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

[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?