#I wrote out this whole thing earlier

[mariana-oconnor]

Tagging on AO3

Because I've come across this a number of times in the past few weeks and I know other places work differently:

On AO3, you don't need to add variations of your tags.

What I mean by that is if you are tagging a certain ship, you don't need to tag "Name A/Name B" and "Name B/Name A" and "ABShipname". AO3 has a system that's pretty well established now that, with the help of many tag wranglers* (All Hail the Tag Wranglers) behind the scenes, does that for you. All of those tags are linked together so if a person filters by one of them, they see all fics tagged with any of them. In fact, it's probably better for you to stick to a single tag, because that means potential readers can scan through your tags more quickly to check what's in the fic, making them more likely to read it if it's got tags they like.

Not only does it link tags with the same meaning together, the wonderful tag wranglers (their praises be sung) also create a sort of hierarchy of tags, so multiple more specific tags are all included under a more general umbrella tag.

For example, if you are tagging your fic where beloved side-character Tom Fakename is a werewolf, you can tag it "Werewolf Tom Fakename" or "Tom Fakename is a Werewolf" or "I made Tom Fakename a Werewolf Because I Love Werewolves LOL" and all of those mean the same thing. BUT your fic will also appear if someone filters by the more general tag "Werewolves"**. And all those fics, as well as fics where Tom Fakename (or his fan favourite ship partner Matt Blorbo) are tagged as being werecats, wererabbits, werebats or were-stick-insects can ALL be found if you filter by the tag "Were-creatures". Weirdly, were-creatures doesn't seem to come under the Shapeshifters tag, but I assume that was the result of careful consideration on the tag wranglers' (may their days be filled with joy) part.

In summary:

"Matt Blorbo/Tom Fakename" = "Tom Fakename/Matt Blorbo" = "Fakebo" = "Tom x Matt" (only one of these tags is needed***)

"Were-creatures" > "Werewolves" > "Werewolf Tom Fakename"

"Were-creatures" > "Matt Blorbo as a Werekitten is Something That Can Actually Be So Personal"

(You can tag with multiple of these if you want, but you only really need to be as specific as you'd like)

Of course, the tag wranglers (may the fandom gods bless their names) are only human and literally do not have time to read every 100k fic out there to check every single tag is absolutely correct, so sometimes things do get mixed up. However! You can aid them in their mighty task by using the tags that already exist where available and appropriate for you!

When you start typing tags into the little input bar on the AO3 New Work screen, you'll see a dropdown list of tags that are similar to what you're typing. If one of those has the right meaning for what you want to tag and it works for you, you can click on it, and your fic is already connected to the great tag web in the right place. Of course, if it ruins your comedic tagging rant, feel free to ignore this.

All good things come with a downside, though, beware the autofill!

Sometimes, when you're typing Werewolf Tom and you press enter, there may be another fandom with a character called Tom Otherguy who people love to make a werewolf (Tom Otherguy is just crying out for werewolf AUs, you know how it is. He's just a werewolfy li'l guy). And if you press enter, you'll find that rather than you tagging your work simply "Werewolf Tom", AO3 has autofilled the most popular tag that starts like that: "Werewolf Tom Otherguy".

Naturally, this can confuse both readers and the tagging system, so in general I'd recommend always including a second name where available****. I.e. it's better for everyone involved if you tag your fic "Werewolf Tom Fakename" rather than simply "Werewolf Tom" so it's clear at a glance who you're talking about and AO3 doesn't accidentally jump to conclusions. Just to be sure, make sure you check your tags after you've entered them, in case one of them autofilled without you noticing.

*To learn more about the tagging system and tag wranglers (bright stars of the fandom sky), check out the AO3 wrangling guidelines. Or, if you're interested in becoming a tag wrangler yourself, they will post information here when they're looking for applications.

**The "Alternate Universe - Werewolf" tag is a little different because it depends on whether your fandom has canonical werewolves. It comes under the umbrella tag of "Alternate Universe". Likewise with the "Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known" tag.

***Canonical pairing tags (the ones that appear in the filter list) are written in alphabetical order by surname (If they have a surname). Therefore "Matt Blorbo/Tom Fakename" is the standard tag for that pairing. Or "Matt Blorbo/Zara Diedforplot/Tom Fakename".

****If the character only has one name then usually that name will be followed by the name of the fandom in brackets to distinguish them from other characters with that name, i.e. Name (Fandom). Some characters have nicknames they are more commonly known by and those are usually inserted between their first and last names in inverted commas, e.g. "James "Bucky" Barnes". Other characters have nicknames and half a dozen other names, e.g. "Percival "Percy" Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski De Rolo III". If you have irritating motherfuckers (affectionate) like these in your fandom, I'm going to assume you already know about them.

Disclaimer: I am not a tag wrangler, nor have I ever been one. All information above is presented as I have come to understand it from having used AO3 for over a decade. If any of the information above is incorrect, please let me know so I can correct it.

TL;DR - You only need to use one version of a tag, AO3 will make sure anyone searching for variations can find your fic, and be careful to check your tags before you post to make sure they're right.

[movietonight]

While there are things to criticise mash for and those conversations are important to have some of what I read can be explained very easily by reminding yourself

It was a TV show

On a budget

From years ago

From America

Written by a variety of human writers

Who used characters and plots to tell stories

Within a certain number of minutes

[theodore-lasso]

So like certified bad day. My grandma died this morning and now I'm sick???? Bro come on

[yououghtaknow]

feeling myself Actually move on is insane..... what do you Mean i don't want to cry every time i see her????

[ravensroleplays]

Random Observation:

Okay, quick disclaimer: I haven’t gotten very far in the Security Breach: Ruin DLC yet by which I mean I haven’t watched all of Markiplier’s videos. However, the other day I ended up running into a spoiler regarding the ‘Gregory’ Cassie talks to in the game.

And given the circumstances, I...can’t help but be reminded of the very first time I wrote Ian.

[sashimiyas]

good night guys. i’m gonna write about mattsun taking us out fishing for the first time

[pallases]

okay i lied abt being done going thru old things ive spent the last like hour and a half clearing out my drawers bc they are a MESS and i found a “song book” of mine and it gets dark so unnervingly fast

[evil-ontheinside]

Since I've seen a few recently (I wrote this a while ago so that's not quite true anymore), is this a good time to say that I also had a role swap au (as in: El -> Will -> Mike -> El) in my wips for a few months now? I'm probably never gonna write it but I do love my ideas for it

[beesarthur]

ok friends, how do i make my way into the one career i was born to (continuity checker for a long-running tv show)???

[justthatspiffy]

i can't stop writing essays about my friend's shitty plays!!

[4giorno]

insane abt K in general but also abt his expression as he asks "is this about judge kim?" after having to hold yohan back from killing a guy in anger, specifically bc this is a rewatch so ive seen the nature of K's and yohans relationship and That Conversation K and gaon had in a later episode

[spidersunday]

me when i cant mass delete my twitter posts so everyone knows how chronically online i am

[lily-lovelyy]

Thinking about Simon or Konig giving you an aphrodisiac without you knowing 🤭

(I wrote this when I was half asleep, this is all consensual, just didn't write it out sorry 🙏🏻)

Ghost

Earlier in the day, Ghost had given you some chocolate to help some of your normal cravings. It was ovulation week, and you were craving so much dark chocolate you thought you'd explode.

Simon only gave you a little piece, but you snuck into your room and found the bar. And ate it. The whole thing.

Simon didn't walk in on you, but he subtly noticed your face turning beet red and the way you fondled with his hands. You definitely got his attention whenever you started whining and pulling his hand down to your crotch.

"Someone's needy, huh?" He taunted, before throwing you over his shoulder and leading you into your shared bedroom. He slammed you down onto the bed, and you were already a panting mess. The light reflecting off of the foil wrapper got his attention, and he smirked at you.

"looks like we're going to have a long night tonight, huh bunny?"

Konig

He had seen an article on aphrodisiac candies, and he decided for fun to purchase some. He read the instructions, and it said to only consume one, but he figured two wouldn't do much harm...right?

About 30 minutes later, you had been in bed, already pushing up your skirt passed your hips and spreading your legs, whimpering just at the sight of Konig watching you.

You pulled your panties to the side, showing him your already dripping cunt and he smiled at you, groaning at the sight. "Already this horny for me, maus?" He snickered, before climbing over you and kissing you on your neck, making you a panting mess with just a few wet kisses.

'this will be fun...' he thought

[taibhsearachd]

...ngl, the fact that ADD and ADHD got condensed into ADHD when the hyperactivity specifically is part of the reason so many girls were simply not diagnosed drives me up the wall.

It's not that the whole name isn't bullshit, because it is. It describes the way people outside of our experience perceive us, as opposed to the difficulties that are part of our lived experience. Even from an outside standpoint, it's recognizable that "deficit" is not always the issue with our attention... but that's beside the point.

When psychiatrists noticed that ADD and ADHD were basically the same thing... they chose to favor the typical male presentation in the literal naming of the condition, and in doing so condemned a generation of girls (and other afab people) to suffer through being told they're so smart, they just don't apply themselves enough, that it's a personal failing they can't regularly turn in homework, that they're lazy for waiting until the last minute to work on an assignment... because those girls weren't hyperactive. Those girls just kind of drifted off and daydreamed in classes. Those girls doodled or wrote stories all through their school years, and functioned measurably worse when a teacher noticed they were doing that and tried to stop them. Those girls are now so many of my adult friends who are now being diagnosed with ADHD as adults, because the hyperactive part of the diagnosis almost solely applies to children (CHILDREN, when, I might note, this is a lifelong condition) who are socialized male.

We need a whole other name for the condition, because attention deficit is not our problem at all. But my god, the hyperactivity part actually ruined my life for so many years, because I had no way to explain to my dad why it physically hurt me to be bored, why I had to read or write or doodle in class in order to keep my focus, why I excelled in tests but failed at homework so my grades sucked because of that. No one even considered I might have ADHD, all through my childhood, but earlier this year I had the opportunity to go through all my grade school reports, and they could not be MORE CLEARLY talking about a child with ADHD. "Pleasure to have in class", "assignments not complete", "does not pay attention in class", "Birdie is a highly intelligent child with specific and unique needs" (I would LOVE more follow-up on that one, from third grade, do not have it). But I was a quiet and reserved child, so obviously I couldn't have ADHD.

I'm legitimately angry about it in retrospect. I went off my Adderall for a couple months recently, as an adult who only started taking Adderall as an adult, and it completely fucked up my ability to function. For years I was just out there as a teenager struggling through high school and college entirely unmedicated because as a child I was too withdrawn to be diagnosed. Fucking wild and also infuriating.

[noxtivagus]

I HAVE WRITTEN SO MUCH IN MY NOTES IN THE PAST HOUR OH MY of today n then to-do dump n other stuff too 🫣

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Neil talking about the responses to Good Omens Season 2 - from the Neil Gaiman interview with Brian Levine for The Gould Standard (x,x)

BL: The audience that you have built is a very passionately engaged audience. They, frankly, they love you. And one of the reasons they love you is that you fit into what I think of as one of two great divisions in art. There's, or in writing, um, there is: I'm entertained, I'm amused. I may be even enchanted; and then there's this hits me at a visceral level. You understand me as no one else does. You have touched something very central to my experience. And it seems to me that Much of your writing, maybe all of your writing, actually reaches your audience at that latter level. You know. I would say in the former category, sort of my quintessential and beloved example would be P. G. Woodhouse. He amuses me, but I don't feel like he's revealed my inner self at a very deep level. Um, were you aware that you were going to be able to achieve that? Um, that this is something... was it a startling thing when people began coming up to you, who'd read your work and said, this means so much to me?

Neil: Yeah. It was huge. And it wasn't expected. I... if I had a mountaintop I was heading towards, it was gonna be P. G. Woodhouse. Um, I wanted to be a proficient entertainer with a clear prose style who could tell stories. Um, it probably wasn't until Sandman that I found... I started to realize that in order for a story to work, I had to show too much. In order for a story to resonate, in order for a story to matter, I had to let it matter too much. And, and I remember the first people who would start coming up to me and saying, um, you, you know, your, your Sandman comics got me through the death of a loved one. Your death character got me through my child's death, through my parent's death, through my partner's death, through my friend's death. Um, and that left me kind of amazed. I'm like, well, I didn't write it to do that. I wrote it to feed my children. I wrote it to satisfy myself. I wrote it because nobody else had ever written it. And if I didn't write it, it wouldn't be written, but I don't think I wrote it to give you what you've taken from it. And I spent really about 20, 25 years feeling awkward about that. And then my father died, in March 2009, and never got to cry about it. Never... I, you know, I've, I've got on a plane and I went to the UK and dealt with the funeral stuff and organized all of that stuff and came back and go toff the plane and went and did Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report and wearing the funeral suit because and that was all I had with me and carried on. And then, somewhere in the middle of summer, I was reading a friend's script. They'd sent me a script and said, can you look this over? And I'm reading it, and on page 20, the lead character meets somebody, and on page 26 maybe, she's dead, and I burst into tears. And I'm bawling. I am sobbing. It is coming out of me in giant racking waves. And I realized that it's everything that I'd been, hadn't let myself feel, or hadn't been able, hadn't stopped enough to let myself feel, was suddenly being given permission to feel by the death of a fictional person who I'd met six pages earlier, ia script. And I thought that... and it was huge for me, and I thought, okay, that's that thing that people are talking about sometimes, when they come tome and they say, you, you did this. So right now, I'm in this weird, wonderful place where I think a lot of people in Good Omens Season 2 thought they were signing up for the P.G. Woodhouse, and didn't know that, no, no, no, you've, you've signed up for the whole thing. You've signed up for the feelings. You've signed up for the emotions. I... it is my job to make you care and to make you feel and to feel things you haven't felt before. And which meant that the first week or so after Good Omens came out, I was getting angry, furious, deeply upset messages on every possible social medium telling me that I had betrayed people, and it was awful, and they couldn't stop crying, and why would I do that to them, and did I hate them? And they hated me. And then a weird sort of phenomenon happened as people would watch the show again. And again. And now they started to know, okay, this is where it's gonna go, this is what's gonna happen, this is how it works. And they started realizing that they were actually feeling things, and that was good. And that they were caring about two people who don't exist. You know, I made them up, and then and Terry Pratchett made them up, and then, um, David Tennant and Michael Sheen gave them life, and then they get to walk around on a screen and you know they don't exist, but you can cry for them, you can love them, they can make you laugh, they can make you exult, and most important of all, they can make you care. And the number of people who are now writing to me, saying, 'This was so important to me. This has changed my life. This makes me feel like I belong. This makes me feel like I can cope. And it's let me sort of find myself. P. S. I hope you get to do Season Three.' is, is huge.