AO3 tags

One of these is from my fic. I'm not sure if this feeling is pride or mortification.

 

Congratulations!! If it were possible to frame a video, that would be my move.

In other news,

 

I KNEW I recognized "now with more dissociation and dick"... it's from Unpretty's batman fic sdgsdg

 

Spoiler: Vaguely nsfw

 

let the good news echo from on high

 

no more randomly running into works that take up an ENTIRE laptop screen or more with JUST their tags

 

several of my fics have over 75 tags :/ I am the 0.5%

 

My big question is, is it 75 non-character/ship tags, or is it 75 tags period? Because I’d be fine with the former, but the latter might well be a problem, especially for long ensemble fics…

 

So yeah, I think the "Ensemble Cast" tag might be getting more use now.

 

Gods I hope this helps kill at least some of the background character and background pairing tagging. If it's not the focus of the fic then I don't want it fucking tagged. Like I can assume if you're doing a Bleach longfic that involves most of the cast that fucking Grimmjow or whoever the shit else is going to be there. But if he's not the focus and like Chad is then I want tagging for Chad not Grimmjow.

 

Noted, I guess. :/ I’m personally not huge on that, but eh, I’ll work around it.

 

(sigh) and also I have to edit my fic with possibly the most tags to mark that I don't condone the actions of the performer who got metooed. ah well. moving several warnings into the author's note. hope nobody was filtering out those tags :/

eta: in fairness I think all the tags I moved to the a/n were noncanonical or being used in weird ways

 

With long multichapter fics w/ content warnings, one system that I've seen work really well is: Put a "per-chapter warnings in the author's notes" tag. Add warnings that only apply to a few chapters into the beginning A/Ns of those chapters.

 

This system also gives the reader a better sign of where the thing they might not be comfortable reading is in a fic. Which then lets them decide to skip the chapter or to proceed knowing what's up beforehand. Alternatively, it lets them read on until they catch signs of the thing in question, and then lets them skip around that bit of the text.

Also like when I see, say, tags for sexual abuse I expect the entire fic to be heavily focused on that. Either in the form of sex abuse being a regularly occurring thing or in the form of a few instances of it being so integral to the themes of the story and being so explored that you can't possibly just skip it. As a result, when I see tags for things I don't like I just...Won't read the fic. As I'm working under the assumption that the things tagged are the most important things in the fic.

So like to use an example with The Masquerade series of books...There's three of these. Lots of fucked up shit in them happens or is mentioned. One of those fucked up things is corrective rape. However this only happens a few times in the entire series, once in chapter 2. So were this being tagged or given warnings in author's notes, I'd stick a warning in an author's note before chapter 2 to the form of "CW: Corrective rape mention". However, homophobia is so frequently discussed and depicted in the books and Baru's struggles as a character center so heavily around homophobia that I couldn't do that on a per chapter basis. Because I'd be putting a note before each and every chapter just about. So instead I'd tag the whole work with "homophobia" or something of the like, to indicate that homophobia doesn't just show up but is a regular feature in the story. Such that you can't selectively jump around examples of it. Because the entire series is based around dealing with that topic. You can skip around some of the other things though as they aren't regular features but like things that appear once, maybe twice, in the whole series.

 

Fwiw, as a reader I wouldn't be upset with an author because I couldn't filter out a specific content warning. Fic just doesn't tend to be tagged consistently enough that I'd even consider that particularly useful most of the time ime.

It's possible I'm Not Like Other Readers *flips hair* but mostly what I want to filter out are overwhelming trends that fill search results with stuff I'm not interested in. Like say, if I'm just not in the mood for any A/B/O, that's often worth filtering because of sheer volume. I mostly use search exclusions to narrow down the results so that I can give more attention to fewer things with better returns.

I'm sure I don't speak for all readers, but for me, a very large block of tags becomes counterproductive. I'm probably going to miss a lot of things. It's like if an elevator pitch covered over 75 bullet points. It's so much that a lot of things will get lost, and I'll have no idea whether they were higher or lower priority things.

 

They also aren't capping series tags, only individual works, so if it's truly a concern you can just become like me and separate your longfic arcs into their own subfics.

 

Also -- tags don't just serve the purpose of warning users. They also serve the purpose of signaling "you may be interested in this". The principle of a tag signalling majority of the content deals with Topic A has resulted in a ton of letdown when a work has been tagged with one of my favourite minor Consequence Tags and then it turns out the exploration is one mention of the character thinking about it for half a chapter.

I firmly believe the majority of Ao3 users overtag and undecomment, even outside of the exclusive 0.5% club. It's not deceptive or bad form or false advertising to tag in a way that entices people to click on a fic, but then warn them off in an A/N. Tags on Ao3 aren't even primarily for blacklisting.

 

Oh, something else to consider -- long fics, multichapter stories and short fics all need to have different priorities while tagging. With a shorter, self-contained story it is probably more polite to tag for everything included. Also, overtagging for content and overtagging for characters are two separate problems that need to be tackled in different ways. In my experience short fic anthologies tend to be the worst about both, but IDK how the tag limit will help with that other than to entice people into splitting their stuff up into collections.

 

maybe now people will stop tagging their longfics with every single sex act that the characters perform in its 100k+ wordcount

 

OH GOD THAT SHIT. I tried looking for kinks of mine once. I gave up when I saw that shit. If I'm looking up bondage then what I want are fics that are entirely focused around bondage. Not a fucking epic novel that has one bondage chapter in it. I'm not reading that just to get my porn.