i do know that “was sat” instead of “was sitting” is the modern parlance of great britain and as valid as any colloquial formation, but it honestly bugs the crap out of me. every time i see it i picture some giant hand plonking the characters down like dolls. they didn’t sit, someone sat them. possibly against their will. it’s alarming. :(
I associate it with an ex of mine who is just about the sweetest person you ever could hope to meet, so I’m fond. It’s just *very* not American.
I really wish people would stop tagging past relationships in the relationship section, where they redirect to the general tag for that relationship, and put them in the additional tags section instead. I keep getting excited, but nope.
Especially when the fic is about that past relationship being abusive. I’ve seen this multiple times.
I genuinely had no idea it did that and now I really wish I had because uh...I've done that? Whoops. Sorry. :( Wish AO3 would fix that. (And I still think that having sections for things like past relationships or background ships in the tag area would be a really great idea...)
having a section for past relationships and for background ships would be great, because, for example: i hate looking for a pairing, and all of the fic that comes up being a different pairing but it's tagged 'cause it's background but simultaneously there are pairings that, even if they're just background, i will nope out, so i do want background ships tagged as it is, i was told that putting a relationship in the additional tag section gets corrected by tag wranglers into the relationships tag section anyway, so that at least is something that the tagging system would need to shift to accommodate - either changing tag wrangling policy to leave such tags in additional instead of relationship, or by creating some sort of differential with in the relationship section (for example, "&" vs "/" exists to differentiate things - a tag modifier for "past" or "background" would be good, maybe?)
I only know about how tag wrangling works secondhand, so anyone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression was that AO3 hardly ever changes the actual user tags? Tag wranglers definitely syn tags to canonical tags with the same meaning (as judged by the wrangler), which is why entering something like "Past Giant Squid/Hogwarts" or "Giant Squid/Hogwards (mentioned)" as a relationship tag will get it synned into the main "Giant Squid/Hogwarts" tag, but as far as I'm aware the different categories of tags can't be synned to each other. That's why people sometimes recommend the workaround of listing your background ships in the freeform tags section, I think—so it will be there for readers' information without clogging up the actual ship tag.
PLEASE GOD THIS WOULD HAVE FIXED ALL MY ISSUES WITH FINDING ANA/MERCY CONTENT ON AO3. We honestly just need way better ways of handling this sort of shit in general. Because many ships get clogged by fics of the ship not working out and wow they broke up and now the character is with this much better character. Or background lesbians. That's like. The death sentence of so many fucking pairings on AO3 and a lot of them are f/f which pisses me the fuck off. The way relationships are tagged in general, either by culture or how the site functions, just kind of sucks because it's unusable unless you mess with filters all fucking day for a lot of ships. And a lot of those happen to be f/f. that happens to people who like side characters too. like i feel bad for tokoyami fans. his tag is apparently a lot of 'he exists in the fic that's about deku's life problems' type stuff from what i've heard.
I am now wondering why in the fuck I will use the phrasing 'was sat' some of the time. Because now that you guys bring it up...It's not really...how American English varieties phrase this? I don't use it all the time which means there must be a reason behind the picking of the phrasing. But what is that reason? I know that at least in the poetry at least some of it would be 'I need my meter to work and I hate anything that goes over five syllables so syllables are at a premium SO HELP ME GODS'. But like what about instances of it that aren't in poetry? ??? ?????????? whatever the case i'm blaming morven for the phrasing slipping into my speech at all
Yeeeup. I'm a Koji fan and his tag is 99% "class 1-A has a group chat" fics that tag all nineteen students but only give actual dialogue to six of them. I'm starting to feel like background characters and ships just shouldn't be tagged, because it makes a lot of tags useless.
They really shouldn't be. Or AO3 needs some sort of way between distinguishing between main cast and background cast. Though in all honesty at this point I'd just rather they not be tagged at all.
i think it'd just be real helpful if there was a more up-front explanation of how the tag sections work. i mean personally i put everything but the main pairing in additional tags, but it's because i'm a chatty fuck, not because i knew how it worked.
Honestly, the Background Ships (and Past Abusive Relationship) aspects of it are why I don't tag one of the past relationships I feature heavily in my fics. Because I treat it as a super toxic relationship and I know the fans of it aren't really in for the 'by the way your fave is a garbage human' ride. So I mostly compromise by plugging in a warning into the author's notes at the beginning of fics that feature that sort of thing. (But also my god, tagging in characters that get maybe one line, tops, but they're there so it counts!!!!!!! is the bane of my fucking existence. Maybe I undertag for characters/ships, but I'd rather undertag and have people pleasantly surprised that I pulled some side characters into roles than have someone reading it like "okay cool, does my fave ever show up past chapter three???")
Like, I have no need to tag any fic, but I know I somewhat frequently come across tags about how the author is not totally confident about tags. That seems telling. I'm not someone who often looks for pairings. I search for individual characters. I definitely will decide how interested I am based in part on the pairing, and there are ones I especially like to see and ones I generally avoid. All things considered, I probably would never have thought to not tag pairings or even characters as a courtesy to readers who rely on tags to search before I encountered this specific thread on this forum. Afaik there's nothing that explains to anyone that readers use tags that way and might be annoyed if you make it harder for them. All that information at the top of the fic, including the tags, is the descendant of story descriptions such as you might put above the cut on your livejournal or whatever. They didn't used to be hyperlinks. Tags were a concept that didn't really exist until well into the popular life of the internet, and a lot of people initially thought it was an unworkable idea that would lead to mayhem. It's actually worked out shockingly well, considering. If you think of it as if it were a description at the top of the story, sort of like an overenthusiastic blurb on a book rather than a database query, there's a lot more room for individual preferences and styles. Compared to browsing book blurbs, which was very much a comparison that seemed relevant in the past, a very spare fanfic description was already spoiling a shocking amount of the story, so labeling too many things seemed like a rather silly thing to worry about. There were general conventions that became widespread for what basic categories of information might go in the description, but there was no real template. What got included was probably heavily informed not just by what the author hoped might attract readers who might be looking for fic like that, but also by what the author thought might get them flamed or worse given their idea of what that fandom was like. It didn't necessarily stop it from happening, but at least you could point out that you had clearly warned people about the stairs. The tags at the top of fic on AO3 are a relatively new thing designed to look like an older, fundamentally different thing. I think a fair number of people are still using it according to old ideas, even if they weren't around for that. Fandom osmosis has probably passed on at least some of the habits that sprung from things like the not unreasonable concern that if you don't tag background Heero/Relena, or background Relena, you should probably prepare for a deluge of very unkind comments on your work.
yeah, personally i do want background characters or past relationships tagged because like, going back to bnha, i ... pretty much cannot stand anything that involves bakugou, even if he's background. he's a main character and pretty popular, so fics where he shows up and doesn't get tagged are, admittedly, pretty exceedingly rare, but i have also noped out of every single one i have not many but a couple of characters or ships like that, that i just won't interact with even in passing, so tbh i do want background ships/characters tagged - i just wish there was a better system, that would clearly indicate that they're background, rather than, say, all of the dwarves from the hobbit getting tagged, but you only see thorin, kili/fili, dwalin, and maaaaybe bofur - there's gotta be some middle ground, even if i don't know what it is i've seen things tagged 'Background - Name/Name' or or 'Past - Name/Name,' so possibly making that a more popular (here: well known) option for tagging things would work?
author who has decided to assign a character a nickname he never had in canon and it's bugging me more than it should they have also decided that aziraphale and crowley are a "former"/"ex-"/"reformed" angel and demon respectively even tho thats......not in canon, and its not tagged as any AU that would make that make sense they are also making heavy use of those epithets so i cant just gloss over it Eta: extra word
USING. NICKNAMES. IN. NARRATION. e.g., i'm reading something about a bloke named william, but the narrator keeps calling him "willy" and only uses his full name once or twice. my word replacer takes care of most of it, but, god. it's beyond annoying. especially if it's a fan nickname that doesn't come up in the series, ever. my luck has it that one of my favourite Car Bois From Outer Space characters has that problem with at least like 30% of fics he appears in. [exasperated headdesk]
can't fix the rest of it, but getting a word replacer to deal with annoying nicknames has been a life-saver for me - i read a lot of DA2 fic, and while people are usually pretty happy to leave a m!hawke with his canon name, f!hawke frequently gets hers changed - the fics are usually pretty good, and i don't mind that they're writing more about their personal self-insert hawke from their playthrough, but i prefer the default names. (same thing happens to f!inquisitors, but jokes on canon, i actually hate all her default names, so)
The leads of Persona 3/4/5 have no canon names in-game, but each one is given one name in the manga and a different name in the anime release. And I find this personally annoying because I think the manga names are better (and they came out first) but the anime names are considered 'canon'.
oh ALSO i read something that was kinda cute except they flanderized one character, who is noted to like food a lot, but in this fic it was like his brain was wandering over towards Oh Boy That Reminds Me Of Food every few paragraphs thats not how you characterization
