What are your fan fiction gripes?

tl;dr most of AO3's founding staff was anglophones primarily in live-action and lit fandoms for anglophone works. They set the standards supposedly to foreground the non-English names of characters and works in translation/localization, with little to no consultation with anyone who doesn't speak English natively or anyone in the fandoms that would actually be affected, and consistently ignored all complaints from the affected fandoms, including the non-anglophones they supposedly set these standards out of consideration of.

So you have unreadable nightmare tag walls in fandoms where all the names have been localized, like Ace Attorney or Pokemon:

(taken from the first page of Ace Attorney results)

Unreadable tag walls that are also full of accented characters that are difficult to type in Chinese-language fandoms, like Aon and Verily said:

(from the first page of MDZS results)

And the straight-up absurd, like the one I just posted or this one I complained about a few pages back in this thread:


And none of these names are actually how someone who spoke the language would tag these characters. Klavier Gavin's Japanese name is 牙琉響也. "Garyuu Kyouya" is what you get if you read that out loud and transcribe it in the Roman alphabet. Here's what turns up if you put his name in the search bar:

(EDIT: He's half of the secondary juggernaut slash pairing and the "Garyuu Kyouya | Klavier Gavin" tag has 2322 works, BTW.)

It's a standard that isn't functional for either anglophone or non-anglophone fans, and, just for bonus points, it's applied wildly inconsistently.

These are in the same series. Hint: the author did not suddenly switch from writing titles in the Roman alphabet to writing them in kanji.

AO3 is incredibly English-centric, but they've historically been a lot more interested in pretending they totally aren't than in taking steps to fix that.

 

They also changed the ship tag piping. Previously, the Ace Attorney ship tags were in the form

Garyuu Kyouya / Odoroki Housuke | Klavier Gavin / Apollo Justice
​

which means that for someone familiar only with the localized names, you could look for "Klavier Gavin / Apollo Justice", while someone familiar only with the original names could look for "Garyuu Kyouya / Odoroki Housuke". You could also just use CTROL+R to search for "Klavier Gavin / Apollo Justice". But now it's in the form

Garyuu Kyouya | Klavier Gavin / Odoroki Housuke | Apollo Justice
​

which means you need to know the localized names AND the Japanese names to be able to read ship tags at a glance, or to CTRL-F for them.

This would suck marginally less if the Japanese names were written in Japanese (kana or kanji) and not romanji, because then you could tell at a glance which language was which and wouldn't have to send time parsing the wrong one to figure out what was going on.

 

The lack of consistency between when kanji is used and when romaji is used is possibly the most aggravating thing to me and seems like it should be quite the brainless fix. Also, some character names return the romaji tag when you search them, but not nearly all, so a lot of it probably also comes down to wranglers not having consistent instructions.

 

My guess is also that it's "there are so many non-English fandoms and characters that nobody has really made a project of digging up the original-language names for all the small ones that are already canonized with just a romanji title."

 

(And we're probably kinda stuck with some level of nightmare tag piping because AO3's design and coding doesn't really have room for a more elegant solution, and a lot of nonstandardization because cleaning it up would be so much work, and in all likelihood even if they did find some solution that magically worked perfectly for every Chinese and Japanese fandom there'd eventually be an equally obnoxious issue in translation from another language because, shockingly, different languages work differently, but I can still whine about and/or laugh at "Satoshi no Pikachu" because this is the gripes thread. :::PPP)

 

According to the tag wrangler spock quoted, non-fandom tags have to use the Latin alphabet, thus the kanji for the character's name not returning results.

 

Then I retract at least some of my whining.

I know it is still synned, because I clicked on the 1 result's (Japanese language) tags to check and it redirected to the main Klavier Gavin tag. But that's also sort of what I mean about how the basic infrastructure doesn't really allow for good solutions.

 

Huh. I wonder if the correct searches I've gotten are the result of something in the summary, then? I didn't think the search takes that into account.

 

The box at the top searches the full summary + title + tags text, I believe.

 

There are also people who tag the name in its original language, I assume, they just aren't recognized as "canonical" tags

 

Satoshi no Pikachu is still probably my favorite example of this. Because that is some 2000's era fansub shit. Not even the fun sort either. It's just stupid and sloppy looking.

 

Yep. I can't say it's surprising that "specific but unnamed member of a fictional species that is distinguished by being the pet of a character whose name is different between languages" is an edge case that causes ridiculous results, but those results sure are ridiculous.

 

Because of how this all is. I kind of wish now that My Unit | Byleth was two separate tags. So the one tag is My Unit | Byleth/Beresu and the other is My Unit Byleth/Bereto. Maybe somehow add in a gender symbol to the English too because fuck it. This is actually an important distinction in the Japanese fandom too. Het Edeleth and yuri Edeleth are two separate ships with two separate names in Japanese, namely Edereto and Ederesu. This would of course necessitate creating new ship tags for all the Byleth ships. The Japanese system does honestly help with finding my preferred gender of Byleth. This would have the benefits of being able to find ONLY the Byleth I want (who is universally f!byleth save in like dimileth) and also making FE's already gross tags grosser.

 

I have a friend who's been reading mountains of Miraculous Ladybug fanfic who was talking about the difficulties of finding the specific flavor of identity porn you want because AO3 synned the tags for all four possible configurations of the two-person Love Quadrangle together. :::PPP

 

Current peeve- canon's obsession with Magical/Destined Bloodlines keeps smashing into my primal loathing of kidfic and pregnancy fic.

 

Am I reading this story because I enjoy it, or am I reading it because it is both 1) long and 2) finished? Now that I've figured out it's the second one, will I stop reading it and do something else? Of course not! I'm 200k words in, its too late to bail out now.

 

If it's before the halfway point of the story and I'm not invested in something about it, I try to remind myself of some other very long complete story and go reread it instead.

There's a couple of the 500k+ fics that I've reread like 10 times because of doing that...

 

just came across a 5k fanfic that's like 2k story, 3k the author tearing into some random character essay from a person over on tumblr

...okay, so I'm all for dissecting what you think is a bad take and why, but I don't think the body of an otherwise unrelated fanfic is the best place for it

 

yeah that's absolutely not the place for it, wtf