#ao3's tag system makes it much easier to avoid/filter anyways

[suddencolds]

hey vanessa !! i'm just wondering, will there be any new fics coming in? ofc take your time with it all! i understand it can be really tiring so this is just out of curiosity ! no pressure or anything :) <3 also i really love your fics like i always come back everyday to read them :D

Hi anon!! :) I have 3 WIPs atm and they are all... blatantly unfinished and it's taking a lot out of me to write them. I've been unconfident in my writing for the longest time, and I'm also really slow at writing fml

But since you asked, here are some excerpts from each! - I can't promise I'll get around to finishing them (I think it's actually unlikely that I'll get to all 3). But if any of these seem worth continuing, lmk

1. (Diluc) - Kaeya asks for Diluc to accompany him on an expedition - really, it's an excuse to spend more time with him. He doesn't expect Diluc to come down with a miserable cold in the process.

“An expedition,” Diluc repeats.

“Yes.”

“You’re asking me to go with you.”

Kaeya laughs. He’d already expected that Diluc would have questions about this, but it’s not as if he can tell .

“Amber is leading her own expedition,”—busy scouting out some temples in Starfell Valley, after they’ve caught wind of Fatui activity in the area. It’s an assignment that Kaeya thinks Diluc would be much more interested in, but that’s besides the point—“and Eula is out sick this week. So are nearly half of the Knights. Jean suggested I find you.”

Perhaps if he phrases it this way—as if this is a last resort—Diluc will be more receptive to it. It’s not technically a lie. Jean hadn’t advised him to do anything—actually, Jean had told him that she hadn’t wanted him going up on Dragonspine alone. Technically, with Diluc’s company, he would not be going alone.

If Kaeya is taking her words out of context, then no one has to know.

“Where is it?”

At least it’s not outright a no. “Dragonspine,” Kaeya answers carefully. “You’d understand why a pyro user would be good for that.”

“And if I say no?”

There it is. Kaeya waves an arm dismissively. “I told her you wouldn’t want to… well, never mind. I suppose I can bring a few unactivated warming bottles and hope for the best.”

—

2. (Childe) - After the entire fiasco with Liyue and Rex Lapis's passing, Childe throws himself into work with a fever, gets injured, and begrudgingly seeks Zhongli out.

(This was supposed to be for Childe's birthday 3 weeks ago, and now it's sitting in my drafts as a 4k word unfinished WIP)

“How do you know Mr. Zhongli?”

Her question catches him off guard. “We used to be close,” he says, though maybe that isn’t completely accurate. “Now I think he might hate me, or… something.”

The ferrylady sets aside the papers she’s dealing with. “I am doubtful that Mr. Zhongli would hate anyone.”

Childe laughs, bitter and humorless. “Not without reason, I’m sure. But if he despises me now, I think it would be justified.”

He coughs into a raised hand, ducking slightly so that she can’t see how he grimaces after. “I mean, I didn’t set out to bother him just because I’m injured, ahaha! To be honest, I…”

Truthfully, he doesn’t know who else to turn to.

“...I think he would at least have the decency not to turn me away.”

Zhongli is the first person he’d trusted—entirely, foolishly—in a long time.

“He was... good at playing the part of a good friend.”

He knows that coming here has been selfish.

“I mean, he really had me fooled!”

“Is that so?” The ferrylady says softly. “From the way you speak about him, it seems like the two of you had a lot of history.”

Had they? His head is swimming now—perhaps he hasn’t been keeping up on sleep as much as he should’ve. “...You could say that,” Childe says, blinking slowly. “I’m sorry, I’m... rather tired. Do you mind if I shut my eyes for a second?”

He’s asleep before he has the chance to hear her response.

—

3. (Zhongli) Zhongli - after he's given up his godhood - comes down with something, though he hides it well. Childe takes notice.

(I just wanted to write a character study for Zhongli sfkjsh; I feel like he would still be exceptionally dignified and polite when ill, just... it would take a lot out of him to keep up that front)

They walk for a few minutes in silence. When the caverns splits off into two different entryways, Childe turns on his heels to ask for directions.

He’s met with Zhongli, ducking his head, a gloved hand over his face as his shoulders jerk forward, sharp and violent, even though it sounds contained. It takes another moment for Childe to recognize the action for what it is.

“Bless you, xiansheng!” he says. “Is something in the cave bothering you?” Childe had assumed that Zhongli’s archon status had made him unaffected by things like dust, though perhaps Zhongli is not impervious to everything human, after all.

“I am doubtful that anything inside this cave is causing this,” Zhongli answers.

Childe shrugs. “Well, let me know if you want to head back.”

Zhongli hums. The cavern is intimidatingly silent, save for the rush of water, so Childe passes the time, talking about the recruits he’s been training. He’s halfway through a tale about a ruin guard he’d encountered out in Guili Plains when Zhongli leans away slightly to cough into a raised arm.

“I apologize,” he says, when Childe stops mid-sentence to look at him. “I did not mean to interrupt.”

His voice is rough. Childe wonders why he hadn’t noticed earlier—perhaps because Zhongli has been speaking so quietly. He looks him over.

Zhongli looks, with every inch of him, as presentable as always, though the cavern is so dark it’s hard to say if anything is off. He meets Childe’s eyes with his usual, steady glance, sniffling softly.

The possibility that he might be ill is so fleeting that Childe almost dismisses it.

[beatrice-otter]

An Open Letter to AO3 Regarding Fandom Tagging Changes

ETA: Checking the archive this morning, I found that the Wonder Woman (2017) tag no longer redirects to DCEU, but takes you directly to Wonder Woman (2017).  Also, someone said that even last night, you could (from the DCEU page) click on the "Fandoms" list on the sidebar and filter to just Wonder Woman (2017), but I don't know if that worked last night when the tags were merged, because in my poking around in disbelief, I forgot the 'filter by fandom' option on the sidebar.  I am writing another message to support thanking them for fixing the issue.

ETA 2: @melannen checked with the DCEU taggers and confirmed that redirecting the Wonder Woman (2017) tag was a mistake and not part of an overarching plan for DCEU or any other megafandom.  Somebody clicked the wrong button, I guess, and they fixed it as soon as they figured out it had happened.  Thank you to all the people working hard at tag wrangling and support to keep the archive going, and fix problems like this.

My original letter is below the read-more.

This is what I just sent off to AO3's Support. Hi!  First, before I get started, I want you to know that I have loved AO3 since its beginning.  I know how huge an endeavor it is, and how much work goes on behind the scenes (all of it on a volunteer basis), and I am grateful for it.  I also understand that there are situations where there is no good answer to a problem because of either technical issues behind the scenes or conflicting needs/wants of users, and I actively try to be charitable in how I interpret the decisions the archive makes, for the reasons stated above.  I know that large fandom trees were straining your servers, and you needed to find a solution. The flexibility of the tagging structure on AO3 is about 90% of the reason I love the archive.  And by that I mean, the ability to use tags to find EXACTLY what I want to read, instead of slogging through hundreds (or thousands, in some fandoms) of fics I am not interested, is THE MAJOR THING AO3 has always (until now) done better than any other fic archive or website.  My main frustrations with the archive have been when tags aren't granular enough--when I want them to be more specific than they are.  For example, when I wish that character tags were filtered by whether someone was a major or minor character in the story, or when I'm trying to find fic specifically about X-Men: Days of Future Past and get redirected to all XMFC fic.  And I don't think I'm alone in this.   So any change to make them less granular, even when it might make the back end run smoother, is a big problem for me. In particular, your that solution to current tagging woes (merging sub-fandom tags into one over-arching fandom tag) has broken the archive for me in some of my fandoms, and (if it is rolled out across other fandoms in the same way) will break all of those fandoms for me, rendering the archive virtually useless for doing anything other than reading fic I have already bookmarked. As a first step, merging the individual movies of the Star Wars Original Trilogy together into one tag is a pretty good decision, and I was actually surprised that it hadn't been done already.  It works because the three movies of that trilogy tell one unified story with pretty much the same characters.  There may be people who love one movie in it and hate the others, but I've never met any; and the fandom has not historically split along intra-trilogy lines.  There are very few people who, when they click on "Return of the Jedi" and get all OT fics, are going to be seriously upset or discommoded by it (and many who would actually PREFER to get all fics in that trilogy).  So when I saw the tumblr post saying you were going to do that, I went, "oh, yeah, good idea, that makes sense," and went about my day.  I assumed that other instances of merging things would be similarly merging things that were already a unified fannish category with little individual distinction and went on about my business. Then I found out that all of the DCEU movies have been merged together into one fandom.  That, my friends, is  WHOLE DIFFERENT BALL OF WAX.  Unlike the three movies of the OT, there are NO characters that are shared between all DCEU movies.  There are no overarching plot threads between them all.  There are MAJOR differences in plot, characters, theme, and many other points, between these movies.  It is quite possible to love one movie, and hate, loathe, and despise another.  There are LARGE swathes of the fandom that don't overlap.  There are many people, like me, who love one movie, like another, and actively try to avoid other movies in that megafandom.  This is quite common for megafandoms.  Every megafandom I'm familiar with--Star Wars, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, MCU, Stargate, DCEU, Star Trek--is too varied for people to like all of it equally; you end up with a handful of people who genuinely like the whole thing and most people who focus on parts of it.  Except now, there's no way to separate out the stuff you ACTUALLY want to see from all the OTHER mass of stuff in the megafandom.  And while that's not that big a deal in a small fandom where there isn't much fic to sort through anyway, it's a pretty BIG problem in a megafandom with is, you know, MEGA, with lots of fic. For example, I LOVE Wonder Woman (2017), am only occasionally interested in in the DCEU Superman and Justice League movies, and am only willing to read Suicide Squad fic if it's a Harley Quinn story that's mostly comics canon with a few Suicide Squad details.  With the old way the archive was organized, this was not a problem.  I could regularly look through the Wonder Woman (2017) tag for new fic, dip into Superman and Justice League on the rare occasions that I was in the mood for Batfleck and Cavilman, and pretty much never have to deal with anything Suicide Squad.  Now, I click on Wonder Woman (2017), and instead of getting pages of exactly what I want, I get the entire DCEU.  On that first page of 20 fics, there are currently only four that I would even be interested in considering reading.  Your tag change has dropped my rate of finding interesting things from 100% to 20%.  That is an 80% reduction in my ease of finding fic.  An 80% reduction in how useful your tagging system is. Let me repeat that: your new tagging system has decreased the usefulness of this archive by 80%. We're not talking, "oh, a small reduction in user satisfaction for a HUGE gain in back-end functionality."  I don't know how much easier this makes things on the back-end for you, but it is a FRICKING HUGE reduction in foundational ease-of-use for the entire site.  This is not a minor change.  This makes the most basic function of the site--finding fic to read--80% harder.  The only scenario in which I would view this as a workable solution--not a good solution, mind you, but one that I could accept--is if it was literally a choice between this and closing the archive. Let's talk about what my use of the archive would have to look like going forward if this change is maintained and expanded, so you can see what I mean.  Up until this change, if I wanted Wonder Woman fic, I clicked on the tag and got it!  Now I can't do that.  So my options are: 1) slogging through the entire DCEU, 80% of which I don't want.  This is the only way to be sure I see every Wonder Woman fic I actually want.   Problem: it will take me at least 80% longer to find stuff I ACTUALLY want.  So, I would be less likely to look for new fic, and more likely to just go re-read old favorites, because it's so much quicker to do.   As a reader and a writer, this is a problem for me, because I do want to read new fic, and I want other people to be able to find MY new fic. 2) putting together a long string of boolean search terms, probably based on characters.  So, for example, I couldn't just search for "Diana (Wonder Woman)" because she appears in too much Justice League and Batman Vs. Superman fic (which I very seldom want to read).  Searching for her would be better than just DCEU, because I wouldn't get Suicide Squad, but it would still be a ton of slogging through fics I don't want.  I could search for "Diana (Wonder Woman)" and use the "Search within results" box to exclude Justice League and Batman and Superman.   But that would miss any fics about Etta Candy or Steve Trevor or Hippolyta or any other Amazon in which Diana didn't appear.  So, then, maybe use boolean search terms for Diana OR Steve OR Etta OR Hippolyta, and eliminating Justice League and Batman and Superman.  Except that would still miss any fic that is, say, general worldbuilding for Themyscira, that doesn't have Diana or Hippolyta in it.  And I love worldbuilding, but not everybody tags for it.  Do I have to build up a boolean search string for EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE in the hopes of catching everything?  How many boolean terms can I use at once?  Or do I need to run several separate searches, which would mean sorting through a lot of these fics multiple times, as they would pop up under multiple search strings?  I would STILL probably end up missing things that I would be interested in, and it would take A SHIT-TON of extra effort on my part.  Far more effort, for less reward.  And, again, as both a reader who wants to find new fic and as a writer who wants other people to be able to find MY fic when I write it, everything about this is terrible. 3. Use AO3 Savior to do some of the filtering for me.  I don't know, blacklisting some tags would probably cut down on the number of boolean terms to rack up, but then I would have to go in and un-blacklist things on the rare occasions I actually wanted to read Batfleck fic.  But this would become of less and less utility as people stopped tagging for individual movies and just tagged everything with the current canonical metatag for DCEU.  Also: there is only one site I know if in which browser extensions are required to make the site useable, and that is tumblr which is a shambling hellscape of a site.  Is that AO3's new goal?  To become as user-hating as tumblr?  Because while I appreciate how hard you guys work, that's what this change feels like. Now, I know you may be reading all this and going, "well, yeah, Wonder Woman fic is a problem, but you won't even notice the changes in most fandoms!" Let me present to you a list of the fandoms I have read the most of over the last year: Star Wars (but only some parts of that fandom, and not others) Star Trek (but only some parts of that fandom, and not others) MCU (but only some parts of that fandom, and not others) Wonder Woman (but not the rest of the DCEU) DC Comics (but only some parts of that fandom, and not others) Rivers of London And much as I love Rivers of London, I've spent a LOT more time reading fic in those other fandoms, because there's simply so much more of it, even when you only count the small pieces of each megafandom I'm interested in. What this means is that if you keep this tagging change and roll it out to other megafandoms, you will SERIOUSLY AND FUNDAMENTALLY BREAK how I use the archive.  And given a) how many other people on this archive are in megafandoms and b) how large a percentage of the people in megafandoms only read fic in one corner of that megafandom ... you are seriously and fundamentally breaking the websites functionality for a very large percentage of your userbase. At one fell swoop, you turn AO3 from an archive I love and support (including financially) to an archive I hope is replaced (soon) with something better, because it's a pain in the ass pretty much every time I try to use it.  Please, please, please, find some other way to fix the problem.  If you need money for more servers, or to hire a professional coder to do some serious backend changes to make things workable with the old tagging structure, I'd be fine with that and I would contribute to any fundraiser you did.  Your current choice is not a solution, it's a nightmare.

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