Picking up the pieces

[regshoe]

Here we go, then. Once again, a diversity of websites is a good thing, and—sad as it is that this is necessary—I hope that at some point it helps someone find Kidnapped fic who couldn't on AO3. :)

Now, I've been thinking a bit about this general tags situation over the last few days, and here is one thing that's come out of this cogitation. I'd like to politely, non-pressurisingly encourage fandom in general to keep tagging works on AO3 'Flight of the Heron' and 'Kidnapped', when they are Flight of the Heron and Kidnapped fanworks rather than trilogy/series fanworks. 'Flight of the Heron - D. K. Broster' and 'The Flight of the Heron - D. K. Broster' are both synned to the 'Trilogy' canonical tag, and likewise 'Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson' is synned to the new canonical tag there, so it won't stop your works showing up in the right place or cause any organisational issues; and there are two big practical reasons for it:

1. So that new people who've only read FotH/Kidnapped won't assume that they have to have read the other books in order to understand the fanworks, or that the fanworks will contain major spoilers for books they haven't read, when that isn't the case.


2. Foolish as it may be, I do continue to hope that these tags might be fixed one day. If and when that happens, one possibility—I think it's the most logical one and in line with the wrangling guidelines, although of course my knowledge is an outsider's and thus incomplete—is to have metatags and subtags: for instance, a 'Jacobite Trilogy' tag which contains within it 'Flight of the Heron', 'Gleam in the North' and 'The Dark Mile'. In this case, fanworks will only show up in the 'Flight of the Heron' tag if they are actually tagged 'Flight of the Heron'. This tag is the one that people—especially new people—will be most likely to look in, because it's the obvious title that they know, and there's a danger that works only tagged with what becomes the metatag will drop out of view.

(If anyone who knows more about tag wrangling than I do would like to say either 'No, a metatag/subtag structure will absolutely not ever be set up, for ABC reasons' or 'No, if a metatag is made then that won't happen, for XYZ reasons', please do!).

Comments

[garonne]

I just realised that when I type "Kidnapped" into the "Fandom" field in the AO3 Search page, nothing relevant to RLS appears :(

I guess our best/most realistic short-term hope is probably to have the "David Balfour Series - Robert Louis Stevenson" tag renamed to something like "David Balfour Series | Kidnapped Series - Robert Louis Stevenson", as AO3 was willing to do for the "Jacobite Trilogy | Flight of the Heron Series" tag. In that way, anyone who types "kidnapped" into the search page or does a CTRL+F for "kidnapped" in a tag set will still be able to find the fandom. What do you think?

(And in any case, of course, we will still be free to use "Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson" on our own works.)

[luzula]

Did RLS ever call it the "David Balfour series"? Or the original publisher? When I put it into a search engine, it's true that it does turn up a fair number of hits. But I think there's a good case to be made to the wranglers that it's better for the AO3 fandom name to be "Kidnapped Series - Robert Louis Stevenson", given that this is the most famous title and the most likely one that people will search for.

[garonne]

Personally I also prefer "Kidnapped Series - Robert Louis Stevenson" but feel like "David Balfour Series | Kidnapped Series - Robert Louis Stevenson" could maybe be the path of least resistance.

[regshoe]

As far as I can tell it was made up after the fact in very much the same way as the name 'Jacobite Trilogy'—by people trying to describe how these books relate to each other in the language of modern book series that didn't really exist when these books were published. Certainly my copy of Kidnapped doesn't say 'Book One in the David Balfour Series' on the spine!

(Thinking about older ways of describing related books, I wondered if this might hypothetically happen to Waverley if anyone posted fic for it. In fact four of the Waverley Novels have fic on AO3, all with separate and unconnected canonical tags. Though 'Ivanhoe - Walter Scott' is synned to the canonical 'Ivanhoe - All Media Types', which seems rather bizarre).

[luzula]

Though 'Ivanhoe - Walter Scott' is synned to the canonical 'Ivanhoe - All Media Types', which seems rather bizarre.

This is not bizarre to me, but then, I have been a tag wrangler. It's because there is a movie, and the All Media Types tag is designed to cover both the book and the movie. Err, it's possible that someone might notice that sanguinity made a vid of one of the FotH TV series, and make an All Media Types tag for FotH...god, I hope not.

Actually, in the past it was more common to have a meta tag structure, so that Ivanhoe the book would have one tag, Ivanhoe the movie another, and then the All Media Types tag would be the meta tag. But I remember isis saying that they are doing this less, because it puts more strain on the server.

[regshoe]

I thought it was unusual to have the AMT tag be the only canonical one, rather than a metatag! But that is interesting about not using metatags because of the strain on the server—I wonder if that's where the reluctance to make a metatag for FotH has come from.

Re. the FotH TV tag, please don't tempt fate—I'm envisaging a single tag that contains neither 'Flight of the Heron' nor 'Broster'...! :( At the moment it's canonical under TV and unconnected to the book tag—and interestingly, though I'd never noticed this before, Raffles and its TV adaptation are the same, with no AMT tag or any connection between the two. Perhaps that's a standard thing now, then?

[regshoe]

Hmm, I do see the no-longer-canonical 'Kidnapped - Robert Louis Stevenson' tag when I search for 'Kidnapped'. My fear is that most casual users won't even get that far—they'll see that there's no Kidnapped tag on the Books & Literature page and give up there. Certainly I wouldn't have thought to do it before this whole situation taught me that I can't assume the title of a book will be in its canonical tag!

A piped tag is probably a good compromise at this point, though I would at least want 'Kidnapped' to come first, so it'll be in the right place in the alphabetical list. But ultimately I want there to be a canonical 'Kidnapped' tag because I am (and, even more so for FotH, I think the fandom in general are) writing Kidnapped fic, not David Balfour Series fic that happens to be set during Kidnapped rather than Catriona.

[garonne]

When I type kidnapped into the "fandom" search box on the Search page the only two suggestions I get are "I was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates" and "Kidnapped by my Stalker". And if I go ahead and try just to search for "Kidnapped" I get 1000+ fics for other fandoms about characters getting kidnapped. The only way I can actually find "Kidnapped - RLS" fic is by going to the profile page of someone I know has already posted Kidnapped fic. Which is pretty worrying. It means that if I didn't already know you, it would have been impossible for me to find Kidnapped fic no matter how much effort I put into it.

[garonne]

(P.S. on a more light-hearted note it's very interesting to see the different ways that people interact with AO3. I had never visited the "Books & Literature" page you mention. I always find fandoms via the "Search" page instead, which I guess is the opposite of you! I have heard other people say that they use google.com to search AO3, which never would have occurred to me till I heard that.)

[regshoe]

That is indeed interesting! I suppose I prefer having a nice complete list to look through to typing into a search box, but other people find it the other way round :D

[luzula]

Yes! I suppose this is true of any system, people are always going to use it in unexpected ways that the makers did not intend. I do use the books and literature page, but I also use the tag search. I think this is because I have been a tag wrangler in the past.

[regshoe]

Ah, I see! I was using the tag search page (https://archiveofourown.org/tags/search), putting 'kidnapped' in the Tag Name field and specifying 'Fandom' under Type and 'Any status' under Wrangling Status... which, now I type it out like that, is not a very intuitive thing to do if you don't know you're looking for a particularly difficult-to-find fandom tag!

[garonne]

Interesting! I hadn't realised that page existed.

[luzula]

I have gone back and changed the fandom tags on my existing fics, which in most cases has meant putting in Flight of the Heron - D. K. Broster, but in some cases taking that out and using the canonical instead, because it was actually fic for GitN or TDM.

[regshoe]

<3

[feroxargentea]

Hmm. I've changed my (single) fic accordingly.

Finding fics doesn't greatly bother me, but series names being nominated in fic exchanges does. Once the series name is made canonical, it tends to be the one that's nominated/accepted into the tagsets for exchanges, and I've certainly avoided offering fandoms in case the prompt turns out to be for some obscure sequel.

[regshoe]

Thank you <3

And I totally agree about exchanges—that's yet another problem with these tags. But never fear, I am quite prepared to stubbornly nominate 'Flight of the Heron' every Yuletide for the foreseeable future :D