I’m sitting down with the person who recently made a very sincere yet misguided post about how “good” media cannot beget shipping culture fandom and showing them a slideshow that starts off with explicit mater/lightning mcqueen fanart then does a deep dive exploration into the tomgreg omegaverse mpreg tag on ao3.org and explaining in a gentle voice that there are no hard and fast truths when it comes to the human mind
was going to make a different joke for this ask initially and scrapped it HOWEVER I need to share this screenshot with you all. the idea that hbo’s chernobyl is outside of the “fandom zone” is laughable and we should never underestimate jared harris stans
Video description: an AO3 tutorial narrated by a female voice.
“Searching for all fics for one character in a relationship with anyone got a little bit easier today in the updated Tags Search.”
The narrator starts on the homescreen of AO3 and navigates to the header menu, choosing the word Search and then selecting Tags from the dropdown menu.
The screen now shows the AO3 Tags Search page with its new format. The narrator has typed Darcy lewis into the field labelled Tag name. She then types Marvel into the Fandoms field and selects Marvel Cinematic Universe from the dropdown menu that populates.
She selects the Relationship type with a Wrangling status of Canonical.
A canonical tag is one that exists in the dropdown menus of AO3. It is one that AO3’s Tag Wranglers have added into the site itself for easy selection. A non-canonical tag has not yet been added into the site’s menus.
After tapping the Search tags button, the narrator shows the search results. There are 1094 tags found. The narrator then explains that the default setting for a tags search is to display tags in alphabetical order. She then scrolls back up and chooses the Sort by option Date Created instead. After once again pressing Search tags, different results are at the top of the list.
“And now, if there’s one that I’m particularly intersted in, I can tap into that Relationship tag and then tap into Works”
She taps on the button labelled Works and a search results page appears. She then taps on the Filter button to show that you can still apply filters to these results.
This is just one potential use of the new Tags Search, and I hope you find it useful!
Someone asked: What tags have policies attached to them? For example, does Policy & Abuse deal with cases where a fic has explicit sexual content, but is rated G by the author?
In the TOS, these are the tags we might change if they’re mislabeled: Archive Warning, Rating, Fandom, and Language.
We do not touch Character, Relationship, Category, or Additional tags.
Support has taken over wrong language (I talked about that in this post ). PAC still handles Archive Warning, Rating, and Fandom tags.
Ratings and Archive Warnings should reflect the work as a whole. If graphic, gory violence happens in only two chapters of a 100k work, then the work should still have a higher rating and the Graphic Depictions of Violence warning. However, if the situation is just a reference or otherwise occurs off-screen, we generally defer to the creator’s interpretation.
For Ratings, PAC only comes in if a work crosses over the “T/M” line. We won’t ask for a G work to be changed to T or for an M work to be changed to E.
For Archive Warnings, PAC only requires warnings to be added if the content is currently in the work.
The work should also clearly and unambiguously contain the material. If someone rates their work as G or T and adds tags about smut, but the work doesn’t actually have any smut in it (or maybe it just has a fade-to-black scene), we won’t make them change their work to M. If two friends get drunk together and have sex and they’re both enjoying themselves, we don’t consider that to need a rape warning.
While PAC will ask for a rating bump or a Archive warning to be added, we won’t ask for an “E”-rated work to be lowered to M or G, or request “Major Character Death” to be removed from a work that features no death. There’s plenty of reasons why someone might organize their works like this and we defer to the creator in these situations.
Similarly, we will never ask for more specific ratings or warnings for a work marked “Not Rated” or “Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings”. These fulfill our Rating and our Archive Warning requirements. Creators are free to be as specific or nonspecific with their works as they want as long as they’re not missing required information.
Our fandom tags policies aren’t quite as easy to summarize as the above and I’ll talk about those in another post.
— guest mod tealight
The form is now closed. I’m just working through submissions.
Disclaimer: I am speaking for myself and not behalf of AO3 or PAC. While I can answer general questions, I cannot tell you if a specific work or user is breaking the rules. If you want to file a report or otherwise need an official PAC response, you can find PAC’s contact form by clicking on the “Policy Questions & Abuse Reports” link on any AO3 page.
