humanist + humorist

Gonna start* a hot new internet game: “Someone has posted a fic on AO3 with this New Fandom Tag. Can we figure out what fandom it’s referring to?”

*(No guarantee when/if I’ll continue…but I’m titling this “post #1” in an effort to be optimistic)

When I see a fandom (okay, mostly the webcomics) on AO3 that’s been lingering for a while without getting a canonical tag, sometimes I’ll put in a request for it to be canonized. But only if I have sources to include. As in “here’s the website, here’s the creator’s social media, here’s a wiki page, here’s any other info to confirm what the original canon is, so we can be sure the fandom tag gets the fitting AO3-standard format.”

Here are some tags where I went looking for the original webcomic, and couldn’t find it. So I’m tossing the links in front of the wider internet, like some kind of fandom sphinx. Can anyone track down the answers to these riddles…?

“Absolution Program (Webcomic)” – The work (Dec 2025) has great character tags with full names, but googling them doesn’t turn up anything. Some of the vocab has me wondering if it’s Homestuck-related. [ETA: AbsoPro links+info here! It's...confusing.]

“DeMo (Webcomic)” – Another work (Dec 2025) with full-name character tags, but no webcomics in the results. Googling “demo webcomic” is unhelpful for probably obvious reasons. [ETA: Might refer to this unreleased project; there's no public info yet, but the fic author knows the project author]

“faust (webcomic)” – Work (Feb 2026) is tagged with a couple dozen fandoms, no characters at all. I don’t even know which part of the work corresponds to this fandom, heh. [ETA: Options include Faust by LIM, and Faust by Arechan. I won't be the one to read through them all and see if the quotes are in there.]

“Hellven (Web-comic)” – There are two findable webcomics with this title, HELLVEN – Lord Nomus (Webtoon) and Hellven – Luna (Tumblr)…but the characters in the fic (March 2026) don’t seem to come from either. Is there a secret third Hellven??

“Immortal (webcomic)” – Work (March 2026) is also a crossover with The Owl House and Undertale; all the character tags are from one of those canons. Always possible it’s a fancomic for one or both series. [ETA: Seems likely it's the comic being pre-planned on this blog]

Bonus note: If you’re curious how many of these there are, you can see all the not-synned-anywhere AO3 fandom tags in the Tag Search. (That list of results is “most-recent first”…so if you click on the last tag of Page 1 and look at the date the fic was posted, you’ll know “50 new fandom tags have been created since then.”)

Down to 1034 fandoms wrangled. Almost exactly 100 dropped since last check-in.

I did a big “invitation to all wranglers, look through my list and grab any webcomics you want” post, and managed to hand off 80+ that way. The rest are from dropping more A’s and B’s.

Only 39 of these have any tags that need wrangling. Higher than usual. I didn’t wrangle as much last week…tbh, I was low-key hoping some of the lightly-active webcomics would get claimed in the big invitation post.

(By “lightly” I mean “there are 1-5 new tags.” It’s still not an overwhelming burden, here. Just a mild annoyance to check lots of individual tag bins.)

While I’m at it, AMT updates: My “please combine the redundant Frosty the Snowman fandoms” request was approved, so my count will go down by 1 when that gets processed. The Madoka Magica requests I mentioned last month…are still on the waiting-for-approvals list.

I haven’t actually made the request to restructure the Fake News tree. The wranglers of other fandoms involved have all signed off on it — but now I’m waiting on a response to a different question. Which I kinda suspect has been forgotten at this point. Maybe I’ll just go forward, on the premise of “since nobody has responded to say [thing] is a roadblock for the tree, that means [thing] is not a roadblock for the tree, and I won’t worry about it.”

I know there’s not a ton of people left who actively care about this fandom. But of the ones who do, I’m guessing at least a few of you still follow my blog(s).

So here’s a quick writeup! Let’s find out if anyone has feedback.

For people who weren’t in this fandom (or have forgotten the details by now), I’ll start with some backstory.

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…

Sudden awkward realization that Malcolm’s daemon has been “Asta” all along, I just took the spoken version as “Aster” with a British accent.

Have to go edit some roundup posts now…

(And here I was appreciating the celestial symbolism in how “Aster” means “star”!)

—

Spent some time this evening reviewing AO3’s character tags for His Dark Materials, along with The Book of Dust. There’s a handy tag format that only really picked up after I originally canonized most of them, “Petname | Fullname Character’s Pet”, as in “Alpine | Bucky Barnes’s Cat“. So I redid most of the daemon character tags to match that, as in “Asta | Malcolm Polstead’s Daemon“.

Some of them, it feels like overkill — not a lot of fans are likely to forget which Pantalaimon or Hester we’re talking about. But it’s really useful for the daemons whose names only came up briefly. Or maybe were only established outside the actual canon (e.g. author interviews, TV credits). Kyrillion, Jal, Grizal, Sergi…

The review also turned up some minor characters who weren’t canonized before because I couldn’t find info on them, and some characters who got newly-established full names after they were canonized. Also, at least one where the canonical had a typo. Whoops.

I have not audited the relationship tags to make sure they all match up. (Except the one with the typo.) To avoid overloading the servers, there’s a limit on how many tags each wrangler is supposed to rename per day, and doing the rels tonight would blow way past mine.

So that’s a future project.

—

I put most of my post-LBS reaction feelings as addendums in the liveblog roundup post, so I didn’t end up making a new microblogging thread about them.

About a month ago, TW chairs announced a new limit: each wrangler should have a maximum of 450 assigned fandoms. Of the 400+ wranglers in the committee, only 3 actually had more than 450 fandoms, so for most people this was going to make no difference in their lives at all.

So, hey, I’m one of the 3! Figured I’d write about it.

To be clear, the limit is for admin reasons. There hasn’t been any allegation of “you’re falling behind in wrangling because you have too many fandoms to keep up with.” Not to me, and I have no reason to believe it’s happened to either of the others, either.

The thing is, my habit for a while now has been “check the Unassigned Fandoms list for webcomic fandoms with less than 5 works, pick them up, tidy up whatever tags they have, and then just…keep them.”

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.)

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

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.”