#using the tilde for qpr tagging

[kitkatt0430]

So big shout out to SquidgeWorld for the news update acknowledging and encouraging the use of the tilde relationship identifier for queerplatonic ships!!!

I actually had a bit of a hand in how this one came about, which is pretty fun. (Story time!)

So a few years ago the Character A ~ Character B format was introduced over here on tumblr to represent QPRs. There is a post I know I rebloged a few times buried on my main somewhere about this and I'll have to try to remember to dig that up later. And there was bit of a push to try and get Ao3 to officially acknowledge the tilde or at least for those of us who write fic there start using it in tagging regardless of official acknowledgement and see what happened. And, well, what largely seems to have happened is that the tag wranglers have let us use the tilde, but there's been no official acknowledgement as the Tag Wrangling page for relationships on Ao3 still only discusses the '&' and '/' identifiers. (If there was anything official said about it elsewhere, sadly I must have missed it.)

I started using the tilde... two years ago? I think? And went back to update some of my existing fics to add in ship tags with the tilde. I still made sure to keep the Queerplatonic Relationship tags because those are still the best way to find fics that have QPRs included in them. And I've seen a few others using the '~' out in the wild, but discussion about it kind of faded again. If you knew, you knew. And if you didn't... there was always that Queerplatonic Relationship tag.

Then, about a year ago, I signed up for SquidgeWorld. I'd never heard of it before (which is likely because I'm just not super active in fandom outside the niche I've carved for myself; I admit, I am a bit under a rock at times...) but Squidge been around in one form or another since 1994. One of the fanfic authors I followed was moving their works there and so I followed and did what I always do on new sites I'm curious about - I lurked.

Fast forward to more recently. Fanfiction.net that I've been loyally using as my backup fic location for years after leaving it as my main fanfic archive... it's getting buggier and more unstable by the year. I don't intend to pull my fanfiction off it - I will leave what's on there up until the site collapses in on itself - but the day is coming ever nearer that the bugs and lack of tagging updates will finally make cross-posting there entirely too much of a hassle. And much as I love Ao3, I don't like the idea of only having all my fanfic in one place. I've seen enough archives big and small get destroyed over the years that no matter how stable or permanent Ao3 feels... I'm more comfortable knowing my fic can be found in multiple places. (Of course, the biggest hurdle for getting my fics cross-posted in multiple places is... executive dysfunction.)

I started finally cross-posting to SquidgeWorld recently and honestly just didn't really think too much about it when bringing over fics tagged with the QPR identifier. I just copied over the Character A ~ Character B tags and hit post. :D

But admin-squidgie over there - who I believe is found here on tumblr using @squidgiepdx (hi! Thanks a bunch for the news post!) - asked me about the tilde usage and what that was being used to represent. So I responded with an explanation about how it was a relatively new identifier used because queerplatonic relationships aren't really well represented by romantic or platonic identifiers. And then admin-squidgie got back to me to let me know there'd be a news post soon about this new identifier type. Which was so awesome.

While the wrangling guidelines haven't been updated on SquidgeWorld to note the use of the tilde yet (and could take a while, I know official docs always wind up being the last thing updated), the news post really is a very big deal for those of us who like to write and read queerplatonic ships.

For those of you interested in cross-posting or moving your fanfic to SquidgeWorld, I do recommend the archive. I've lurked long enough to see that the community there is pretty friendly, the interface is a clone of Ao3's so it should be familiar to a lot of you and is easily customized to make it more accessible (or covered in rainbows if you prefer ^_^ ), and (as seen here) the admin over there is open to helping make the archive an inclusive place for all of us.

And with at least one fanfic archive both acknowledging and encouraging the use of the queerplatonic relationship identifier, it'd be nice to see information on that making the rounds here on tumblr again. I bet there are a lot of aspecs who don't know about the identifier but who would be glad to know it exists and start using it themselves.

[fridayyy-13th]

currently debating heavily with myself bc i started writing a oneshot for Valentine's Day (not v-day themed but focusing on aro sasha & ace jon bc i wanted something aspec to focus on instead of What Today Is About) and i kind of want to finish it before the day is over?? but i have an exam to study for and also aro awareness week is literally right around the corner so i should probably just do it then but also Eww Studying and Woo Meaningful Platonic Relationships

i'll study but like. i'm gonna be salty about it the whole time. stay tuned for that oneshot sometime next week hopefully.

[fantasykiri5]

Who else thinks AO3 should add a queerplatonic-type relationship tag. ENOUGH with having to tag both the / and & type tags, or having to elaborate using MORE tags, LET ME MAKE A QPR SPECIFIC FIC! Like!!! We could just use the plus sign or something!! Or idk, a tilde! (That’s this ~ btw) It would be so awesome! It would be so cool!

[qpr-prompts]

Will there be any more prompts?

hi hello!!! this blog has been suuuper dead. mod tragedy is super busy, and i think qce might've just lost interest in tumblr altogether, but im still around!! (also, im engaged to my qpp now??? queerplatonic MARRIAGE is REAL guys)

unfortunately i dont think im all that good at coming up with prompts on my own :( i started this blog because i really want to see more qprs written about and drawn in fandom! ill try my best to come up with some ideas if there's still interest in filling this niche! in the meantime, the inbox is always open for you to send prompts of your own!!

now, this part is slightly unrelated but since this blog has been dead, i want to say it somewhere! i know a while back there was a movement to start (tagging QPRs on AO3) with the tilde (~), but AO3 support didn't go for implementing the idea on their own? if i recall correctly, they told everyone to just do it themselves and added the idea to a waitlist. which... means we'll probably never see it, given AO3's track record :(

but since then, ive come across a different archive project that's just like AO3 called squidgeworld archive (SqWA)! they've (officially implemented the tilde as a relationship marker, as well as given QPRs their own relationship category)! its been super refreshing to be able to correctly tag and post fanfictions on there as QPR and have it be recognized, so that's where ive mostly been posting my own works. the tag wranglers on SqWA are also super quick to canonize tags and make them available for everyone to use, so it's very easy to trailblaze a fandom on there, and squidge is extremely responsive to their users so it feels a lot nicer than AO3 :)

~ Mod Comedy

[izhunny]

I've seen this question across so many fandoms and there just isn't a solid single 'one size fits all' answer.... but

AO3 has a queerplatonic relationship (or QPR) tag in the sortable canonical additional tags category.

And there are many, many versions/variations which syn to that tag:

Some authors add a QPR tag while utilizing the ampersand (&) relationship tag (which indicates a non-romantic, non-sexual platonic pairing of characters).

However,

some choose to use the slash (/) pairing of character names and preface it with "queerplatonic" right on the relationship tag to indicate, even though they used a slash(/), there's no romantic or sexual component as indicated by their use of the slash. (Possibly trying not to mislead searchers/readers with wherever the work shows up in results.)

Again, there doesn't seem to be a standard consensus for this particular relationship type or how to convey it's not a simple 'friendship' and that it's more than or deeper than typical friendships seem to go.

Some throw their hands up and use both the slash and ampersand relationship tags, never thinking to put 'QPR' in the additional tags and just explain in the author's note: "it's not got any smut", or "it's completely aromantic but they're (the characters are) definitely together in ways typical best friend friendships would raise an eyebrow at."

This tends to limit or stymie results of searches and/or frustrate those sorting (including only or excluding only) for specifically one or the other types. No shade to anyone, we all have needs and deserve to be able to find what we're looking for.

My personal rec is for author's to use the ampersand if there's no trace of romance or smut and add Queerplatonic Relationship in additional tags until the archive comes up with an additional character-designation divider to differentiate between slash(/), ampersand(&), and queerplatonic (QPR) relationships.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe they could use a tilde(~) between character name pairs for QPRs.

Hey Steph! I’ve been following you for about a year now & I really love the fan space you’ve created <3

I saw your reblog on AO3 tagging differences between romantic (/) and platonic (&). Do you by chance know what a queer platonic relationship would be tagged as? Thanks in advance!!

(referencing this post)

Hey Lovely!

Thank you kindly for your lovely comments! You're too kind!

Ah, this is a good question! I BELIEVE it's a "slash" since most are romantic relationships. The & is specifically for friendships and no other relationships, at least that's been my understanding in all my years in fandom spaces.

If people who write for that type of ship tag, please let us know if I've erred. :)

[kitkatt0430]

Additionally, a new icon and relationship type - QPR (queer platonic relationship) - has been added. This is in addition to M/M, F/M, F/F and such. The new icon is a rainbow with a tilde (~), which is used for QPR-type relationships. The rainbow is for the queer aspect. And while the rainbow doesn't match any of the true flags in the queer community, it's what our imaging software gave us.

!!!! I'm gonna have to go back and officially tag all my fics that are QPRs with the new relationship type that's been added

This is very awesome and exciting!!!

[squidgiepdx]

Thank you for the reminder about wrangling guidelines! Those'll be updated post haste. :)

So big shout out to SquidgeWorld for the news update acknowledging and encouraging the use of the tilde relationship identifier for queerplatonic ships!!!

I actually had a bit of a hand in how this one came about, which is pretty fun. (Story time!)

So a few years ago the Character A ~ Character B format was introduced over here on tumblr to represent QPRs. There is a post I know I rebloged a few times buried on my main somewhere about this and I'll have to try to remember to dig that up later. And there was bit of a push to try and get Ao3 to officially acknowledge the tilde or at least for those of us who write fic there start using it in tagging regardless of official acknowledgement and see what happened. And, well, what largely seems to have happened is that the tag wranglers have let us use the tilde, but there's been no official acknowledgement as the Tag Wrangling page for relationships on Ao3 still only discusses the '&' and '/' identifiers. (If there was anything official said about it elsewhere, sadly I must have missed it.)

I started using the tilde... two years ago? I think? And went back to update some of my existing fics to add in ship tags with the tilde. I still made sure to keep the Queerplatonic Relationship tags because those are still the best way to find fics that have QPRs included in them. And I've seen a few others using the '~' out in the wild, but discussion about it kind of faded again. If you knew, you knew. And if you didn't... there was always that Queerplatonic Relationship tag.

Then, about a year ago, I signed up for SquidgeWorld. I'd never heard of it before (which is likely because I'm just not super active in fandom outside the niche I've carved for myself; I admit, I am a bit under a rock at times...) but Squidge been around in one form or another since 1994. One of the fanfic authors I followed was moving their works there and so I followed and did what I always do on new sites I'm curious about - I lurked.

Fast forward to more recently. Fanfiction.net that I've been loyally using as my backup fic location for years after leaving it as my main fanfic archive... it's getting buggier and more unstable by the year. I don't intend to pull my fanfiction off it - I will leave what's on there up until the site collapses in on itself - but the day is coming ever nearer that the bugs and lack of tagging updates will finally make cross-posting there entirely too much of a hassle. And much as I love Ao3, I don't like the idea of only having all my fanfic in one place. I've seen enough archives big and small get destroyed over the years that no matter how stable or permanent Ao3 feels... I'm more comfortable knowing my fic can be found in multiple places. (Of course, the biggest hurdle for getting my fics cross-posted in multiple places is... executive dysfunction.)

I started finally cross-posting to SquidgeWorld recently and honestly just didn't really think too much about it when bringing over fics tagged with the QPR identifier. I just copied over the Character A ~ Character B tags and hit post. :D

But admin-squidgie over there - who I believe is found here on tumblr using @squidgiepdx (hi! Thanks a bunch for the news post!) - asked me about the tilde usage and what that was being used to represent. So I responded with an explanation about how it was a relatively new identifier used because queerplatonic relationships aren't really well represented by romantic or platonic identifiers. And then admin-squidgie got back to me to let me know there'd be a news post soon about this new identifier type. Which was so awesome.

While the wrangling guidelines haven't been updated on SquidgeWorld to note the use of the tilde yet (and could take a while, I know official docs always wind up being the last thing updated), the news post really is a very big deal for those of us who like to write and read queerplatonic ships.

For those of you interested in cross-posting or moving your fanfic to SquidgeWorld, I do recommend the archive. I've lurked long enough to see that the community there is pretty friendly, the interface is a clone of Ao3's so it should be familiar to a lot of you and is easily customized to make it more accessible (or covered in rainbows if you prefer ^_^ ), and (as seen here) the admin over there is open to helping make the archive an inclusive place for all of us.

And with at least one fanfic archive both acknowledging and encouraging the use of the queerplatonic relationship identifier, it'd be nice to see information on that making the rounds here on tumblr again. I bet there are a lot of aspecs who don't know about the identifier but who would be glad to know it exists and start using it themselves.

[shamelesslymkp]

I've been using the + sign as a signifier of QPR-ships for years in my personal tags, I'd never seen the tilde used before! (...oh no brain does not like that, am going to have to do some self re-training i guess)

example qpr of ineffable husbands:

aziraphale.~.crowley or would it be aziraphale~crowley versus my current aziraphale.+.crowley vs the accepted romantic and/or sexual aziraphale/crowley and the platonic aziraphale.&.crowley

hmm visually there is a clearer distinction and lack of platonic connotation than with the plus sign, which is sometimes used for platonic ships the same way an x is sometimes used for romantic ships

it feels off-balance the same way the ampersand tends to, tbh, because it's so high up in the character space, although admittedly that's probably less awkward when you're not converting all of the tags to forced lowercase for standardization purposes (i... have a very detailed bookmark tagging system)

i'll definitely be keeping an eye out for tildes in future, tho!

So big shout out to SquidgeWorld for the news update acknowledging and encouraging the use of the tilde relationship identifier for queerplatonic ships!!!

I actually had a bit of a hand in how this one came about, which is pretty fun. (Story time!)

So a few years ago the Character A ~ Character B format was introduced over here on tumblr to represent QPRs. There is a post I know I rebloged a few times buried on my main somewhere about this and I'll have to try to remember to dig that up later. And there was bit of a push to try and get Ao3 to officially acknowledge the tilde or at least for those of us who write fic there start using it in tagging regardless of official acknowledgement and see what happened. And, well, what largely seems to have happened is that the tag wranglers have let us use the tilde, but there's been no official acknowledgement as the Tag Wrangling page for relationships on Ao3 still only discusses the '&' and '/' identifiers. (If there was anything official said about it elsewhere, sadly I must have missed it.)

I started using the tilde... two years ago? I think? And went back to update some of my existing fics to add in ship tags with the tilde. I still made sure to keep the Queerplatonic Relationship tags because those are still the best way to find fics that have QPRs included in them. And I've seen a few others using the '~' out in the wild, but discussion about it kind of faded again. If you knew, you knew. And if you didn't... there was always that Queerplatonic Relationship tag.

Then, about a year ago, I signed up for SquidgeWorld. I'd never heard of it before (which is likely because I'm just not super active in fandom outside the niche I've carved for myself; I admit, I am a bit under a rock at times...) but Squidge been around in one form or another since 1994. One of the fanfic authors I followed was moving their works there and so I followed and did what I always do on new sites I'm curious about - I lurked.

Fast forward to more recently. Fanfiction.net that I've been loyally using as my backup fic location for years after leaving it as my main fanfic archive... it's getting buggier and more unstable by the year. I don't intend to pull my fanfiction off it - I will leave what's on there up until the site collapses in on itself - but the day is coming ever nearer that the bugs and lack of tagging updates will finally make cross-posting there entirely too much of a hassle. And much as I love Ao3, I don't like the idea of only having all my fanfic in one place. I've seen enough archives big and small get destroyed over the years that no matter how stable or permanent Ao3 feels... I'm more comfortable knowing my fic can be found in multiple places. (Of course, the biggest hurdle for getting my fics cross-posted in multiple places is... executive dysfunction.)

I started finally cross-posting to SquidgeWorld recently and honestly just didn't really think too much about it when bringing over fics tagged with the QPR identifier. I just copied over the Character A ~ Character B tags and hit post. :D

But admin-squidgie over there - who I believe is found here on tumblr using @squidgiepdx (hi! Thanks a bunch for the news post!) - asked me about the tilde usage and what that was being used to represent. So I responded with an explanation about how it was a relatively new identifier used because queerplatonic relationships aren't really well represented by romantic or platonic identifiers. And then admin-squidgie got back to me to let me know there'd be a news post soon about this new identifier type. Which was so awesome.

While the wrangling guidelines haven't been updated on SquidgeWorld to note the use of the tilde yet (and could take a while, I know official docs always wind up being the last thing updated), the news post really is a very big deal for those of us who like to write and read queerplatonic ships.

For those of you interested in cross-posting or moving your fanfic to SquidgeWorld, I do recommend the archive. I've lurked long enough to see that the community there is pretty friendly, the interface is a clone of Ao3's so it should be familiar to a lot of you and is easily customized to make it more accessible (or covered in rainbows if you prefer ^_^ ), and (as seen here) the admin over there is open to helping make the archive an inclusive place for all of us.

And with at least one fanfic archive both acknowledging and encouraging the use of the queerplatonic relationship identifier, it'd be nice to see information on that making the rounds here on tumblr again. I bet there are a lot of aspecs who don't know about the identifier but who would be glad to know it exists and start using it themselves.