Made ya laugh.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

~(Belated) 15 Year Anniversary ~

Pirate King pass 1, from my WIP Tides of Eternity.

I've turned on a filter to illustrate how many fics in AO3's Willabeth tag are fics where Willabeth appear in the relationships but are NOT actually the relationship being written about. When I do that, this is what their tag looks like:

Blurred fics are fics where Willabeth have been tagged first, but are actually background characters or a past relationship in a fic about other characters--they just happened to be first because there's no other canon ships in play to bump them down the priority list.

Note this isn't a filter I usually have turned on--this just helps show how many fics a reader has to scroll past to find a fic that is reasonably Willabeth focused in the Willabeth tag.

I'm not shaming people who want to write about other characters or ships, I think that's great! But there's something deeply frustrating about the way the Willabeth ship tag has been turned into a fandom catch-all bucket for stories that are actually about other characters and ships. Genuinely it can average like 1 in every 20 fics having them as actual key characters in their own tag. Depending on the trends in the fandom, it can get worse than that. Without exaggeration I see way more Norribeth and Sparrabeth fics on a single page of the Willabeth tag than I do actual Willabeth fics--and the same thing cannot be replicated in those other tags. If I go into the Norribeth tag and set up similar filters to get rid of every fic that isn't actually about them, maybe 3-5 will be filtered per page. The majority of their tag is about them.

And idk man. I get that people usually write about what canon doesn't deliver for them. But it just kind of sucks that people not only mostly don't want to write about a ship you care about, they also gotta tag them when they're not actually relevant.

I don't know what the solution here is or if there even is one. Maybe I want to politely ask the other ships to stop cross-tagging Willabeth for their "What if Elizabeth chose someone else?" AUs, maybe I don't. I'm just ... frustrated and sad and fighting the burn out of trying to contribute to their tag with so few others sharing the same interest, I guess. I wish I had pages of stuff about them to read like the other ships get.