a trilogy, because here’s a writeup of question 3!

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

The Question

Do you have any fandoms on AO3 that only have separate tags, that you wish were just combined into one tag?

(Example: some users who read fic for “呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Anime)” and “呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Manga)” have said that they would prefer one combined “呪術廻戦 | Jujutsu Kaisen (Anime & Manga)” tag. This would mean that all the works appear together, and can’t be filtered on separately, similar to “Naruto (Anime & Manga)“.)

As always, list as many or as few as you want!

The People Who Said No

The survey says upfront that you can leave any answer blank — but for this question, 8 people took the time to write variations of “No/None”, making it the most popular response!

Several people elaborated on their answer. Excerpted comments:

• “I understand why this kind of tag combining is suggested, but I personally am opposed.”
• “None, I see no reason to not have separate tags if an All Media Types tag also exists. The only cases this is a problem is when there isn’t an appropriate umbrella tag to allow similar versions to be visible together.”
• “No, never. A metatag with child tags for each adaptation/fandom would be my preferred way to handle this situation.”

The General “Anime & Manga” Requests

The second-most-popular response (3 respondents each) was a tie between JJK and “a general statement about anime fandoms.”

All 3 of these elaborated on their answers. Excerpted comments:

• “probably any anime that’s an adaption of a manga or LN and that’s come out in the last five years”
• “Basically any anime & manga fandom where the difference between different versions is negligible”
• “Basically every single big JPN media mix franchise. […] it makes finding stuff way harder, makes it basically impossible to filter out crossovers, and I don’t understand why these aren’t mixed- they’re very straight adaptations!”

The Specific Fandom Requests

Nearly all the specific fandoms were about canons that tell close adaptations of the same story:

3 requests to merge Jujutsu Kaisen (anime, manga)

2 requests to merge SPY x FAMILY (anime, manga)

1 request each to merge:

• Bocchi the Rock (anime, manga)
• Chainsaw Man (anime, manga)
• Demon Slayer (anime, manga)
• Given (anime, manga)
• Monogatari (manga, anime, light novels)
• The S-Classes That I Raised (webtoon, webnovel)
• Toilet-Bound Hanako-Kun (anime, manga)
• Tokyo Revengers (anime, manga, live-action film, spinoff manga)

And 1 request for “Arrowverse. Or I’d take a metatag for it, at least.” This was the only response that refers to a shared universe for several canons that tell different intersecting stories. Gonna take a wild guess here: what they really want is a metatag. (Most fandom tags that say “Arrowverse” seem to be synned to the Arrow TV series.)

(I’ve left out 1 final request because it involved merging freeform tags, not fandom tags.)

Process thoughts

In the interest of keeping the survey short, there are a lot of questions I didn’t ask…including “what already-existing multimedia-combo fandom tags on AO3 do you personally use?”

Kinda wish I had put that in, now! It’s definitely worth investigating in the future.

Some of them got mentioned anyway. Several people answered the the “what metatags do you use?” question with combo tags, mostly “Anime & Manga” ones (BNHA, Hikaru no Go, One Piece, and Yu-Gi-Oh). More came up in response to question 4 (writeup TBD). And, anecdotally, whenever this discussion goes around social media, I see people mentioning specific “Anime & Manga” tags they use, expressing the fear that AO3 will split them up. If I had asked about it directly, there’s no telling how many more would’ve been named.

On the flip side — combo tags also got a notable amount of pushback. Some responses pointed out existing combo tags they want to be split into separate tags, or currently-separate fandom tags that they actively don’t want to see merged. Two specific fandoms in the “please make a combo tag for this” (JJK and Demon Slayer) also came up in the “please make a metatag for this” results! So it’s not a clear-cut case of “here’s the one policy AO3 users overwhelmingly prefer.”

(The response to AMTs was way more one-sided. I don’t think a single person pointed out an existing All Media Types metatag and said “I wish this would get synned to the most popular subtag.”)

One thing I really want to highlight, though:

Even when users felt strongly about not combining the fandom tags for different versions of a canon, they want those versions linked with a metatag instead.

“Separate fandom tags for different versions, no metatag at all” is the worst of both worlds. Nobody likes that.

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.”

Some time recently, AO3 tag wranglers de-canonized the “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms” metatag. This involved detaching the fandom subtags for almost 100 different Holmes-related adaptations, reboots, and spinoffs, and then making the “Related Fandoms” metatag into a synonym of “Sherlock (TV)“.

I don’t actually know when the switch was made (though it couldn’t have been more than 4 weeks ago), but within the past week, fandom-at-large (a) noticed, (b) was horrified, and (c) inundated AO3 Support with a flood of complaints.

The fallout is being discussed all over the place — here’s a nice roundup of some reaction links — and there’s a heck of a lot of misinformation swirling around. Gonna try to set some of it straight here.

Disclosure: I’m a wrangler. An average one, not a supervisor or a chair. I don’t wrangle any Holmes-related fandoms, and was not part of the Holmes &RF discussion. This is supposed to be a facts-and-info post; any personal opinions that do show up are my own, not speaking on behalf of any other wrangler(s).

There are some links to individual fics in here — they’re not supposed to represent “good tagging” or “bad tagging”, they’re just examples of “a kind of tagging somebody has done.” Please don’t be weird to the authors.

AO3 stuff:

“PSA: there’s a negative comment bot active right now […] Mark them as spam so that AO3 can start filtering them out.“

Cloudflare does a retrospective on last year’s DDOS attacks: “Within three hours of applying to Project Galileo, the OTW was accepted into the project, configured their nameservers to point to Cloudflare, and successfully got the AO3 site back online. According to the systems chair, “The impact was immediate.””

Digital artist stuff:

“One of the reasons why social media is so popular is that it gives us the impression that we’re working hard, while avoiding exposing ourselves emotionally in the same way we do in 1–to–1 communication.” Ways to get clients in 2024 that aren’t social media.

Hey, who wants some exciting cutting-edge blockchain news? “Wacom Yuify is a service, in beta for Adobe, that enables digital artists and photographers to permanently record ownership of their work on [an unspecified blockchain].”

Wait, did I say cutting-edge news? I meant a stale rehash of the same “use cases” people were pitching in 2018. (With the slight tweak that they have…uh…reinvented the watermark. Maybe one of these years they’ll even catch up to where DeviantArt Protect was in 2018.)

And how did the blockchain-ownership-record plan work out in 2018, you ask…? “Long story short, I convinced them that I painted the Mona Lisa.”

AO3 got a wave of spam comments a few weeks ago (including lots of “I bet this junk was written with [AI program the bot is advertising]” abuse), and part of their response was, new works are now default-marked as “only registered users can comment.”

If you, like me, enjoy getting guest comments but will definitely not remember to change the default setting every time you post something new, here’s a little browser script to automatically swap it back.

Feels like part of a much bigger sea change in how people use the internet. When blogs were widespread but social-media sites hadn’t really taken off, “allow guest comments” was…kind of the expectation? Forums were big there too, and it wasn’t expected on forums, but every WordPress-based blog defaults to allowing them, every Livejournal fork (including Dreamwidth) defaults to allowing them.

(This is only feasible if you have some robust spam-filtering software underneath. I just checked Leif & Thorn, there are 8 garbage comments in the spam filter right now. Including, hilariously, one that says “why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your weblog when you could be giving us something informative to read?” Guess how many videos are in that post. Go on, guess.)

The next generation of platforms, you have to be logged-in just to interact. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Youtube…on and on and on. All of them want to be their own little walled gardens.

Protocols like OpenID have been around that whole time! We have the software for (say) Facebook to accept a Tumblr login as a recognized “account” and vice versa! But the corporate will to adopt it isn’t there. Facebook doesn’t want users to have the option of using another site as their home base. They want everyone to be forced to use Facebook, or else.

AO3 was specifically built by Livejournal content-purge refugees, so it has LJ-style defaults built in. I bet nobody signing up for AO3 in 2024 has used LJ. I wonder how many of them have ever used any other platform that allowed guest comments? There have to be a lot of users who never thought “I want to turn off the guest-comments option” because it didn’t occur to them that guest comments are A Thing Platforms Let You Do in the first place.

On the one hand, there’s something to be said for meeting people where they’re at. User-friendliness is good!

On the other…not allowing guest comments is something FB/T/T/IG/YT/etc do to force signups, drive up their profits, juice their statistics for the benefit of advertisers and investors. It’s a bummer that this ethos has gotten so entrenched in the internet-at-large that AO3 — which has none of those motives! — is still getting swept along with it.

I just hope they never get pressured to remove the option completely. AO3 is not a corporate walled garden — it’s a community for anyone who cares about fanfiction, whether you take the extra step and make an account, or not. We deserve communities like that! We deserve, in general, an internet where platforms like that still exist.

Wrote up recs for a couple webcomic collections, and got them into this 13 Best Books With Gay Protagonists list! (Pretty sure it’s not “13 best” so much as “the only 13 recs we got,” but still. A little good publicity never hurts.)

“The numbers just look worse with every new change, and Diamond didn’t change the things that I think most [local comic shops] actually are concerned about the most (like shipping costs) ” From 2022, but the nerdy business details are enlightening.

“Critics came up with a narrative that I was promoting shoplifting. Which as you might know is crimes, and thus should be mocked and ridiculed. But something was different this time…”

“…books by marginalized authors are more often tagged with triggering content than books by white authors on The StoryGraph (where readers can tag books with triggering content). […] Another issue surrounding trigger warnings and marginalized authors is how often these get tagged for content that does not exist on the book.” When readers have unlimited power to tag works, that power gets weaponized against the most vulnerable.

Ranking of the top 50 most-trafficked Arts & Entertainment websites in the world. A couple years ago, AO3 was #7 (topped only by Youtube, Netflix, Wikia, Spotify, IMDB, and the Chinese entertainment site Bilibili). Now it’s down to #12 (bumped by HBO, MiguVideo, Aniwave, DisneyPlus, and Pixiv). Can’t begrudge Pixiv the traffic, and AO3 is still #1 in terms of Sites To Read Fiction On. (Wattpad is a ways below, fanfiction.net no longer shows up in the top 50.)

“Nona lives in a genre where the back blurb is, ‘How do you deal with the world’s most embarrassing family — AND school?! How do you cope when the biggest jerk in the universe … turns out to be your secret crush’s out-of-town cousin?!?!’ Everyone else in the book is living in a docudrama where you get a message at the beginning saying, ‘Caution: Disturbing scenes will follow.'” Fun Tamsyn Muir interview from before the NtN release.

“I spent five years trying to get this stupid job and now that I have it I’m not going to hire it out to somebody else. The whole pleasure for me is having the opportunity to do a comic strip for a living, and now that I’ve finally got that I’m not going to give it away.” Not sure Bill Watterson has done new interviews for decades, but this is an old one, and a fun read.

As seen on my flist, most recently from genarti .

I was going to start this with a link to the last time I did a meme about the stats on my AO3 account…but apparently I have straight-up never done one!

Welp, no time like the present.

Most hits: He Says He Is An Experimental Theologian (114,570). First installment of the “retelling Welcome to Night Vale with daemons, also filling in gaps in the character development” AU, which spent a long time as my most-popular series overall…and wow, it turns 10 years old this November.

The runner-up is Cover of Knight (94,025), first installment in my current most-popular series. The overall series is still ongoing, so it’s racking up the hits more quickly; it’s not a question of if it overtakes Experimental Theologian, but when.

Most kudos: Cover of Knight (4,835). First installment of the “Team Moon Knight interacts with other Marvel Cinematic Universe characters, with increasing shenanigans to cover up the fact that they’re a plural system” series. Started in late June 2022, had already taken the crown by late November. Has the advantage of being episodic, so even if you’re mainly a fan of just one MCU sub-franchise, you can read those specific chapter(s), find them satisfying, and maybe get hooked into reading the rest.

I expected Experimental Theologian (2,546) to be the runner-up, but no, Persephone’s Waltz (2,559) has just-barely overtaken it! My longest and most popular Madoka Magica fic, the “what if Homura just locked Madoka in a basement for a month” timeline. These two are both enduringly popular, so I can see them continuing to trade off second place for a while.

Most comment threads: A Blinking Light Up On The Clouded Mountain (1,313), the second major installment of the WTNV-with-daemons AU. It has dramatically fewer hits (65,194) than Experimental Theologian; seems like the more casual readers dropped off, but the ones who were invested enough to comment stuck around, and commented more as the drama and mystery leveled up.

Cover of Knight (1,291) is a close runner-up. Reveals by Knight (224), the major follow-up to CoK, is still way down the list — I’m just noting it here because it gets more comments per chapter than CoK did, and I plan on making it at least as many chapters. Check back in a year.

Most bookmarks: Cover of Knight (1,233). Probably recently surpassed the runner-up, Experimental Theologian (1,058).

Most words: Clouded Mountain (313,788). Dramatically outstripping the runner-up, Experimental Theologian (182,093). Cover of Knight (56,605) is all the way down in 8th place.

The #3 place is taken by State of Grace (108,448), the Colbert Report “what if character!Stephen was plural” fic — which doesn’t even come close to any of the other stat records! It was written before I got an AO3 account and then crossposted, so the bulk of the interaction was back on the Livejournal/Dreamwidth version.

Fewest words: A four-way tie between a series of “exactly 100 words” fics. Three for WTNV: On Schedule (boy, this one turned out way too optimistic), Serenity Prayer (creepy and unsettling by design), and the way you flip your hair gets me overwhelmed (just fluff). One for Jeeves & Wooster: Lemon (a pun on its use to mean “NSFW”).

I know I’ve also done a bunch of “exactly 100 words” fics for the Colbert Report — but these were also pre-AO3, and only got crossposted as part of bigger TCR fic compilations, so you can’t just find them in the stats.

Final observation: Only have to post 10 more Moon Knight fics before it becomes my 2nd-most-written fandom! (By number of works, not by word count. I’m not going to sit around and manually add up word counts.)

It would need 59 works on top of that to take 1st place. Which seems like a less-reachable goal, if only because the energy I would usually put into “standalone one-shots” is mostly going into “mostly-standalone episodic chapters in the Cover of Knight universe.” But 2nd place? Yeah, that’s on the horizon.