They fought like heroes.

Calu. Thirtysomething. Argentina.

[bromple]

in conclusion,

[buddie-romance]

thank you ao3 for being an archive and not an algorithm. thank you for letting me like things without consequences, thank you for being free with no ads, thank you for having lawyers to defend our freedom of speech. thank you tag wranglers. thank you to all authors and thank you ao3

[harpieisthecarpie]

[queso-blanco]

[wlfb0ygrl]

saying “i want him” about the character but not in a romantic or sexual way . i just Require him i need to Obtain him

[harritudur]

text posts + kingdon

[patroclusdefencesquad]

bobby and athena : we're having a child

buck : oh that's great-

bobby and athena, slamming down adoption papers : it's you, sign here

[anzekopistar]

Babe wake up, the NHL is posting old man yaoi on main

[toffcake]

he is half my soul. as the poets say.

[grndgame]

it's just like thaiboy said...true love, unconditional, this life is a miracle

[tsarinablogs]

I CANT BELIEVE MORE PEOPLE ARENT TALKING ABOUT THIS BUT WE’RE GOING TO HEAR A FEMALE VOICE ON THE RADIO THIS YEAR!!!!!!!

fuckin - go HOME lewis hamilton i couldnt give less of a shit when a WOMEN!!!! LAURA MÜLLER!!!!! AS A RACE ENGINEER!!!!! IN F1!!!!! FUCK YOUUUUUUU AND GO DIE IN A HOLE BERNIE ECCLESTONE GO HAVE YOUR HEART ATTACK SOMEONE LIKE ME WHO YOU SEE AS AN OBJECT IS GOING!!! TO BE!!!! ON THE RADIO!!!!!!!!

That was very loud, but you’re right

[choscar-op81]

[captiandirtnap]

do you wanna see my wounds from being nailed to the cross or are we not chill like that yet

[captiandirtnap]

this post is doing numbers in the f1 fandom. Who is Charles leclerc

[trans-yllz]

had a dream last night that the new tumblr discourse was whether or not people deserved their urls and people were getting callouts and anon hate like "I can't believe you have x in your url when I never see you actually post about them it's pretty messed up that you're taking that url away from other people who actually deserve it :/"

[toxicyuricaramel]

This was genuine discourse in 2012 you guys need to remember your history

[badwolfkaily]

This.

[strongwomenunited]

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.

[beatrice-otter]

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.

[mylordshesacactus]

More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.

[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]

"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.

[adribelladonna]

Also, idk if it's just me, but whenever I see an overtagged fic with a bunch of "/"s and "&"s thrown in seemingly at random I'm going to scroll past it. I'm going to assume it's a plotless, half-baked attention grab. Because it most likely is, 9 times out of 10 it is.

A few tags relating to what's in the fic? Great, amazing I can clearly see the author's intentions, I know I can trust them with what they're doing, I can kinda infer what's the fic gonna be about just from the tags alone and see if I vibe with that or not, the description is gonna help entice me and pull me in.

A giant wall of all concievable tags on the site? Welp, looks like the fic is trying to be everything at once, I have no idea what the fic's gonna be about, the author went unhinged with tagging and I'm uncomfortable, cuz it's either really going to be everything at once and yet nothing of substance at the same time (and most times in a form of a chatfic) or it's literally going to be the most normal fic out there that could've been summed up in 3 tags or less and the author is a liar.

You're not getting your fic to 2 audiences at once, girliepop, you're just putting your lack of effort and respect for potential readers out there to scare them away. Just pls learn how to properly tag shit. It's not hard to tag fics correctly.

Use the fucking "&" properly, pls, I'm begging you, I'm starving for my platonic relationships content in this barren AO3 land and the morsels of "&" I stumble upon all turn out to be FUCKING PORN! THIS IS A CRY FOR HELP PLEASE

[macavitykitsune]

Labeling your plastic chair "brocade" "boho" "desk" isn't going to get people to buy your chair; it's going to tell them you're a dipshit. Don't be a dipshit.

[golddustdyke]

no other social media site gives me what tumblr has given me . i love this place . it’s awful here. i’ll never leave .

[orpheuspilled]

MESSAGE TO ALL BITCHES: WE ARE SURVIVING THIS YEAR NO MATTER WHAT.

[orpheuspilled]

CAUSE PROBLEMS ON PURPOSE.

[charl0ttan]

quarter of the century is o.k. but halfway between 2000 and 2050 makes me feel like im in a very large and dark room and i dont know what else is in it