AO3 Tag Tips

Everyone is probably familiar with the works page of a tag, where the URL looks like this: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Rose%20Lalonde/works. That’s the page you get sent to when you click on a tag that’s used on a fic. But if you then click on the name of the tag at the top of the works page, you get sent to the tag landing page, where the url looks like this: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Rose%20Lalonde. But not all the things this page show you are intuitive, so (especially with the recent tag limit announcement) I’m going to use it to explain the relationships between tags. We’ll use a character tag because that’s got all the components.

Our landing page looks like this:

The line “This tag belongs to the Character Category. It’s a common tag. You can use it to filter works and to filter bookmarks.” means it’s a canonical tag and will turn up in the dropdown. An unfilterable tag will instead look like this:

A synonymous tag will look like this:

But that’s not all you can tell from the landing page! I’m going to show you in an order that makes it easier to understand, not the order it shows up on the page, so bear with me. Let’s go back to the Rose Lalonde canonical landing page. The first and easiest to understand section is Tags with the same meaning, which will show you the tags that will redirect to the canonical tag if you click on their works pages. At the end of the list of synonymous tags attached to the canonical, there’s the heading Metatags:

Rose Lalonde has the metatag Rose, which means that if I clicked on the works page for Rose, it would show me all works tagged “Rose” AND all works tagged “Rose Lalonde” (as well as the other Rose tags it’s a metatag of). However, when I look at the works page for Rose Lalonde, works tagged with “Rose” won’t turn up. That’s because Rose Lalonde is a subtag of Rose. Like a little matryoshka doll, Rose Lalonde has a subtag of its own, helpfully under the heading Subtags:

A subtag also has the metatags of its metatag, so when I click on the works page for Rose, it will give me works tagged with Rose, works tagged with Rose Lalonde, AND works tagged with Doomed Timeline Rose Lalonde. However, if I go to the works page of Doomed Timeline Rose Lalonde, only works tagged with Doomed Timeline Rose Lalonde will turn up. This is the difference between subtags and synonymous tags: a subtag has its own works page that you can filter on, whereas a synonymous tag will always redirect and the only way to find ONLY works using that synonymous tag is through the ‘search within results’ field in the filtering menu. (You must put the exact tag in quotes and there’s no way to tell it to only search in the tag field, so you’ll also get results where that exact string turns up in the title, summary, etc.)

Those are all the useful bits of the tag landing page for you, the reader. But you may have noticed that there are two other boxes: Parent tags and Child tags. Child tags only exist on Fandom tags and Character tags. The only way they affect the reader is that character and relationship tags that have a fandom parent tag will turn up first in the autocomplete when you’re posting a work if you use that fandom tag. If a tag has multiple fandom parent tags, only one of them needs to be tagged to bring characters in that fandom in the autocomplete up first. For example, let’s take the relationship tag Rose Lalonde/Thuringwethil (Tolkien).

It has four parent tags:

Homestuck

Rose Lalonde

The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien

Thuringwethil (Tolkien)

Homestuck and the Silmarillion are both fandom tags, which means that if I post a work and have Homestuck OR the Silmarillion in the fandoms field, when I type Rose or Thuringwethil into the relationships field, it will suggest this tag near the top. (At least, it would if both characters didn’t have heaps of much more popular relationship tags.) Rose Lalonde and Thuringwethil (Tolkien) are both character tags and have zero impact on how the archive behaves for readers/writers; that’s purely as an organisational tool for wranglers.

For Additional tags (also called Freeforms), these parent tags have absolutely no effect, not even on the autocomplete. This is why, for instance, the freeform tag Hardbroom Has Feelings (Worst Witch) only has the parent tag The Worst Witch (TV 2017), even though Hardbroom could conceivably have feelings in The Worst Witch (TV 1998) or any of the other Worst Witch adaptations. The parent tags of freeforms are purely for wrangling organisation purposes.

Have you tried sorting and filtering? It might help if you haven’t done this already. I’ll show an example for Severus Snape (because of your icon/username). 

If I go into the Snape tag, there are almost 38,000 fics:

But that’s every single fic where Snape is listed in the character tags. We need to narrow this down. We can do this by going to the grey Sort and Filter box on the right hand side of the screen.

Using this box, you can narrow down what you want included in your search and what you want excluded from it. You can do this based on: rating, Archive warnings, relationship categories, fandoms, characters, relationships, and additional tags. You can also include or exclude: completed fics, works in progress, crossovers. You can set a word count you’re looking for (from X to Y). You can specify your preferred language. You can sort based on date posted, comments, kudos word count…. Honestly? There’s a lot there. Check it out. 

To continue with this example, click the Read More.

I have a tip for you and anyone else wanting to filter works about specific characters or ships that takes advantage of another place where important information about a fic could be: the summary.

On AO3, in addition to filtering in or filtering out tags, you can also Search within results. If you use Search within results to search the summary, you can often get much more precise listings of fic.

For example, if I am looking for fanfiction about Mila Babicheva from Yuri on Ice I might find that a lot of the fics tagged for Mila are not actually about Mila at all.

[Screenshot of the Works listing for the tag “Mila Babicheva”, showing 4440 works. The first work is clearly about main characters Yuuri and Victor.]

However, if I enter “summary:mila” in the Search within results field, this will return ONLY fics which are both tagged “Mila Babicheva” and say “Mila” somewhere on the summary.

[Image of the Search within results field, with the text in the field reading “summary:mila”]

If I enter this search to filter on the Mila Babicheva tag, I get much more appropriate results, as you can see:

[Screenshot of the Works listing for the Mila Babicheva tag, filtered, showing 430 works. The first work appears to focus on a pairing involving Mila.]

So I noticed a weird thing with the relationship tags on ao3. It’s not a problem or anything. It’s just a little thing I notice, and I’m curious about it. I really like looking at numbers and understanding how things work.

So the other day I was in the beaujester tag like I do, and I noticed the number was high enough to be in the top ten in the sidebar. So I was like “yay beaujester is getting really popular.” When it didn’t immediately appear I figured it took time for the tags to reorder in the sidebar and it wasn’t refreshed regularly. However, today I noticed that widojest has appeared in the sidebar despite having a lower number of fics.

So my first guess was that some fics were private so I logged out, and they both went down by like one, but the order remained. Does anyone have any theories? It might just be a glitch or something which is cool, but it seems to be counting it right everywhere else.

so ao3 just posted an update with a cheat sheet of things you can sort/filter works with, and i was scrolling and there was nothing particularly interesting and then i hit this one:

otp: true for works tagged with only one relationship (experimental!)    

can be used by itself or in combination with a specific relationship tag (e.g. chosen from the filtering options)

will exclude all A/B works where A/B might only be a side pairing, but also all A/B works with other side pairings)   

will include works with multiple relationship tags if they’re all synned to the same canonical tag

basically, what this means, if that if your ship is a side ship the majority of the time, if you type otp: true into the search bar in their tag, it will exclude ALL fics tagged with another ship. as the quote states, this includes fics where your ship is the main pairing, and there’s a side ship, so it’s not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot easier than playing around with getting rid of other categories and manually deselecting relationships in the way the new search lets us do

i used to read quite a lot of sara/felicity, but it was pretty much IMPOSSIBLE to find because they were often a side pairing to olicity, and these ships would show up at the top of the sort by kudos because they were big ones. this gets rid of all of those with literally one click.

I really don’t want to pick on the OP as I’m sure they meant well in the post and probably have received approximately 5982873549 messages on the subject already; if you see the post, please don’t bother them about it. But for other people who may be seeing that advice, please realize it’s not true and extremely misleading.

“No Archive Warnings Apply” only means that the fic doesn’t contain any of the four types of content AO3 offers Archive Warnings for. Those are:

Rape/Noncon

Graphic Depictions of Violence

Underage

Major Character Death

That’s it.

A fic containing psychological torture or emotional abuse can be accurately tagged “No Archive Warnings Apply.”

A fic containing explicit sex and BDSM between consenting adults can be accurately tagged as “No Archive Warnings Apply.”

It does not mean PG-13. The Archive Warnings are there to warn you about specific types of content, not appropriate age level. 

The latter is what the Ratings are for. There is a tag that means effectively the same thing as PG-13, and that’s the “Teen And Up Audiences” rating tag. And even “Teen And Up” doesn’t necessarily mean fluff or “totally safe.”

So if you’re an author, yes, it’s fine to tag your fic No Archive Warnings Apply as long as none of the Big Four apply. It does not mean PG-13. There’s a rating for that. There are freeform tags for content not included in the Big Four.

Thanks for the question! Honestly, I’m hardly an expert and I don’t know if I use tags correctly, so I’m probably not the best person you can ask to, but I can definitely explain my process. I hope it’s not too wrong! 😅

Obviously, you need to use the right fandom category, rating (I honestly miss the FFN distinction between K and K+, but I guess everything goes under G), and then there are the warnings and kind of pairings.

I have to admit that, at first, I was a bit confused by the warnings – especially, the ‘Graphic Depictions Of Violence’ one, as I really don’t know what qualifies as ‘graphic’. I used it on I See Fire because there are some serious injuries in the first chapter, but I’m still unsure if it was actually needed, haha. Probably not. At first, I used a lot the ‘Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings’ tag, then I learnt that readers tend to be wary of that as it’s often used to avoid tagging sensitive content that is actually included in the fic but the author didn’t want to spoil. In my case, I was just being overcautious, and I have since changed that to ‘No Archive Warnings Apply’ as I don’t think any depiction of violence in my other stories is strong enough to be considered ‘graphic’. Of course, I’m always receptive to feedback if any reader were of a different opinion.

As for the kind of pairing – they obviously depend on your story. I tag fics as ‘gen’ if none of the main characters is in a romantic relationship, I tagged both ‘gen’ and ‘f/m’ in Chrysalis because there is obviously a romantic relationship, but the focus is also on other non-romantic relationships that are developed through the story. The only advice I can give you here is to think only about the pairings (or lack thereof) involving the main characters, I don’t think that background ones warrant a change of category.

I follow a similar logic for tagging the pairing themselves: I tag familial relationships/friendships that are focused on with a ‘&’ between the two characters’ names, and the established or eventual romantic ones with a ‘/’. I don’t know if this is right, but I personally tag only the relationships involving the main characters – if there are other pairings, they are relegated to the ‘Minor or Background Relationship(s)’ tag as I don’t want to clog the tag for people who are looking for stories centred on that pairing. I also used that tag for the relationship between George and Aila in Arthur Kirkland’s Guide to Being a Big Brother, for example – I kept the category as ‘gen’ because their relationship was never the real focus (moreover, they were OCs, readers probably didn’t care about who they were paired with), but I thought it was better to warn the presence of a background relationship. Once again, I don’t know if this is the right way to do it, but nobody complained.

Now, on the characters: I think it would be better only to tag the ones with a significative role, but how do you define what ‘significative’ means? Personally, I’m still trying to find a balance – I also tag side characters who are recurring or have a significative impact on the main characters’ actions – and I’m afraid I’m overtagging, in this department. What I do, however, is to specify in the additional tags which characters the story is actually focused on, so readers will have more elements to decide. I also always add the ‘Other Hetalia Character(s)’ tag if there are some characters who appear in the story but I don’t want to tag because they have some truly minor roles.I don’t tag OCs if they’re not focused on, though, even if they have a role I would deem significative enough to tag a canon character. I don’t know if this is the right etiquette, but I do it keeping in mind my preferences: I don’t like stories focused on OCs and I won’t read them, I’ll even blacklist the tag when I’m looking for stories to read – but the only thing that bothers me is the OC being focused on, I don’t mind side OCs. So, I don’t even tag them because they aren’t truly important.

After the characters, there are the additional tags, that I still have no idea of how to use, haha. I used to overtag a lot, using them as tumblr commentary tag because I had gotten the impression that it was what most people did, but I’ve since learnt that many don’t like it so I cleaned them up (I only left some tags on Overheated because they ended up featured on ao3tagoftheday, haha). I see additional tags as the place for further specifications. I tag the main genres – usually, the ones I use on ffn plus other ones that might apply (and that’s why like all my fics will be ‘family’, ‘hurt/comfort’, ‘angst’, ‘drama’, ‘brotherly love’, and ‘fluff’, haha) and if the story is an AU, for example.

One important thing to keep in mind, in this department, is the existence of subtags, that show up in the specific search but also when looking for the parent tag. To make an example, ‘Alternate Universe – Human’ is a subtag of ‘Alternate Universe’. Obviously, you’ll find a work tagged ‘Alternate Universe – Human’ when looking for something tagged like that, but it will also show up when looking for ‘Alternate Universe’. Therefore, tagging also as ‘Alternate Universe’ would be redundant, and this is something to keep in mind to avoid using too many tags. Unfortunately, I don’t know where you can find a list of subtags and parent tags, so you’ll have to rely on logic and maybe try a bit.

For the rest… honestly, I really don’t know. Always in the optic of specifications, I tag other things that I think the readers might want to know. As I’ve already mentioned, I specify which characters are focused on if others are tagged as well, use tumblr-style tags to elaborate on the meaning of other tags or mention themes/elements that come up in the fic, and write other stuff I think I should warn readers of (for example, always in Chrysalis, I mentioned which name I would use for Nyo!Canada because it’s not the most widespread one). I also add warnings that weren’t included in the main ones – violence that I don’t think crosses the threshold of graphic, abusive situations, and other things that might bother somebody.

This morning I hopped on to AO3 and looked up Dean & Cas genfic. There are 8,139 works tagged Dean & Cas but I was dismayed to find that 6,408 of them are also tagged Dean/Cas. Now, some of these are probably cases where the author feels legitimate ambiguity over whether the fic falls on the platonic or romantic side of the fence…but I think a lot of them are just unsure what the tags mean.

It gets worse. Only 834 out of the remaining 1727 Dean & Cas works fall in the gen category, while 768 are m/m. Cursory examination shows most of the m/m ones are mistagged Destiel. I’d guess there’s maybe a thousand actual gen woks in the tag at most, which means ~88% of the tag which is supposed to identify a platonic Dean and Cas relationship actually consists of shipfic.

Now, this is a trend not limited to Dean/Cas. Many younger fandoms out there are confused about which tag they should use and wind up using both, filling the platonic tag for popular ships with romantic and/or sexual relationships. I suspect this happens because AO3 doesn’t describe the difference clearly when you click on the (?) for the Relationships field when posting a story. You have to click again to the FAQ and then scroll down nearly to the bottom in order to figure out what the difference is between & and / if you don’t already know.

How do I tag a platonic relationship between friends, family, partners, etc.? In the Relationships field, you can use the symbol ’&’ between two or more characters if you want to indicate the relationship is platonic.

AO3 was born in a fandom culture where everybody knew what the slash tag was for, so it may not have seemed necessary to explain this to people right off the bat. I did bring it up in a support request to them and they’re planning to fix it, but in the meantime it’s on us fans to spread the word if we want to be able to reliably find genfic. So if you know anybody who might be confused about this, or have written fics in the past that they’ve mistagged, the good news is it’s super easy to edit the tags on your AO3 works!

But does the same problem exist with misplaced Wincest in the Sam & Dean tag? Not so much: since the Sam/Dean crowd leans toward people who’ve been around fandom longer, the vast majority use the tag properly. Out of the 6958 Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester stories, 1271 are also tagged Dean/Sam. This percentage is much likelier to represent genuinely ambiguous works. 

I played a lot with filters (ask for details if you want) looking for fics which should be, but aren’t, tagged Dean/Sam, to see how big a problem they are. In the whole Dean & Sam tag, there are only a few dozen. Roughly a third are foreign-language works.

Conclusion: the rate of Wincest in fics tagged with the platonic ’&’ relationship is about 19%, almost all of it easy to filter out. Meanwhile Dean/Cas consumes about 88% of the Dean & Cas tag and is much less filterable.

Now, it’s true that Dean/Sam is more likely to traumatize the unsuspecting than Dean/Cas. But I worry that if people don’t use common tagging conventions, future fandoms may find themselves with no ability at all to tag for platonic relationships, even for problematic ships.

Based strictly on the platonic tags, the ratio of Destiel as a whole to deancas gen is about 85:1, while the ratio of Wincest to Sam & Dean gen is only 5:1. There are thousands more “Category: Gen” works which only use the character tags and no relationship tags at all, but it’s tricky to sort out primary from secondary characters that way: those fics might or might not focus on our faves.

Tl:dr: What can we as a fandom do to help newbies use the platonic “&” tag?

Before fic tagging was common, fics weren’t tagged. You had a pairing, if applicable, an author’s note about genre or general content, and if they were feeling charitable, a vague content warning. There are even a few genres of fic where even vaguely tagging literally spoils the plot and impact (such as horror, psyche thriller, in which the likely content is implicit to the genre). As a result, there is a basic category tag that permits this, as a courtesy to “old-fashioned” writers.

“No Archive Warnings Apply” means the fic is PG13 at worst, probably fluff, totally safe.

“Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” is the polar opposite. It’s a glaring Enter at Your Own Risk billboard. It means: a shitload of warnings apply but I ain’t telling because this story requires shock value. It’s very important to read the author’s notes for those fics because they might be using that older format from above.

I don’t actually know anything about the top/bottom debate in fanfic. 

From my outside perspective, sexual positions aren’t something that is 100% one way or another. You might have a preference (even a strong one) but that doesn’t mean you might not try a different way every once in a while. 

If it’s considered polite to tag that in your fandom I suppose it’s a difficult choice not to. You don’t want to get a reputation for being inconsiderate after all. Hmm. I think I’m stuck on this one :/

I don’t think you need to tag for top or bottom if you don’t want to. It’s true that a lot of people use top and bottom tags to filter fics in or out, but if you don’t care either way if someone bottoms or not, chances are a lot of your readers don’t either, specially if it’s not what your fic is about.The people who complain about how you tag your OWN fics are being rude, and you shouldn’t change the way you tag just to please them. Are they really the type of readers you’re after?

When you tag, you tell people what’s in your fic, but you also tell them what you care about. You wouldn’t tag a thing if you didn’t care to highlight it. You want readers who care about the same things you do, and who will not get mad at you for your perfectly reasonable tagging choices.