Things Wax has whispered under her breath to her phone while trying to find new fic to read today

[cimorene]

• "Why would you"


• "What. WHAT"


• "Who are you? Cause you're not jfkfgn"


• "Hnnnnn"


• [DEEP SIGH]

Comments

[yvannairie]

This made me burst out loud laughing at lunch :'DDD

[cimorene]

Her pain is our gain!

[krait]

Sounds like my recent forays into a certain fandom tag on AO3. :D

Though for true accuracy it needs a bit more emphasis. Sprinkle some "WHYYYYYYY"s and "Areyoukiddingmerightnow"s in there and it'd be perfect.


(But seriously, why are some fandoms so bad at tagging?! I can only borrow Wax's [DEEP SIGH])

[cimorene]

I wonder things like this a lot, the demographic differences between fandoms, that is. I definitely prefer mainstream multi-fandom media fandom for this reason, that is, the fact that people are mostly socialized into it regardless of which bit of it you find. Fandoms that are monofannish or isolated get these weirder and weirder little pockets and develop truly bizarre, antisocial, and counter-productive customs just because, I guess, people who aren't already accustomed to fandom norms from elsewhere find themselves together and sort of spontaneously invent their own, like making a pidgin and/or a creole.

Bad header writing and bad tagging are some of the most immediately obvious of course - you can see them without even reading the fic. Fanon tropes taking everything else over is probably the worst, though. After a certain point it sometimes becomes impossible to find anything that isn't essentially just fanfic of the fanon. Which is fine if you're a fan of the fanon and your interest wasn't sparked by the canon, but if you came there because you liked something about the canon that's about when it's time to give up.

[krait]

All very true! Getting a glimpse into those tiny, isolated fandoms that have been evolving on their own for decades is always a fascinating (if sometimes also terrifying) experience. :D

On the bad tagging front, let's just say, I'd like to tattoo the words TAG YOUR MODERN AUS on the back of the whole fandom's hands. If I ran an archive, this would be mandatory! :D I'm doing my best to filter, but screening out the eight most common AUs I don't like does nothing if a third of them are untagged. (Or 'tagged' with rubbish tags like [character] opens an OnlyFans account and [character] is his first subscriber ;) that isn't synned to AU - Modern.)

[cimorene]

Wow, that's a new level of stupid though. People also look FOR modern aus on purpose, so the lack of tags is making it harder to find the intended audience! Not to mention that AU in general is one of the most basic and obvious things to exclude!

[krait]

It really is. DX

That's why I say the whole fandom is really, genuinely bad at tagging; it hardly seems like a "skill" to put a Modern AU tag on a modern AU fic, but nonetheless it appears to be a skill that this fandom's writers have not learned.

Do these writers not read, themselves? Because I feel that anyone who has ever tried to find something to read on AO3 in a large fandom should grasp that using searchable tags means more readers who are interested in your fic. And yet...!