fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6332 ]

[ SECRET POST #6332 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6332 ⌋

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

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[The Old Guard]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 17 secrets from Secret Submission Post #905.
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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Little bit inspired by the first secret - but what are your fanfic-searching pet peeves?
Do you also have trouble finding your ship, or find it but its written 'wrong'?
Certain tags? How People in a fandom use the tagging system? Have you encountered the mass-tagger or someone who reposts their fic for more views?

Feel free to rant!

In my current fandom, there's a few people who will post up about 50 tags for a fic that's less than 500 words.
Like - I have read short drabble fics before and usually don't mind them, but I really don't believe THAT much is happening in oh so many words.

Stop putting background pairings in the relationship section! Tag them Background X/Y in the additional tags section! I am begging!

My crossovers dilemma that's only a specific problem in my current fandom.

Also every one is into whumps right now with sad endings. I'd write my own hurt/comfort, but writers block is kicking my ass right now.

Ive been looking into older fandoms and seeing what there is on ao3 and it seems like when ao3 was new people didn't really tag much. Sometimes they'd put the pairing, but often not even that. And a bunch don't even have descriptions. It seems like it was literally purely archival, which makes it really hard to search through the old fandoms for fic I want or when looking for old ones I half remember.

I'll take undertagging over overtagging any day of the week though.

Why? If there are no tags you cant search for it.

Re: Older fandom problems

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 01:22 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Older fandom problems

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 01:26 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Older fandom problems

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 13:42 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Older fandom problems

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 18:14 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Older fandom problems

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 18:39 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Older fandom problems

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 19:52 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Older fandom problems

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 16:41 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Older fandom problems

philstar22 - 2024-05-08 02:01 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Older fandom problems

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 13:44 (UTC) - Expand

Same! In older fandoms, it’s easy to find stuff that’s under tagged even when the fandom is giant or even still active. Just use the fandom tag and sort by date, then skip to the last page and start moving forward.

IME the undertagging is a mix of Open Doors and early adopters not knowing how or not caring to tag. That first year or so it was purely an archive where authors posted a backup of their fic but the main was on LJ, either on their own or posted directly into a comm. I can’t remember anyone posting there expecting to find a new audience, that came later.

You could also be seeing the results of Open Doors. It uses the posted date from the original archive and any tags that can translate.

Oh interesting! I was just assuming people approached the archive differently then, but it absolutely could be this.

Nobody is writing fics about male characters getting turned into women as the main narrative plot device and finding themselves happier.

There was a good* fic in Teen Wolf that did this. Derek's body got turned female and at first everyone was looking for a spell to reverse it and Derek was just ignoring the whole thing, but eventually they had to admit they couldn't reverse it and Derek turned out to be super happy about it and went on to live her best life.

*Good of course being subjective and I read it years ago so it might be better in my memory, but I remember liking it.

honestly, just...not tagging. or incorrect tagging to the point where a crucial tag was omitted, same thing. I only notice it when I filter out what I don't want and shit still slips through, but it's a street that runs both ways - if people are specifically searching for a thing and you didn't tag the thing, you're not showing up in their results, same as people trying to omit your thing and you still show up because you didn't fucking tag it. I wish every AO3 account creation came with a mandatory FAQ that includes this basic fact. This is how you tag, and why tagging correctly is 100000% in your favor/benefit and you will get more clicks and kudos with proper tags.

I just really hate when there are well established tags for things and authors go out of their way to use slightly similar but different tags. Worse if they use several slightly similar but different tags all EXCEPT the well established one.

Its extra annoying becaise all they are doing is making more work for the tag wranglers, who are all volunteers

I always try to see if a tag pops up that's in the neighborhood of what I was going to use, since it will auto-suggest tags. Because YEAH, it drives me crazy when I block one thing from my search and then I get a bunch of fics that have Thing-Worded-Differently.

Sometimes people tag when they have an abusive version of my OTP, and sometimes they don't. That interpretation is super OOC to me, and I hate it. I hate clicking on a fic that looks interesting only to be hit with that.

I tend to be very picky about characterization in my ships. Sometimes I even ship the biggest fandom OTP but dislike most fic because it just feels "off" to me.

Hard same. In-character is really important to me. And I know there is usually going to be a range. But if something feels out of character to me, I'm instantly annoyed and no longer interested in reading.

One of my current ships involves a character who is ace in canon. The vast majority of the fics for this pairing tag the character as asexual, but the way he's written in most of these fics makes the asexual tag so broad that I literally never know what to expect from the fic.

Most of the time it feels like the author just avoids making any point-blank, unmistakable statements about Character A feeling sexually attracted to Character B, and then proceeds to...write Character A behaving as though he were attracted to Character B??

As a sex repulsed aro/ace person who just wants to read fics about my OTP being horny for each other, I usually skip fics tagged with ace tags. But the way this one pairing is tagged is totally fucking me up, because I can never figure out whether the fic will basically pass for both characters being allo, or whether it won't.

..but you want to read fic where your OTP is horny for each other. I was with you until that bit because then isn't this fulfilling that?

I imagine ace fic is hard to write just because the spectrum is so broad. I can see how that could be frustrating as reader. (I am ace but I tend to avoid any topics that are too close to home so I don't read ace fic.)

As an ace writer I often wind up writing characters as at least somewhere in the demi zone, but if it's not going to have a real bearing on the story, then yeah, I don't tag it as Ace (Character).

I like using fic to explore ace/allo relationships, to be fair-- yeah, a lot of times that means the ace character is sex positive or at least sex neutral, but like... sometimes I want the smut! I just also want the allo character to FIRST say that sex isn't make-or-break and it's okay to never have it.

Re: Fanfiction Rants

(Anonymous) - 2024-05-08 02:28 (UTC) - Expand

One of my fandoms with an ace character has an author who always writes them being basically an allo. With a lot of sex and experiences etc. Tag fics with "ace character". And I am also usually going into fics for characters being horny and being ace is a spectrum. But I find this particular instance so damn annoying

Going back to a previous fandom I was in; this was the early days of ao3 so my main fic sources were FFN and LJ. A/B was the juggernaut ship and A/C was my OTP, by no means a rarepair, but still dwarfed by many other popular ships.

On FFN, fully 30% of all fics tagged "A/C" actually portrayed the relationship as doomed or unrequited, with A/B as the endgame pairing. Happened a fair bit on LJ as well. It drove me up the wall.

I completely HATE when people tag for fandoms they aren't actually using. The biggest offenders is MCU fic tagged as "comics" like get the fuck out of here, I am looking for very particular characterization and your fic does! Not! Cut it! And if you don't know if your dynamics are comics accurate? Then they aren't. Stop it.

Also, super long character names in the tags suck. Especially if they have to include the name of the work they're from because the name is a little too generic. And then, god bless, someone will write a fic like Tony Stark/Jane Doe| Female Protagonist | Blood Walkers RPG (2004), Virginia Potts/Jane Doe| Female Protagonist | Blood Walkers RPG (2004), Tony Stark/Virginia Potts/Jane Doe| Female Protagonist | Blood Walkers RPG (2004). Like, sure, it's the best way to make sure all the Jane Does don't cross contaminate each other's tags but it's so annoying.

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