My Flight of the Heron fic on Squidgeworld.org

[regshoe]

I think I've mentioned my frustration with AO3's canonical tag for Flight of the Heron before, but a bit of backstory for anyone unaware of it: the canonical tag at the time I got into the fandom was 'Flight of the Heron - D. K. Broster', which was the fandom tag which people had used on works posted over the previous several years; it was changed to 'The Jacobite Trilogy - D. K. Broster' shortly afterwards, which I believe is bad for various practical and sentimental fannish reasons. There seems little prospect of it being changed back fully, although many thanks to isis for your recent help with efforts to get it fixed as far as is possible.

Well, I will never acknowledge the Hanoverian usurper as the rightful king the current canonical as an appropriate way to categorise FotH fanworks, and so I will continue to raise my glass over the water bowl when I toast 'the King' at the dinner table tag my own fics 'Flight of the Heron - D. K. Broster'—this is still synned to the canonical tag, so works using it will show up in the fandom list as normal. Again a note for those unaware, you can do this too if you like.

(Silliness aside—for what might seem like a fairly unimportant and pedantic bit of stubbornness, I love this fandom and it genuinely does make me sad to see it categorised wrongly!)

However, I've recently found another way to have my fics listed correctly. I was vaguely aware of Squidgeworld/WWOMB as an older, pre-AO3 fanfiction archive which switched to using AO3's (open source) code and site format a few years ago but which does some things differently; it turns out one of the things it does differently is still categorising Flight of the Heron correctly, as 'The Flight of the Heron [Public Domain]' (following the site's usual system for book fandom tags). Thus I've decided to copy my fics over there, where they can now be found here—along with hyarrowen's fics, which are excellent and always worth a re-read. Look at them all nice there :D :D

Hopefully some day in the future, the rightful King James will return and there will be peace and joy in the land the AO3 tag will be properly fixed. But it's nice to have an alternative in the meantime; and nice in any case to be able to evade problems with any one site by having multiple options.

:)

Comments

[tei]

YEAH. I get that there are reasons for the canonical tags being the way they are (though I don't understand them because I simply have not bothered to) but my fandom has a similar pet peeve, and I do wish that there was some way to. IDK! Democratically decide tags :P Some sort of plebiscite system for tag canonization. I'm sure that would be entirely impractical and start the absolute worst wank. STILL.

I keep meaning to put stuff up on Squidgeworld! I had decided to use it to "unpack" and archive all of the (rather many) one-shots I posted as "chapters" instead of as their own works on ao3, thereby essentially making them unsearchable. Not that being on a completely different site would really fix that. But hey. I want to use it!

[regshoe]

I mean, the exact position of the line between 'totally independent works with separate fandoms' and 'continuous series with a single fandom' is complicated and ambiguous, and I totally understanding AO3 having a single straightforward default policy to cut through the issues that causes—but you'd think it wouldn't hurt to allow people actually in the fandoms affected to appeal with explanations of why that isn't appropriate in our particular cases and get our tags changed to something that actually serves the fandoms in question. All of which is to say, I know, right??? Sympathy. <3

That sounds like a good idea! I think it's a good thing to have my fic up in different places anyway, just on general principles, and this is being a good opportunity to explore that.

[hyarrowen]

Butting in to say that Shakespeare has a combined tag, and there are tags for the individual plays as well. If that can be done for Shakespeare, why not other fandoms? Especially when people will look for fic under a particular title... as we keep mentioning to the wranglers and in other places...