forget slow burn romance, give me slow burn found family. give me enemies to friends to siblings. tired, weary old mentors learning to live again for their plucky young apprentices. heroes sharing apartments after world saving adventures because they’re so used to living with each other. dramatic “oh shit” moments where one gets kidnapped and the other realizes “god, that’s my kid.” i want to sit and watch in agony for thirty chapters while two idiots slowly adopt each other, someone get on it

Yes, you can tag your dark or triggery work on AO3 with the characters and ships that are in it

Okay, so I’ve seen enough purity wank at this point to notice a common slip of the fingers among multiple wankists that admits the main complaint: some people feel that tagging a work that has dark themes or triggery content in the ship or character tag that they follow on AO3 is akin to posting in a tumblr tag as an anti.

I’ll go ahead and clearly state: that is not true.

The tags on AO3 literally mean “X content is in here.” X may be a ship, a character, a trope, a setting, a fandom, a gender category, you name it. But that is literally all it means: “X is here.”

That doesn’t mean you’re going to like the X that’s in a given work. You might hate it. It might include your squicks or even your triggers. That’s okay - you don’t have to open it. The point of having multiple tags plus summaries on works is to help you make an informed decision. I break out into chills just thinking about opening a high school au. In some fandoms, that means there’s barely anything left. That’s okay. It’s not up to creators to make stuff that I like. It’s up to them to tag clearly and accurately so I can avoid stuff I won’t like.

(For the record, that includes both underage and character death, but I will absolutely stand up for anyone who wants to make those things in ships and for characters I love, because I don’t have to open them. Someone else out there does want those works, and that’s great. More power to ‘em. I’ll be over here buried in fluff and curtainfic, which I’m sure someone else out there hates.)

I have much more sympathy for those who complain that posters are tagging with ships or characters or concepts that don’t appear in the work or are only mentioned once, because that’s a case of tagging something that isn’t there on the screen, just in the creator’s head. But if something is there on the screen? Doesn’t matter what else is there with it. The work belongs in the tag.

Tags on AO3 don’t belong to a specific group of people. I have seen people be run out of tags by harassers dogpiling them, and I’m here to say that is not on. No matter how much you like a thing, the tag for it is not yours to decide who gets to use it and who doesn’t. Don’t like, don’t read. You have a scrollbar and filtering. Use them like a responsible adult.

(If you’re not an adult, don’t lie about your age to get through the age filter and then complain about what you find on the other side.)

The “anti” problem arose because Tumblr has no functional community structure, meaning people started using the tags themselves to replace the communities from back on LJ. In that context, tagging a negative post with the tags that apply was making the posts show up in the only viable community structure, which was a violation of LJ etiquette (where communities were self-selecting and moderated). This was exacerbated by the lack of functional cut tags, so everything was all completely visible, and you had to scroll past every post in its entirety. The culture of “don’t post anti in the tag” was a social concept developed to deal with Tumblr’s non-functionality for fandom purposes.

That’s unfortunate, but it’s Tumblr’s problem, not AO3′s. AO3 is not a blogging or social media platform. It’s an archive. It relies on a fairly unique tagging system that only works properly if posters tag fully. Don’t import Tumblr social norms about what belongs or doesn’t belong in a tag onto AO3; they don’t fit. All they do is break the tagging and filtering system by bullying people out of tagging fully.

Yes, Hydra Trash Party works belong in the Bucky/Sam tag if they are about Bucky/Sam (filter for removing all 8 htp works from Bucky/Sam). Yes, works about Derek Hale being Superman belong in the Supergirl tag (filter for removing all 2 Teen Wolf crossovers from Supergirl). Instead of dogpiling people, learn how to use the filters to your advantage. Here’s how to remove Hux/Kylo and Kylo/Rey and similar ships from the Star Wars TFA results, or remove the above plus Hux entirely. Seriously, I could go on all day. Ask me for any filtering need you have, and I will show you how to do it.

We need to stop harassing people for making what they love instead of what we love. That makes fandom a more awful place for everyone.

Seriously, I didn’t even know this new wtfuckery was a thing.

Okay but honest question: what about Trojan Horse fic? Where someone specifically trolls shippers by tagging for one ship and then doing a bait and switch with another.

Anybody can do anything in bad faith.  If you’re in a system that allows user participation, you have to compare the potential harm done by bad-faith actors to the benefits of the user participation.

In this case, the harm is…oh no, someone read a story that included a pairing they didn’t like.  (And that assumes that they kept reading instead of quitting when the unwanted pairing turned up.)

Is that potentially really freaking annoying?  Yes.  But we must resist the idea that, as a general rule, seeing something you’re uninterested in or don’t care for is a Great Fannish Tragedy that we must engineer our institutions around averting.  It’s part of the risk you take every time you open up your mind a little by looking at work created by someone else.

@notagarroter Depends on the specifics of the Trojan Horse

If it’s not a fic at all, but a callout post or something, you can report it to AO3 as a content violation under non-fanwork content and harassment if applicable

There’s also a system where a wrong tag can be reported to the abuse team: 

This can only work if the fic has no content of your given ship tag at all, of course. Bad faith writers who include content of the first ship but then bait and switch may be forced to tag the second ship, but likely won’t be obliged to remove the tag of the first one. 

It works, too. I’ve had anti-Shimadaces posts masquerading as fics removed for being non fannish content and in one case, targeted harassment. 

If you hate a ship, keep it to your blogs =)) It’s not that hard. 

This is a great post, but as an AO3 volunteer I feel like have to correct something about this very last comment. The Policy & Abuse committee can only interfere with the incorrect use of language, warning, and fandom tags (and rating). Not relationship tags, character tags, or additional tags. Those are optional tags that are completely up to the creators to use however they want, whether they’re intentionally misleading or not, because there are so many ways to interpret these tags. 

See the TOS FAQ: “What kinds of mis-tagging does Abuse handle? 

We encourage direct dialogue with the creator. However, Abuse also handles complaints about work language (e.g., Chinese mistagged as French); Archive warnings; Archive ratings; fandom categorization and work type (once work type is implemented). Tag recategorization policies are about required tags. Abuse will not recategorize any optional tags, though optional tags are subject to relevant principles of the general content policy, including the harassment policy. Unless a tag violates some other policy, such as the harassment policy, Abuse will not mediate disputes about general tagging (e.g., whether a particular relationship tag should or should not be present). “

and

“Will you recategorize or remove other tags, such as relationship tags?

Because our Abuse and Support resources are limited, and because different people interpret tags in many different ways, we don’t think that we can fairly define or enforce specific rules about relationship or other similar tags, including the additional/freeform tags. We encourage users to engage with each other on these issues. However, our general harassment and anti-spam policies apply to tags, as they do to all Archive content.”

Read more at https://archiveofourown.org/tos_faq#content_faq

(Note that “we encourage users to engage with each other on these issues” does not mean “harass the creator to tag the work the way you feel like it should be tagged”.)

Thanks, alihendrjx! You saved me from having to post this.

As I said in my reply to notagarroter’s concern, the best response to deliberate trolls is to ignore them, though I would also point out that most people tagging a ship that is not end-game are not trolls. This is where the giant PLEASE DON’T HARASS PEOPLE sign in the original post also applies.

I’ve been helping people with filtering over Ask - anyone is free to ask how to filter anything you want. I will gladly help, because I know what it’s like to have tastes that don’t match my fandom’s.

all that remains of a former ghost town in southern manitoba. 

boring & disrespectful: “oh, i can’t survive without my morning coffee”, “energy drink makes it so that i can get through my boring work”, and so on

living properly: treating caffeinated beverages like very mysterious & powerful magical potions that can give us unforeseen abilities

drink 15 cups of coffee in a day and you can clip through walls

me, approaching my local barista with trepidation and awe: potion seller. I am going into battle and I require your strongest potion.

potion seller: trenta macchiato plus five shots as usual, then?

me, extending my credit card with a trembling hand: fuck me up

Still tryin to heal from things I don’t speak about

My whole being calls for an act of violence, but I still use velvet gloves.

all I have to offer is shit posts, sorry

“Okay.”