humanist + humorist

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.)

I also dropped some Random Things that I picked up through the irregular process of “checked out a new canon, enjoyed it, went to see if there was any fic on AO3, found an unwrangled fandom with 1 work.” Stuff like Phoebe in Wonderland (2008), Gary and His Demons (Cartoon), or Her Voice is a Backwards Record – Ozy Brennan. They almost certainly won’t suffer if they stay unwrangled for a while.

(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.)

344 down, 733 more to go…

In that last post about pruning my tag-wrangling assignments, I mentioned the “got 1 fic, the fandom tag got canonized, then nobody ever used it again” fandoms.

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.)