fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3800 ]

[ SECRET POST #3800 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3800 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[Killing Stalking]

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03.

[The 100, Echo and Bellamy]

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04.

[Anne (the new remake of L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables)]

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05.

[Pokémon ORAS]

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06.

[Homestuck]

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07.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #544.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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How well does AO3 work for your fandom? What would you like to see changed? What about how someone tags/summarizes/labels (so not the fandom/pairing/author) would make you click on their story or scroll past?

Do you find there is gray area in tagging (i.e. what someone considers to be worth M rather than E, or if tagging should be viewed as advertising rather than warnings)? If so, where do you come down on the issue or how common do you find such issues?

I love AO3 to death. Since I found it in 2010, I stopped posting fic to LJ and FF.net altogether.

I think tags should be legit tags like "Fluff" or "Coffee Shop AU." Not "Omg guys I finally finished this!!! Plz review!" Those kinds of tags should be banned altogether.

As for summaries, I won't read a fic unless it (a) has one and (2) makes sense and isn't saying "this is awful, but read anyway."

I think M/E ratings are very close, and I'd rather have someone slightly over-rate their fic than under-rate it. I rate my fics in the same system that movies use.

Edited 2017-05-30 23:37 (UTC)

I also hate when someone's tags re longer than the summary. If I have scroll through that many tags, it's an automatic no.

True.

Ao3 is the greatest.

Also I actually really love Tumblr-style tags, I think they're fine and I honestly usually find them really charming as long as they're used in moderation. The only real problem with tagging for me is tag-spamming. But I think that's mostly common sense - just try to honestly summarize the thing as well as you can.

I love Ao3 because it is easier to find specific kinks or scenarios. I wish they had a limit on tags (either character or word count).

I think the rating system is pretty good. Though, I wish they would get RID of the Multi- category OR make it so you can exclude it. The multi category makes it hard to find Gen fic.

The "Multi" category is really frustrating, yeah, and it does seem widely misused. I wish there was better guidance around that.

also you can filter it out if you really want to, just put the text " -filter_ids:2246 " into the Search Within Results field, but I know that's complicated in a way that doesn't work for a lot of people and you might already be aware of it

OMG. I was not aware of that. THANK YOU!

I find it really confusing that people tag stuff as both Gen and ships. I wish I could easily find just Gen stories without having to research a gazillion -filter_ids: to sort out when I'm in the mood for pure adventure and no romance.

I mean, is there a simple way to do that that I'm missing?

I can't help on the simple stuff, but I have had people argue with me that gen was for romance and m/m, m/f, f/f was for sex. So dating, hand holding, kissing, I love yous, all gen until the pants come off.

There's also a lot of arguments on how prominent a relationship should be before it stops being gen. Obviously Harry just existing inherently implies James and Lily did the horizontal tango, but how much of the tango can you put in the story before the line is crossed?

Personally, I think it's pretty simple: if the focus of the story is romance, it's not gen. If they're not a good enough writer to understand focus and throw in a lot of pointless romance when, in fact, every scene of the story should be driving the plot, then I don't want to read them anyway.

But I didn't actually want to debate what the definition of gen is. I was hoping for tech tips.

Re: AO3

(Anonymous) - 2017-05-31 22:40 (UTC) - Expand

Re: AO3

(Anonymous) - 2017-06-01 01:35 (UTC) - Expand

I like that you can tag things and list more pairings and list if it's a romantic pair or just friendship and you can list characters. It gives a lot more flexibility to searching, but I still find that comments are about equal between ff.net and AO3

I like Ao3, the one thing I'd probably change is add a Secondary Pairings category. So if you hate something like Remus/Tonks and don't want it mentioned at all in your fic you can exclude things with a brief mention of it. But if you want to find Remus/Tonks fic you shouldn't have to wade through tons of fic where it's only a brief mention.

I don't like the 'idk lol this is soooo random, i wrote it at 3am, hey stacey how's your back doing?,' tumblr tags, but I do like them for specifics.

I figure advertising and warning are kind of the opposite sides of the same coin. If I put mpreg on a fic then fans are going to see it as advertising, and people who dislike it are going to see it as a warning.

Seconding all of this.

I prefer all pairings to be tagged somehow if they're in the story, but a lot of people don't use the (background) or (minor) modifier.

And tumblr-style tags are great when used appropriately (as content advisement, whether that's "extreme torture" or "set between seasons 1 and 2" or "Pacific Rim+Hogwarts+Dragon Age AU!"). But fucking horrible when people take advantage and write a goddamn novel.

Yup! Things like "Everyone Lives AU" are excellent. I enjoy knowing what I'm getting into, and I like being able to search out tropes. Heck, there are tropes I'll search just the tag to see if anything looks good in fandoms I have at least a passing knowledge of the source material.

I find AO3 difficult to browse in large part due to overtagging. It's fine if I'm just looking for a readable longfic for a popular pairing, but if I want anything more specific than that (e.g. a rare ship, a specific sort of AU) I'm out of luck. Many of the current fandoms I'm in are full of crossovers that have nothing to do with my canon's characters and it's a nightmare.

I long for the days of beautifully curated recommendations and fic finder communities on LJ.

In general, my experience would be much improved if people tagged more sparingly, and as advertisement instead of as warnings. If you want to warn for the mere mention of a character or ship in a fic that focuses on a different character/ship 99.99% of the time, just put it in your author's note. I'd also like if we had the option of changing our account settings to automatically filter out crossovers, fics with certain warnings or tags, etc.

AO3 is great for most of my fandoms.

I love AO3. I just wish the Tumblr style tags would go far, far away.

It would be hard to overstate my love for AO3. I am in one of the major fandoms, and I ship the main pairing in that fandom. AO3 works extraordinarily well for me.

I can't really think of much I'd want to change. I suppose it would be good if there were a way to keep the fic listings for smaller fandoms from being swamped by crossovers featuring bigger fandoms.

Personally, I love tumblr-style tags. I find them quirky, charming, and usually also pretty informative in their own way. I don't think someone's tagging style has ever put me off a fic before. I'm also pretty chill about synopses, and am far more likely to look at tags and how many kudos a fic has when deciding whether or not to give it a try.

When it comes to tagging, the main area of frustration for me is when people don't tag for dark elements in their fic. It's not that I think everything is triggering or whatever. I just strongly prefer to be slightly prepped for darker elements so that I can choose to read them knowingly. I also like tags that advertise a fic's content as well. Tags of that sort give me something to anticipate, which usually makes the fic all the more enjoyable to me.

I just want people to stop coming up with new and ~creative~ versions of tagging m-preg, a/b/o, and other things that could be perfectly tagged with existing keywords so people could filter things out properly. I generally would like to have a built-in option on the site itself that let you exclude things - the giant -"word" search strings are pretty inconvient.

This applies for a lot of my fandoms, really.

How many ways could someone possibly "creatively" tag mpreg??

I have currently ... 11 different versions on my blacklist? It's a thing that also changes with the fandom and person who doesn't know how to use AO3 tags properly, so instead of simply having m-preg, you get things like "character is preggers lol" or m-preg in connection with all sorts of adjectives, which also means a filter doesn't catch it. Or in connection with a/b/o it's often implied but not explicitly tagged. Or they make up new terms entirely. Like, my days in the Transformers fandom are over, but a popular version there was "mech carrying sparklings" etc.

Re: AO3

skeletal_history - 2017-05-31 12:18 (UTC) - Expand

Re: AO3

fishnchips - 2017-06-01 00:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: AO3

skeletal_history - 2017-06-01 12:13 (UTC) - Expand

Re: AO3

fishnchips - 2017-06-01 12:31 (UTC) - Expand

Re: AO3

skeletal_history - 2017-06-02 21:33 (UTC) - Expand

Yeah, I think I complained about this about actual tumblr tags. On one hand it's good to be able to get specific about what you're tagging, but on the other...

Ok, I went to a convention recently and want to tag my photos. Do I use convention name, nickname, name2017, name 2017, nickname2017, nickname 2017, name13 (the number of years the convention has been going on), name 13, nickname13, nickname 13? That's 10 tag variations right off the top of my head. And that's not even getting creative or misspelling it.

True story, on etsy for a while, "whimsicle" had more search results than "whimsical".

I recently saw a story tagged both "Gen" and "Explicit" ... which is just idiotic.

I tend to skip past anyone who has a lot of 'tumblr-style' tags (although one of my fav authors tends to tag this way, and generally has shitty titles and summaries, so I know that the wrapper isn't always indicative of the contents.

I recently saw a story tagged both "Gen" and "Explicit"

I wonder if it was one of those people who's decided they're going to make a statement about how our culture's values are ridiculous and backwards, in that we normalize violence by allowing violent movies to be PG rated but shame and scandalize sex but sticking movies containing any sexual content with R ratings.

So with their own fics they've decided to give violence the adult rating it deserves, while also subverting our assumptions that mature content equals sexual content.

Every time I see someone do this, I think, "Yes. Yes. You're right. I agree with you. I bet lots of people agree with you. But damn it, stop fucking with the tagging system. Stop fucking with my ability to predictably locate porn."

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