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The guide to AO3 tagging that I wrote in 2013, and last updated in 2017 was wildly out-of-date!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.

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.