This.
I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.
I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.
I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.
Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.
When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.
This is such a great explanation for exactly why mistagging "/" and "&" is shooting yourself in the foot, and also a fandom no-no. Lemme just add on (because in my fandom there's a small but persistent rash of writers mistagging their works as genfic or "&"), if your fic is what we call "pre-slash"- that is, this is a fic in which the characters have romantic feelings for each other but it's set prior to them getting into a relationship- then it still gets a "/" pairing tag.
There are indeed cases where a fic would get both "&" and "/", as beatrice-otter mentioned. Slow-burn friends-to-lovers can be one of them. Ambiguously romantic relationships (because hey, what even is romance? It's such a highly subjective social construct that drawing a line between friendship and romance doesn't always make sense) can be another. Pre-slash can also be another, if the fic is genuinely also about the characters' platonic relationship as well as their romantic or sexual attraction.
But pre-slash gets the "/" tag. If your fic foregrounds the characters' romantic or sexual feelings for each other, then even if they don't get to the point of establishing a relationship, that's slash, babey. If that confuses you, just think of the way the romance genre works, in the non-fandom world: if you tore out the last chapter of a romance novel where the characters confess and get together, the rest of the book would still be a romance. That's how it's written, and that's essentially what slashfic is. It's not about looking for a line in the content of the work, but about the intentions of your fic: you're writing a story- what kind of story are you telling about these characters' relationship? 'Cause if your focus is romantic or sexual feelings then yeah dawg it needs a "/" tag, come on. Other details about what kind of feelings you can put in "Additional tags," or in your summary.
And, a general word of advice: fandom as a scene has its own broad trends and norms that most people respect (and specific fandom communities will have their own subcultural quirks, usually heavily influenced by the canon they spring from). Some fandoms will be more stringent about the "&" and "/" difference than others, or will lean toward particular standards for tagging. If you care at all about cultivating connections in these communities, or at least about not pissing off potential fic readers, the best thing to do is to look and see what other people are doing, and ask questions if you need, before you jump in with your own thing.
THIS.
I did not know this 🙈
Time to go change all my AO3 tags...
