Picking up the pieces

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!).