The guide to AO3 tagging that I wrote in 2013, and last updated in 2017 was wildly out-of-date!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.
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.
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.
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 have now tracked down a copy of the 1st edition, from 1992!
All of the “dónde…?” questions (five of them, across three sample dialogues) are the same. And the vocabulary list at the end of the booklet confirms “biblioteca” is not in here.
There was a moment when I wondered if Barron’s didn’t change anything at all, just reused exactly the same text in every re-release over the decades. Then I noticed, the restaurant recommendation in Dialogue 4.a is different. (Did they lose a sponsorship deal with the place from the 1992 version?)
They also updated the dialogues that have references to currency. The letter from 4.b that cost 75 pesetas in 1992, it’s 1.36 euros in 2004.
But yeah, as far as las bibliotecas go, it’s a dead end.
There are a bunch of other “learn Spanish” cassette tapes by different companies on eBay. Way too many for me to buy and inspect them all. I was willing to drop $20 to indulge this curiosity; I’m not blowing $200 on it. So this may be the end of the story.
(If you have any of these tapes on hand, and can confirm/deny whether your brand has the biblioteca line, please comment and let me know!)
There are a couple of “dónde…?” questions, as transcribed in the booklet, but none of them deal with las bibliotecas:
That said, there’s still an open possibility the line was in the first edition, then the editors replaced it for the 2nd or 3rd edition, after they realized it had become a big joke.
Unfortunately, my library doesn’t have the earlier editions.
Youtube sent me down a streak of watching critiques/breakdowns of the Disney movie Wish, and when I came up for air I had a whole thesis for How To Fix This Movie that I haven’t seen anyone else talk about.
The thing is, Wish is trying to have two different morals about…well, a lot of things, but particularly about wishes. On the one hand, it tries to say “don’t rely on magic to fulfill your wishes, get out there and do it yourself.” But it can’t fully commit to that, because it also wants to celebrate the history of Disney movies with heroic magical wish-granting characters — Cinderella’s fairy godmother, Pinocchio’s blue fairy, Aladdin’s genie — to the point of revealing that our heroine Asha grows up to become one of the magical wish-granters.
The only way to make that first moral work is if the Magical Wish-Granting Process is flawed. And then your story is a cautionary tale about the flaw. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is one of Disney’s classic examples, where Mickey tries to enchant a mop to wash the floors by itself, only to have things spiral dangerously out-of-control when he can’t make it stop. That’s a story about “don’t automate a process you don’t understand and can’t control.” That works.
The Little Mermaid is another, where Ariel signs a contract with Ursula to get herself magically turned human, only to have Ursula sabotage her in a long-con to manipulate her father. That’s “don’t get into a legal arrangement you don’t understand and haven’t had reviewed by your own lawyers.” Also works.
But nobody in this movie has their wish powers run amok in a destructive way! Magnifico, the only wish-granter when the story starts, expresses concerns that a wish could potentially go bad if he granted it…but it doesn’t seem like the movie wants us to think this is a justified fear, since Magnifico is supposed to be An Unsympathetic Villain at the end.
And there’s no sign that Magnifico is an Ursula-style conman who’s offering contracts for nefarious purposes, either. At the start, the contract is simple: in exchange for getting to live in Magnifico’s city, you “give” him a wish, which manifests as a little glowing dream-bubble. He grants one wish per month (the rest float around in this lovely storage chamber in his castle), so everyone knows there’s a small chance of their specific wish getting picked — but the whole city is kept peaceful and protected with magic, and everyone is generally happy to live there, bonus wish or not.
So! The writers support their “you should work for your wishes yourself, not rely on magic” theme in the cheap cop-out way. Whenever we hear about a specific person’s wish, it’s either Some Frivolous Nonsense They Don’t Really Need, or Something They Could Have Accomplished By Themselves.
And we all know that’s not how it would work. The Wish Room would be full of incredibly deep, important, meaningful desires that people can’t just achieve by themselves.
Ariel can’t shapeshift her tail into legs without magic. Pinocchio can’t transmute his whole body without magic. Cinderella did, in fact, put a ton of work into making her own ball-ready outfit — and then her abusive family destroyed it! Honestly, the message of that movie is that she couldn't achieve her dreams without support. It’s just that her supportive godmother happened to be magic.
As for Aladdin — he famously gets three wishes. One was “make me a prince,” which he eventually learned he didn’t need…but the moral was “you can’t lie your way into the heart of this girl you like, you have to be honest with her.” It wasn’t “accomplishing literally anything with magic is bad.” His other two wishes were “save my life” and “break the Genie’s contract”, neither of which were possible without magic. (The life-saving came when he was chained up and thrown in the ocean, he barely reached the lamp, he had full-on lost consciousness by the time the Genie came out to see.)
…this is obviously not Disney, but I can’t think about fictional wish-granting without thinking about Madoka Magica, which has no cheap cop-outs, with amazing results. Most of the main characters’ wishes are some form of “heal this critically-injured person(/cat)” or “restore this actually-dead person to life.” There’s an Ursula-style message of “tread carefully with magical wish-granters, they might be hiding their true motives to exploit you,” but there are times when characters know about all the exploitation and still decide “if that’s what it takes to save this person/people, I’ll do it anyway.”
Circling back to Wish-the-movie: As long as “there is a real, non-scam chance your magic wish might get legitimately granted” is part of living in Magnifico’s city, there will be plenty of people who want to live there, no matter what else they find out about him. If your movie pussyfoots around grappling with that, it’s bad writing.
(I was trying to quickly get to the part about how to fix that, and somehow I’m still writing the buildup, why is my brain doing this.)
So, okay, for those of you who did yourselves the favor of not watching the movie, here’s a breakdown of some things that happen:
Asha is in the running to be hired as Magnifico’s…okay, Wikipedia says “apprentice”, but I swear it was just “assistant.” I remember zero indication that she was going to become a Sorcerer’s Apprentice reference with him
She visits the castle, has an interview with Magnifico, sees the Wish Room, they bond over how beautiful it is
Asha spots her grandfather’s wish-bubble (he’s about to turn 100! just like Disney, get it??), gets excited, asks if Magnifico can grant that one next
Well, Magnifico thought they were bonding. He deflates. “Oh. Usually new hires wait a month or so before they start asking me for things.”
honestly, valid
He looks at the wish-bubble anyway, derives the exact wording of the wish, decides it’s too vague and could go bad, tells Asha he’s never granting that one
Hard to tell how valid this part is — Magnifico has an un-explored tragic backstory, his caution could be justified by a bad-wish-experience we never hear about, or it could be PTSD paranoia
Asha asks if he can just return the wishes he’s not going to grant, so people can work on Accomplishing Them On Their Own Without Magic; Magnifico says no, and also, she’s def not hired
Even though all of this is 100% in line with the wish deal Asha already knew about, for some reason she acts like this was a reveal that Magnifico is a secret supervillain and the city deserves better
She sings a song about it, which prompts a marketable plushie-shaped, I mean star-shaped, mascot character to fall from the sky and become her new sidekick
When Magnifico sees the light of the star falling, for some reason he immediately decides this is a magical threat to the whole city, and he needs to become a supervillain in order to defend it
(This involves popping wish-bubbles and absorbing their power to make himself stronger, which would have been a great “oh, he’s a supervillain” reveal if he was doing this from the start and that’s what Asha found out about! But it’s not!)
And here are some thoughts about fixing it. The new setup:
We open with Asha having a little bit of magic, as many people in the city do, which she uses for simple day-to-day tasks. (Most shameless idea for a reference: have her enchant a mop to clean up around the house)
She gets an interview with Magnifico because he’s looking for a magic apprentice. They talk, he takes her to the Wish Room, they bond, etc
Asha finds her grandfather’s wish, and it’s explicitly an Important Thing He Couldn’t Do Without Magic. (Shameless reference: he carved this wooden puppet in the shape of a boy, and…)
Magnifico still has the “oh, oof, I thought we were connecting, but you just want me to do things for you” moment, but he gives it a look
He says no. It’s sweet, but there are more-important wishes — see, Asha, this is the one he has lined up next, it’s a “please heal my sick loved one” wish (there are so many characters you could reference with this one)
And wish-granting takes work, Magnifico will probably need a couple days in bed to recover after this month’s ceremony, he used to try to grant a wish every week until Amaya begged him to slow it down and take care of himself a little more…
Asha feels terrible, she’s been thinking of the king as this untouchable idol but he’s just a guy, he has needs too, she only wishes she could do something to help…
A sudden surge of magic! The wish-bubble disappears! Asha full-on panics, thinking she destroyed it or something??
Magnifico checks his magic mirror…and it shows him the sick loved one, being healed. Asha granted the wish. Fully and perfectly
And she’s not even dizzy!
How this continues, in the “Magnifico was evil from the start” version:
Asha is so excited. She has wish powers! She can take some of the work off Magnifico’s shoulders, she can do so much to help the city, she can–
Magnifico drops the masquerade, his eyes glow Disney Villain Green(TM), he locks her up in magic chains and throws her in a dungeon
Cut to: Magnifico explaining the disaster to Queen Amaya, who is also evil. He was collecting those for evil reasons, dammit! As long as he grants 1% of them, he can use the other 99% for his own nefarious purposes, having a non-evil wish-granter in the city will screw up his whole plan!
For handy exposition, Amaya asks why they don’t just kill Asha, and Magnifico says (a) too much risk she’ll magically save herself, (b) he can make himself even stronger if he siphons her power, he just has to figure out how
Bonus: this interaction is done via Sexy Villain Duet
Cut to: the dungeon. Asha can’t seem to magically grant her own wishes, like “I wish to be safely back home” or “I wish Magnifico would have a change of heart and let me go.” She looks out the barred window at the night sky, and wishes on a star instead
Enter the mascot character
Sidenote: A lot of “how to fix Wish” breakdowns seem really into “what if, instead of Star being a Marketable Plush, we used this design from some of the concept art, where Star is a Shippable Boy?” I…don’t care what form Star is in. The plot works the same either way. If you prefer the Shippable Boy design, feel free to imagine it here
Star mentors Asha on using her powers to break out of jail. Say, by mentally scanning for her grandfather, who's thinking “I wish Asha would hurry up and get home,” and granting that wish
Her first effort is a misfire and hits the goat instead, that's how we get the talking-goat sidekick
The rest of the movie follows similar “Asha sneaks around gathering her friends and spreading the word about how evil Magnifico is” vs. “Magnifico rallies the city against the dangerous rabble-rousing rebel” beats as the original, except now they make sense
After the final battle, Magnifico and Amaya both end up magically locked in the same mirror. Now they can’t hurt anyone else, and hey, they do actually love each other, so they’ll probably be okay
Denouement: Asha is granting wishes at a much faster rate than Magnifico did, but her power isn’t infinite, she realizes she can’t grant them all. Setting up a system where she goes through and offers to return the ones she probably won’t have time for (again, pack in the previous-Disney references of your choice here)
Some people decide, yeah, they don’t need their wishes granted (maybe Asha's grandfather goes “I’m too old to raise a new kid by now, and I’m more than happy with my wonderful granddaughter”). Others decide they don’t trust the government to keep custody of their wishes anymore. But some do trust the current government, because:
One of the already-granted wishes is for some kind of reform. Asha didn’t inherit the whole kingdom, she just took over the wish-granting job, she has supervision! Heartwarming ending about the healing power of oversight and transparency and responsible non-evil government officials, talk about wish fulfillment amirite
Alternately, how it continues in the “Magnifico is just Very Tired” version:
Magnifico is panicking — that must have been exhausting, she needs to sit down, take deep breaths, drink some water, is she okay? (Shameless reference: the dishes from Be Our Guest show up to feed her)
Asha swears she’s fine, feels great, could probably do another one
After a lot of internal stressing, Magnifico lets her do one more. The mirror says it works. He says, look, Asha is absolutely hired, but also Magnifico is afraid she’s going to crash hard once this catches up with her, she needs to go home and lie down and promise not to grant any more wishes today
Asha tries, she really does…okay, she restrains herself to granting one wish for her friends, after she swears them to secrecy. If we want to keep the talking goat, maybe she grants the talking wish too. And then she is tired, so her friends get to reinforce her it’s fine, of course they respect her and they don’t want to ask too much of her
Enter the mascot, for now he just shows up to hang around and be cute (again, pick your favorite version, Marketable Plushie or Shippable Boy)
Apprenticeship arc begins. Under Magnifico’s mentorship, Asha works through the backlog of wish-bubbles. He walks her through a lot of double-checking and follow-up, and sometimes steers her away from granting certain wishes
(This one, longing to be thinner: they're already at a healthy weight, taking more away could make them sick. This one wants to get the girl: they don't need magic, they just need to ask the girl out, and whether she says "yes" has to be up to her)
Asha gets a little too enthusiastic, though, and starts granting some of Magnifico's reject wishes behind his back
Steady increase of conflict/chaos. Sometimes they work out, but other times the result is “now that I have this, I don’t really want it” or “I only got this because it was taken from someone else, and now they’re sad” or “this came with unintended consequences that aren’t worth it” (take your pick of Disney plots to reference)
Not sure what specific details to make the Grand Finale of this one, but it’s some kind of cascade of “I granted a wish for X, it caused problem Y, I hastily granted several wishes to fix Y, went too fast to realize it would cause problem Z, I’m trying to grant wishes to fix Z but I’m running out of strength at this point…”
Magnifico clues in at some point and tries to help, but he definitely can’t grant wishes this fast, he passes out partway through
Bonus: it's not that he finds out because the problem got too bad for Asha to hide. He finds out when Asha goes to him early, confesses she's in over her head, and asks for help! Model for the kids in the audience that this is a thing you're allowed to do when you screw up!
But now he's out, and Asha’s wish-magic is almost run dry. With the support and sound-boarding of her friends, she slows down, thinks through a Sensible Plan that would stop the Chaos Cascade without causing too many new problems. Star gives her a one-time power-refill, and each friend wishes for part of the Sensible Plan to happen
Alternately: each of the friends is thinking “I wish I could do more to help Asha”…Star provides the one-time power-refill, and next thing Asha knows, her friends all have the power to grant each other’s wishes for the Sensible Plan to happen
Denouement: Star is back in the sky. Magnifico lives, but his wish-magic is fully burned-out. Heartwarming chat where Asha promises she’ll be more careful and plan better from now on, and Magnifico admits maybe sometimes he’s been too avoidant about which wishes to grant, so he feels good about retiring from the role and giving it full-time to her (with the help of her Seven Advisers)
Final scene, final shameless reference: a young woman is wishing she had the perfect dress for the ball next week…and she’s in the middle of sewing one. Asha evaluates the wish, figures out this woman is not in a Cinderella-style crisis and will be able to do the work herself in time, and decides not to grant it: “I’ll save that wish for someone who really needs it.” (Soundtrack sneaks in a few bars of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”, audience groans/laughs/cheers)
Roll credits!
My favorite here is the “Magnifico is Tired” timeline. There’s an under-served market for stories about “there are no mustache-twirling villains (except possibly in the tragic backstories), everyone is basically-good and trying their best, but life is complicated and we all have different perspectives, so cooperation takes work.” (Encanto comes to mind as a recent Disney example, and hey, look, that was a smash hit.)
But the “Magnifico is Just Evil” timeline could work! You just have to commit to that, and make it make sense.
Okay. Post over. Don’t ask how long I spent writing this, it’s ridiculous. Tell me about your own preferred Fixing Wish plans, if you have any! Or just help yourself to this one. I put way too much effort into getting it all down, might as well spread it around.
Wrote a fic chapter a while back that used “dónde está la biblioteca” as the classic example of “a simple phrase that a character with limited Spanish-fluency can handle.”
A commenter asked if it was a reference to Deadpool…and, no, it’s much older than that. Decades older. It was a meme before internet memes were a thing!
…Which is probably why it’s so hard to trace. KnowYourMeme only documents it as a joke from a 2009 episode of Community, and it wasn’t invented by Community, either.
I’ve found a couple of pre-2009 examples online. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Storyis a film from 2004…never seen the whole thing, but I’m pretty sure this is our hero trying to intimidate his business rival with what a worldly big-shot he is:
“Dónde está la biblioteca, Pedro?…We’re opening up a new Globo Gym in Mexico City, I’ve been boning up on my Spanish.”
Going back farther, there’s Bedazzled, from 2000, when the hero gets magically awoken in a world where he’s a suave Latino Spanish-speaker.
He flexes his new skills with several Intro-to-Spanish phrases: “[If Mrs. Klein my Spanish teacher could hear this…] Hola Juan! Hola Esteban! Dónde está la biblioteca? [This is the home of my aunt. No thank you, I’m allergic to shellfish.]”
And this other comment says it’s in a 1970s album by Steve Martin. I have now watched/listened to multiple Steve Martin bits that involve non-English languages, and no sign of las bibliotecas
…And finding any information about them has been so hard. Searching Youtube and the broader Internet buried me in a landslide of people shilling their current Spanish-language courses, half of them bot-generated. The title’s very generic. I didn’t have any other details to narrow it down.
Thank goodness for the Library of Congress, because I’m guessing this nice bare-bones listing is it. (The date is 2004, but it’s the 3rd edition.)
Publisher: Barron’s. Author: William W. Lawton.
I can’t find this digitized anywhere either. And I don’t exactly have a cassette player these days. But — the cassettes come with a little booklet, with the whole script written out.
Gonna see if I can get my hands on one. It’ll be a few weeks at least. Hopefully I turn up something that makes for a good update post.
In the meantime, if anybody reading this already has a copy…or if you have relevant links for any of the biblioteca references that aren’t here already…drop a comment, let me know.
So! Some idiot AI bro, but I repeat myself, mass-scraped a bunch of fics off AO3 and put them on his text-to-speech “audiobook” website. Along with a bunch of public-domain works, which he presumably scraped off of Wikisource and/or Project Gutenberg.
Bad news: it happened so fast that I didn’t get to rubberneck all the bot-generated covers/summaries it came up with for my fic.
I only know any of it was there because a reader pinged me on Discord. At least they sent a couple examples. Here’s the cover art for Reveals by Knight:
Anyway, now this guy is only left with public-domain books, accented with totally fine and flawless covers, like…uh:
Yeah.
Also! The cover-drawing bots are oblivious to details like “the original text for Peter Pan is public-domain, but the visual design for Disney’s Peter Pan is not.” So maybe he’ll still get in trouble. We can only hope.
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.)
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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 themmention 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.
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.
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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.
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:
(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.
"In the fics, Marc and Steven are primarily associated with the colors white and blue, respectively. This makes a lot of sense considering the clothes they wear in the duat. What made you choose the purple/pink situation for Jake?" (short answer: the MacKay run)
“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.”
In light of all the discussion about how AO3 handles fandom metatags (more background in this post)…here’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while, seemed like a good time to write it up.
This is not any kind of official proposal! I don’t have the coding knowledge to submit a functional version the Github repository, or the authority to make such a submission get accepted. This is just “if I was the Grand High Dictator of AO3, here’s a thing I would have someone do.”
(Usual disclaimer: I’m a tag wrangler. I’m not any kind of supervisor. All feelings and opinions are my own, not speaking on behalf of any other wranglers, or AO3 volunteers in general.)
The Problem: Metatags are confusing for AO3 users. There doesn’t seem to be any clear evidence on how confusing, or for how many users…but this is officially considered A Problem, and if you’ve ever written in to Support to ask for a fandom metatag, you’ve probably been told about it.
AO3’s Current Approach To Solving It: Get rid of as many fandom metatags as possible. This allows us to confuse AO3 users in whole new ways!
The Approach This Feature Is Based On: Give AO3 users more information about their fandom metatags.
The idea is for this to be built into the site code. I don’t want the info limited to users who write in a Support request, or ask random tag wranglers for help on Reddit, or dig through the site FAQ and hope the relevant sections are up-to-date! I want it displayed automatically. I want Users Who Didn’t Know They Needed It to see it anyway.
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.
Their FATWS commentary was pretty in line with my feelings, and they got some great interviews. Isaiah Bradley’s actor talking about how “no self-respecting black man would want to carry that shield” was, deep down, the character admonishing himself for ever getting his hopes up — whoof.
There’s a chat with the head writer where the podcaster mentions the scene of Sam getting hassled by random cops on the street, before they realize he’s an Avenger. She asks if that was based on [news-making incidents of this happening to IRL famous black men]. And he’s all “hadn’t actually heard of those, it was just based on the universal experience of Being A Black Man In America.”
Double whoof. (She takes it with a reasonable “…yeah, that tracks.”)
Loki
Got to the Loki episodes next (looks like this is the final Marvel series they watched in full). They started with a “theories/teasers/predictions” episode, now I’m into the broadcasts.
Loki s1 was Jonathan Majors’ big Kang debut, and these episodes are from 2021. Which means the podcasters are talking about what big fans of his they are, and how he seems like such a kind and charming guy. Sweet summer children. I wonder if the Majors news is part of why they didn’t come back for s2.
…and there’s an interview with a main writer talking about how Marvel recruited him off Rick and Morty, and he’s not the only one, and then he moved from there to Multiverse of Madness?
Not breaking news, I know, but wild that this is the first time I’ve heard it! Because wow, it explains so much about why MoM is Like That.
Listening back through the WandaVision episodes of the Still Watching podcast. It came out along with the show, so I’m getting to relive fandom churning through a million theories and speculation…
…and they’ve even floated a couple ideas that (a) weren’t jossed by the rest of the series and (b) I hadn’t considered before. It’s a delight.
There’s one exchange that made me head off to Wikipedia to double-check how X-rays work. It’s the opposite of what I thought — it’s not that denser materials reflect more of the radiation to make brighter parts of the scan, it’s that less-dense materials allow more radiation to pass through to the other side, and the film gets darker as it gets hit with more radiation.
Monica Rambeau gets sucked through the barrier of Westview’s weird pocket-reality early in the series, then thrown out, then she fights her way back in. It’s only after that second entrance when she starts glowing, and density-changing, and other obvious superpowers. But after the first entrance-and-exit, she gets X-rayed, and the scans come back 100% white.
It’s not just a general Ominous Weird Thing for our heroes to worry about! It’s specifically the first use of the power she’ll eventually describe as “absorbing and redirecting all forms of energy.” Her whole body absorbed all the radiation, not letting any of it through! That was fully deliberate foreshadowing, and now it’s years later and I’m only just now clocking it.
(Gotta wonder how much other energy Monica was absorbing, without even knowing it, during that time period. And if “burning through those superhuman reserves she had instinctively charged up” was supposed to be a key part of how she busted through the second time.)
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.”
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.
“List of filming locations + canon locations meta. This was originally intended to both fulfill me getting stupidly excited over useless filming trivia like the film nerd I am, as well as having visuals and references to go off of when writing fic. But I figured might as well organize and post it. If either of those things apply to someone else, this list is for you too I guess.”
““I don’t know how to write a version of Marc audiences love from the jump, but I know how to write a Steven Grant,” Slater says. “I know how to write that lovelorn puppy dog searching for his place in the world. I can make you fall in love with Steven and make you feel he is the central protagonist.” […] Slater saw Marc Spector as Steven’s silent guardian, “the guy keeping this puppy from wandering into traffic.”” Lines that live rent-free in my head.
A writeup of the Moon Knight comics for pluralstories! I’m posting a draft here first, so I can share it around with other fans and get feedback. Because with 40+ years of issues to go through, the odds that I’ve forgotten or misremembered something are…high.
Specific things to look for:
Things to warn for? There’s no formal list of required warnings, and I’m assuming “canon-typical superhero violence” doesn’t rate. Just give a shout if you think I’ve skipped anything warn-worthy.
Creators: Let me know if I’ve missed writers/artists who had a significant role during a given volume. Doesn’t have to be “wrote the whole thing”, but at least make it “did more than one issue.”
Which runs to read: It’s not about quality, so please, no comments like “you should include run X, it’s so good!” or “don’t recommend run Y, it’s the worst!” This is specifically a list of “which MK comics to read for significant Headmate Content.” We have to include Bendis and Bemis. I’m sorry.
I’m also putting in some images, because this is long and I want to break it up a bit.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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