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gilbirda · 1 month

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Yet Another Fandom PSA - tagging ships

Hi, it's me again.

Today I come with a small (ish?) pet peeve regarding proper tagging - tagging ships.

(⬆ This is where the magic happens)

What should you tag in "Relationships"?

Tag only the main relationship(s) that show up in the story. The relationship the fic is really about. Is about siblings? Is about a romantic relationship? Is about a platonic ship? Tag that, and only that.

Note: For Romantic relationship, use Character A/Character B. For Gen and Platonic relationships, use Character A & Character B

Don't tag relationships that are not relevant, or appear as background.

That includes, secondary ships that develop in the background or are established "off-screen" and don't actually have any screen time in the fic.

What if I want to warn/describe a ship that does show up anyway?

You can tag them as background in Additional Tags, adding some information that nuance how they show up if you want. For example, if it's a mention, or past relationship or if it's a temporary pairing but not the endgame.

eg. "Background Character A/Character B" or "Minor Character A/Character B" or "Mentions of Character A/Character B" or "Past Character A/Character B"

You can also use the Summary to specify and give context in what manner these relationships show up.

Why would I care? Is just a tag.

There are many reasons why tagging relationships properly is beneficial for the fandom as a whole.

First of all, keeps your tags clean and simple. It is easier for people browsing the Archive to know at a glance what the fic is about if your tags give the right amount of information and nothing more.

Second, it makes very difficult to filter if you like a ship that's not as popular as others. It can get very frustrating expecting your favorite ship to appear only to get to chapter 13 and neither of your ship shows up.

Third, the "otp:true" trick can only do so much.

If this is the first time you hear about "otp:true", it is a filtering trick that will automatically filter out all fics that have more than 1 "/" ship tagged in Relationship, leaving only the ones that have just the main ship tagged.

ID has been added to the pictures as ALT text.

For more info, you can check out AO3 official Tagging FAQs and this helpful guide: "The Fanfic Author's Guide to Metatext" (This is the chapter about relationship tagging)

Here's more filtering tricks for AO3

As always this post is not meant to shame if you do or have done this. I have done this too.

I felt so bad when someone approached me and said "hey, your crossover fic with this ship is the number 1 fic by kudos when you search for one of the main fandom's small ship" and honestly? wake up call.

So there's that!

Remember to be kind and happy fandom! 🥰✨

#fandom PSA #PSA #tagging ships in AO3 #AO3 #Archive of Our Own #i know im not the only one who has done these i know #if you have more information to share please feel free :)#this comes after a friend ranted to me about this topic and uggghhhh please

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ihavedonenothingright · 7 months

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Keep thinking back to the first TOTK trailer (the E3 2019 one) and just...

Do you guys remember when the Zonai were presented as menacing?

I think there's a lot more of it in BOTW, but in that trailer specifically, the arm holding Ganondorf in place is far more creepy than it ever ends up being in game? Even before we find out it belongs to All-Powerful-Good-Boy-King Rauru, it just doesn't provoke the same feeling of dread as it did in that first trailer. In addition to that, we hear Zonai chanting in that trailer, but where in the game it ends up sounding peaceful, in that first trailer it reminds me more of the "dueling spirits" in the Shadow Temple's theme. There's so much in that trailer alone that points to the Zonai being foreboding, if not terrifying figures, and then in the actual game we get... what we got.

Obviously we'll never be able to prove it, but looking back, I really doubt the teaser from 2019 was made for a game about the benevolent founders of this new Hyrule, even if I think the Zonai and Hyrule's founding were always meant to play a role. There's such a stark shift in tone between that first teaser and every trailer that came after it. I wonder what sparked that pivot.

#zelda #loz #totk #ganondorf #(kinda?)#rant #i've realized recently i should probably better organize my tags for archiving and the like #so... commencing now

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aplaceinhell · 13 days

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All these queer podcasts I'm listening to (and hazbin hotel ig) have ruined me.

Now every time I consume uninclusive media with little to no rep, I'm just like... "hey, what the fuck? They can do that? What about my silly little queer men? How can they have no silly little queer women? I want my gay podcast men back!!!"

#And honestly #id rather stick to the media #That has 90% of its characters queer #I can't go back now #I've been spoiled #uhh #Idk what to tag for this #rant #tma #the magnus archives #hazbin hotel #the magnus protocol #podcast #queer community #queer rep in media #lgbtq+#lgbtq

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several-ravens · 12 days

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post season 2 horny rant about elias don't click if it's going to upset you

MY HUSBAND. A MURDERER. who would have thought???

so it was him at the murderous end of that pipe. good for him

when i tell you i screamed when he walked into the room. i mean damn he can talk to me like that whenever he wants. HIS VOICE??? and that little evil speech at the beginning oooooh that's enough to kill me

maybe he didn't need to murder leitner as well but also who am i to stop him? like eurgh brotha eurgh but also ooooh baby heaven is a place on earth like that one remix that's on tiktok atm

AND because that wasn't enough, on top of being evil and fucked up he's also very powerful

excuse me but that's hot af. his place of power should be me.

(i have a thing for evil powerful men in case that wasn't clear)

#no spoilers beyond mag80 pls #the rant continues in the tags so feel free to not open them <3 #you've been warned #no elias don't be a murderer you're to sexy haha #jk jk go on your murderous spree my love you deserve it!#bring me a souvenir!#listen my moral compass disappears when hot older men are involved #does he murder people in cold blood? yes #would he kiss my hair and hold me gently in his arms? also yes #who am i to keep him from achieving his sick and twisted little dreams?#he's a criminal that should be in prison and i fail to see how that's a problem #i love him sm #ik my brain is wired wrong and i'm delusional or whatever #something something my dad was absent idk #you should see my taste in women though it's exquisite #if you've come this far you can't be mad at me you knew what you were about to read when you clicked on the post so no hate allowed #tma #the magnus archives #tma spoilers #elias bouchard

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yourmortalenemy · 2 years

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So I was just reading this post and it raised a couple points I’d like to talk about real quick.

Basically it is someone asking why there is so much less audience interaction with fics than there used to be. There’s a few suggested answers but the one I’d particularly like to talk about is the idea that now we live in an age where the internet and social media is ruled by tiktok (and I suppose instagram to a certain extent as well)

Tiktok is designed so that a user makes as little effort as possible, you don’t have to think, you just have to watch and scroll and tiktok’s algorithm will provide you with hours of content it thinks you will like. It gets people used to the idea that they do not need to contribute because all will be provided for them, people expect to be served.

So what happens when you get a site like AO3 with no algorithm, no recommendations, a site that isn’t built to serve. We get fic writers (like the one who sent the ask in the post I referred to earlier) who have to put up with less and less feedback and it’s disheartening. Sites like AO3 cannot survive without writers to write and readers to read but if the writers stop seeing the point in writing because they don’t know if their readers even liked what they wrote then I don’t blame them for not wanting to write anymore.

And I get that sometimes you just don’t have the spoons to think of a comment, I’m not trying to say there’s anything wrong with that. But please don’t just look at something and move on when you’re done without any indication to the author that you liked what they wrote. Even if it’s just quoting a line you liked and saying something like ‘lol’, even if it’s just an emoji, even if it’s just kudos, I promise you that authors see that and we appreciate it. Don’t be afraid of being judged, if you like something SAY SO!! But please for the love of all that is good and holy, do not treat AO3 like tiktok or instagram. That is not sustainable.

Not to sound like one of the ‘tin foil hat brigade’ (as my mother would say) but I truly believe that algorithms will be death of creativity and freedom of expression. You cannot treat AO3 like tiktok because you cannot treat human beings like robots. It is not shameful to want appreciation, humans need to know they are appreciated.

Not to get too political here but I am begging you to ask yourself who profits most from feeding you the notion that we can expect people to provide a service while giving them nothing in return.

#BE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO SEE #TELL SOMEONE ON AO3 YOU LIKED THEIR FIC TODAY!!!#yes this was an excuse to rant about how much I hate tiktok for several paragraphs #no its not proofread #i wrote this in a rage-filled haze during a heatwave #what do you want from me #now how do I tag this...#ao3 #archive of our own #ao3 fanfic #ao3 writer #i have like 20 followers lets be real nobody is going to see this

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themoonking · 1 year

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when people bring up the racism, homophobia, transphobia, romanticization of domestic abuse / rape / pedophilia / incest, literal actual written porn of literal actual real life flesh and blood children, et cetera et cetera on archive of our own, one of the ao3 stannies’ main defenses is “you can just filter out the tags if you don’t want to see that!” when that defense has no fucking legs to stand on.

ao3 is not an archive, it is barely even a website: a rant <3 (very long)

ignoring the fact that it’s a problem that all of that is permitted on the site in the first place (i guess child porn and racism are fine, and the people who allow it on their platform are fine, as long as i, personally, do not see it), that defense literally means nothing. it’s assuming that every little thing on ao3 is tagged properly and it absolutely is not, and if you think it is you are dumber than rocks. i mean for fuck’s sake, just touching on archive warnings and not tags, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is literally a valid option for fic authors to use when it should fucking not be.

if someone is a freak who thinks that pedo shit is hot, they might not tag it as “rape” (archive warnings OR tags). i’ve literally seen underage father/son rape porn with no trigger warning tags but “child abuse if you squint”. IF YOU SQUINT. if someone thinks that domestic abuse is actually cool and sexy when attractive people do it, they might not tag it as “abuse”. if someone is a freak who likes incest, but bends over backwards to justify it by only shipping adopted family members, then they tell themselves that they don’t view it as incest, and might not tag it as “incest”. if someone is a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe, et cetera and they wrote bigotry into their fic (or else wrote a deliberate troll fic to trigger people on purpose), do you really think they’re going to tag it as racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera? and some people get kicks out of writing purposefully triggering content and either leaving it untagged or mistagging it so that people will read it unsuspectingly.

even for just general content tags, it’s a mess. people just forget to tag things all the time. people deliberately won’t tag the endgame ship of their fic because “it’s a spoiler heehee”. people use the romantic or sexual “x / y” tag instead of the platonic or otherwise “x & y” tag, sometimes by mistake sometimes on purpose. it’s a joked about issue how people will tag characters or ships that appear in their fic for two sentences.

there’s no standardization of tags, which is a pretty obvious problem. what first comes to mind is the “dead dove: do not eat” tag which should just not be a tag at all because it just has no meaning. depending on the individual fic writer using it, it could mean anything from “literally the most sickening and depraved thing you’ve ever read in your life” to “horror w/ gore”. but it applies to other vague tags too - different fic writers will have different ideas of what the tag means.

in addition to that, what is and isn’t made a filterable tag, what tags are made synonymous, et cetera, is entirely up to the whims of the site staff. as an example, if you’re trying to look for fanfiction of a singular animated disney movie, the infinite crossovers with other disney movies will not actually be counted as crossovers (which they are) because they’re classified as the “disney theatrical animated universe” (which isn’t a fucking thing), so you can’t filter them out the “exclude crossovers” way. if you try to filter out the fandom tag “disney theatrical animated universe”, it’ll show up with zero fics because that tag is synonymous with every disney animated film (regardless of if the fic author actually used the tag “disney theatrical animated universe” or not), thus also filtering out the one you actually wanted to find.

and do not get me fucking started on the “all media types tags”, which also just shouldn’t be a thing because it makes it fucking impossible to find the specific fics you’re looking for. some people use it in place of tagging a specific canon / adaptation when their fic very clearly draws from one specific canon / adaptation, and you can’t filter it out because it’s synonymous with every fandom tag under its umbrella.

as an example of the issues of both the “all media types” tag and mistagging in general: as a fan of the witcher books, it used to be a fucking ordeal to find fanfiction specifically for the books (post netflix show release). some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag their fics with the book fandom tag in addition to (or even in place of!!) the show fandom tag when their fics were unquestionably show-specific, meaning i could not simply search only in the book fandom tag. i could not simply filter out the show tag, because some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag as fucking “all media types”, when their fics were unquestionably show-specific. and alas, i could not filter out “all media types” and the show tag, so that i see only those fics which have been deliberately and exclusively tagged as the book, not only because as mentioned some show fans would tag their show fics with only the book tag, but also because the fucking all media types tag filters out the book tag as well, leaving me with zero fucking fics REGARDLESS of if the author actually used the “all media types” tag. now, thankfully, i’ve thankfully seen this issue in this specific fandom lessen, but it still occurs in other fandoms and i guarantee that it didn’t lessen in the witcher fandom because of any fixing of the site on the part of ao3 staff.

another common defense of ao3 freaks is that it’s an “archive”, and therefore can’t get rid of anything anyone posts, and disregarding the fact that that is not how archives fucking work, they don’t just allow anything and also ao3 DOES get rid of fics... when they say that they don’t like proshippers, apparently, archives have... you know... archivists. they have someone or a team of someones making sure that everything in the archive is *properly fucking categorized*. they have someone or multiple someones making sure that everything they recieve (1) belongs there and (2) is properly labeled and organized. same for libraries. meaning that if ao3 really were an archive and not a sub par fanfiction website, they’d have something like that in place. something as simple as a report button for fics with a review team that will see if something’s been mis- or untagged. they’d have some kind of standardization of tags (especially the warning / trigger tags) and have proper tagging enforced in some way. and then they could also do something like stop being spineless racists, queerphobes, and pedos have the barest minimum of content guidelines saying that you can’t post fucking hate speech.

if something is mistagged or untagged, the most you can do is leave a comment politely asking that the author fix the issue, and then hope and pray that they do that. and if that person thinks [insert form of abuse] is hot, or if they’re just straight up a bigot that wrote bigotry into their fics to be bigoted, or they’re a troll that gets kick out of deliberately traumatizing people by tricking them into reading their mis/untagged fics, they might not! AND if you see a major tagging issue on an orphaned work, or a work that has an inactive author / hasn’t been updated in forever, good fucking luck getting even a negative response.

you can’t permanently block tags (i mean even tumblr.hell has that), meaning that if you would like to search for fic without coming across something troubling, triggering, or just something you don’t like, you have to either (1) do a work around by having a bookmarked link for every fandom you’re in or every character you like with all of your tags already blocked, (2) download browser extensions that do the work for ao3 because they can’t be bothered themselves, or (3) input every individual tag every time you search ao3 and don’t forget that all of those options only fucking work at all when everything is tagged properly, and we’ve already established its not. you also can’t actually block people (you can only prevent them from commenting) meaning that if there’s a specific person you’d like to stay away from your fics or a specific fic author that you don’t like and would like to stop seeing their fics clogging up the tag, you’re out of luck (though for the latter you could insert “-[username]” into the “search within results” box, but then uh oh we’re right back around to having to input that every time or have a bookmark)

their archive warning system is shit. first of all it’s functionally useless because, as mentioned, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is an option. what’s the fucking point of special required archive warnings if you’re going to allow people to opt out anyway. second of all, aside from “chose not to use warnings” and “no warnings apply”, the only warnings are “major character death”, “graphic depictions of violence”, “rape/non-con”, and “underage”. disregarding the fact that they shouldn’t be allowing porn of underage characters in the first place (but i’m talking to a brick wall on that issue) and that “non-con” (and “dub-con”) as terminology needs to die, it’s just fucking rape lets not use weasel words... this is a paltry list of possible warnings. there’s no official warnings for depictions of: domestic abuse, animal abuse, depictions of racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera, suicide, self harm, et cetera et cetera. and we return to the issue of standardization of tags. in your required archive warnings at very least, there should be a standardization of what these mean, but ao3′s own faq is just like “ehh... you decide. we’ll leave it up to you”. what qualifies as graphic depictions of violence? two people may write the same level of violence, but qualify “graphic” differently, and make different decisions regarding their warnings. and we also return to the issue of: if a freak doesn’t see something that is clearly rape as rape, they might not tag it as such.

this website gets a disgustingly large amount of money every year that it doesn’t fucking do anything with. it’s been over a decade and they’re still in fucking beta. features that would actually be useful, like an actual block system, don’t exist. they technically have a report system for abuse and harassment and such, but apparently what they qualify as abuse and harassment is fickle. ao3 defenders seem to be very proud of the legal work they do for fandom / fanfic authors, but they set aside a very small amount of the money they get every year for legal advocacy, and they actually use even less of that, because it’s not the early 2000s “anne rice hates fanfiction” era anymore - you aren’t going to get fucking sued for writing fanfiction in the first place. based on their own self-reported yearly cost of upkeep, they literally already have enough money to run the site as they are now for the next twenty years.

once again: ao3 is not an archive. it is not a library. it is barely a even a website.

#specifically a website run by freaks #who care more about ppl's 'fannish experience' than they do ppl of color abuse survivors and the real children ppl write p!rn of #anyway here's the rant i promised in the coming days since that one post #also i know people will come at me and say that dddne DOES have a meaning its a signal that the reader knows what theyre getting into #so cant be upset if it upsets them #or something along those lines #but (1) we've already well established that the reader very likely doesn't know what they're getting into #because a lot of the shit on ao3 is untagged or mistagged #and a lot of stuff with the dddne tag specifically isnt properly tagged because authors use dddne as a catch all #and just put that down instead of actually properly tagging their work #and as mentioned the authors that use it that way use it for literally anything that might make something uncomfortable #from the sickest shit there is to a little bit of gore #and you can say that those authors (who use it without also tagging what exactly they're talking about) are using the tag incorrectly #but oopsie! that then circles back around to (2) if someone is using a tag incorrectly there's no way to deal with that #other than a comment and a prayer #i speak #anti ao3 #anti archive of our own #fandom nonsense #my monologues

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hellshire-harlot · 7 months

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Ao3 Authors stop tagging your OC X Canon fan fiction as Canon X Reader challenge (impossible)

#I AM AT MY FUCKING LIMIT ISTG #TAG YOUR SHIT #I DONT WANNA READ ABOUT YOUR WEIRDLY NAMED OC I WANNA DAYDREAM ABOUT MYSELF GETTING DICKED DOWN #BY FICTIONAL MEN!!!!!!!!!#AND I CANT DO THAT IF YOU GIVE THE ‘READER’ A SPECIFIED HAIR SKIN EYE COLOR HAIR TEXTURE LENGTH NAME ETC #TAG YOUR SHIT PROPERLY PEOPLE COME THE FUCK ON #fan fiction #rant #fanfic #Ao3 #Otw #archive of our own #ficblr #writeblr #looking at YOU ESPECIALLY COD FANDOM

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frownyalfred · 1 year

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I mean this in the best, most educational way:

You don’t get a gold star for not liking something.

If a tag, story or trope isn’t your thing, it doesn’t make you better — or more interesting, pure, appropriate, etc.

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gasterofficial · 2 years

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W.D. GASTER?

STUPID IDIOT MOTHERFUCKING W.D. GASTER GOD DAMN FOOL SCIENCE MAKING OSHA BREAKING BONY OLD BASTARD SHITHEAD IDIOT HEAD ROYAL WHORE BIGGEST CLOWN IN THE CIRCUS LAUGHED OUT OF THE UNDERGROUND SCIENTIST MOTHERFUCKING W.D. GASTER

STOP PINNING ME WHEN I TALK ABOUT W.D. GASTER I HATE HIM SO MUCH WHY DOES HE HAVE SO MANY FUCKED UP FOLLOWERS WHY DID HE DECIDE TO FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT JUST SET THEM LOOSE IS HE DEAD IS HE A BASTARD MAN HAS SUCH A VISCERAL AFFECT ON ME NOT EVEN IN THE ROOM_MYSTERYMAN NEVER SEEN THIS MANS SPRITE AND I KNOW HE HAS THE WORLDS SHITTIEST EYE SCARS GET AWAY FROM ME

if i wanted to get into [HEAVEN] and the angel said w.d. gasters waiting inside i would piss on the angels feet for the sole purpose of getting sent back down

if i have to deal with w.d. gaster speaking one wingding in person on dialogue in game not only will i close the tab i will delete DELTARUNE out of spite and have to play the entire game again for the experience of being able to skip all the times when he is mentioned or implied

i dont even know why i hate him so much. he does science but i am just mad because i am angy

he better have some fucked up backstory to explain this if hes just some nerd bonehead whos a fan of mad science and wanted the irl version ill go ham

BETTER have fallen into his own creation cuz if he didnt Im going to make him

paypal.com/IFuckingHateWDGaster

games not even about him. vaguely mentioned what is supposed to maybe be his lab and I lost it

where the fuck is w.d. gaster if hes still alive im going to so deeply wish he wasnt

crusty old man

ill punch gaster and his sad frail old man twig bones will simply flake apart under my epic huge meat fist and he will doodly doodly until all thats left is one final blueprint he kept on him at all times simply titled Now You Fucked Up in all-caps wingdings

im not breathing im hyperventilating at this point

i hope theres a date given for when gaster died or will die so i can make it a reminder on my phone

everyday once a year i will see it and do anything but pay respects to the man who did so much fucked up if true science

#this is for you tma fans out there #long post #jurgen leitner rant #gaster tag #gaster #mine #utdr #undertale #deltarune #tma #the magnus archives

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thegeneticopera · 5 months

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hey for the record its uncool as hell to make your own repo archive blog and then come mass rb from this one to pad yours with our curated posts lol

#its also uncool to try and steal our content by just reposting our shit but that's a whole other rant.#this blog has had A LOT of dedication put into it. every post and art we rb did take time to find #since you cant just scroll through the general tag and go back literal years #so when you come over here and just...rb all our curated content onto your own freshly made “archive” repo blog thats douchey as fuck #also we dont ONLY rb shit we do make our own content. we make gifs and lore posts and actually layout relatively hard to find pics and info #whatever. rant over. dont do this shit its fucking annoying. this has happened more than once.#repo! the genetic opera #disclaimer

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catgirl-catboy · 1 year

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Fun Fact! Ao3 comes with a default no incest tag.

Its called 'gen', and you can select it above where you enter the other tag next to m/m and f/f! Its meant to show that there's no romance in your fic aside from maybe a quick note of so and so being a couple.

However, if you really don't want people thinking your work is incest, there's another thing you can do! You see, in addition to character tags, there's relationship tags! The & tag symbolizes either a platonic or familial relationship, while the / tag symbolizes the two of them are getting it on. (or holding hands. Either works!)

If you tag a fic as BOTH gen and A & B, nobody will think the fic is incest! I hope this helps.

#furthermore if you go on a rant about an incest ship I will assume you like it and are tsundere #ao3 #archive of our own #archiveofourown #do I tag the turtle in the room?#proship #anti anti

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avaantares · 1 year

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Guys. I shouldn't have to say this, but

AO3 is not TikTok.

Play all the silly algorithm games you want by tagging every irrelevant trend and current pop song on your TikTok vids to try to boost their visibility, but that nonsense does not belong in a structured, tag-ordered archive like AO3 (which doesn't have an algorithm). It is not acceptable community behavior to list every single relationship tag in a fandom on your fic in order to try to accumulate more hits. Tags should reflect what's actually in the story so it can be properly categorized and filtered. If an 1,100-word E-rated fic is tagged "PWP, smut, seriously it's just porn, explicit sexual content, don't like don't read, [six more specific sexual act tags redacted so nobody has to encounter them on their Tumblr dash without warning]," IT 👏 DOES 👏 NOT 👏 BELONG 👏 IN 👏 THE 👏 GEN 👏 TAGS.

I just scrolled through four pages of the primary gen tag in one of my fandoms, and a full 70% of the fics in the results were slash fics -- many explicit -- that people had added gen/& tag(s) to, either out of ignorance of what those tags mean, or in an attempt to sucker more people into clicking on it. (I promise you, if someone is in the gen tag because they don't want to see romantic or sexual content, they are NOT going to enthusiastically R&R your slash fic. Filters exist for a reason. Shoving content at people who are not its target audience just annoys everyone.)

Some of this is obviously deliberate tag sandbagging: A <1K PWP for the main ship that also includes multiple slash and gen tags for multiple supporting characters? Hella sus. A fic that lists eight slash and gen tags for the main pairing alone, using every conceivable spelling permutation of their names? Probably looking to maximize hits (and clearly unaware of how AO3's search function actually works). But it's likely that not everyone is doing this maliciously, and since there might be some legitimate confusion surrounding the use of relationship tags, here's a review for new users or anyone who needs a refresher:

Which AO3 Relationship Tag Should You Use?

Character A/Character B: A slash between character names means that they are depicted in the story as being in a romantic and/or sexual relationship (it does not have to be both). This relationship can be canon, fanon, headcanon, crack ship, crossover, whatever. It just means they're romantically entangled to some extent within the tagged story. (Fun fact: The slash has been used to denote this kind of fanfiction for over half a century! "Slash fic" has its roots in early Star Trek zines, which were the first to codify the slash between names as indicating a romantic relationship. This shorthand spread to other fandoms in the 1970s and '80s, and became the standard for internet fanfiction archives when they came into being in the '90s.)

Character A & Character B: The et/ampersand ("and") between names means that the characters are depicted in a non-romantic/non-sexual relationship, OR that they might be in a romantic relationship (canonically or otherwise), but the tagged story focuses on non-romantic aspects of the relationship. Stories that deal with characters' friendship, rivalry, family bonds, betrayal, coming to understand each other, etc. all fall under this heading. This is also called "gen" or "genfic," derived from the AO3 relationship category (below):

In the event that a fic qualifies for both types of tags, you can use additional clarifying tags such as "pre-slash" (characters are not yet in a romantic relationship, but are heading in that direction), "background Character A/Character B" (the romantic relationship exists only as a backdrop for or incidental to the main story), or "slash applies to chapter 5 only" (if only one scene or chapter deals with the romantic aspects of the relationship) to help readers know what to expect from the story. (The last tag is also used for fics which jump content ratings between chapters, usually due to an isolated scene of sexual content or graphic violence, e.g. "M rating is for chapter 8 only.")

Learning how AO3's tagging system works and using it as intended will only benefit users (authors and readers) in the long run. AO3's filter system is the most extensive and versatile of any fanfiction archive in existence, so you can find the exact things you want without scrolling for days. (There are even additional search tools you can use to narrow your results beyond the basic filters!) But it all depends on the tags being accurate. If authors don't apply the correct tags to their fics, the system breaks down.

So go forth and tag properly! Please. I beg you.

#ao3 #Fanfiction #archive of our own #tagging tutorial #relationship tags #please tag your fics accurately #long post #ava rants about things

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