hello Pia! I have a question about adding tags/warnings in the beginning of the chapter: what's your inner compass when it comes to deciding whether a tag is too spoilery to add there? as far as I remember, CoFT has only one chapter where you deemed a new tag too spoilery and instead put it AFTER the chapter ( Mafydd, my man..), although I felt like there were times when other new tags deserved same treatment. or how about when the tag is pretty mild but can lead to easy extrapolation of the upcoming plot? for example, if chapter 5 and 6 is about characters being apart after a fight, and then chapter 7 has a new tag 'sex maraphon', it's safe to assume characters will make some sort of peace this chapter, so the reader would lowkey know in advance what will happen instead of being on the edge. what's the good balance there, you think? have a good day!!
For the most part, I generally stopped putting tags "after" even if I felt it was really spoilery, because for me personally, AO3 is the place where the spoilers live unless you choose the warning 'Creator Chooses Not To Warn' and then you don't need to put any tags/spoilers at all and if a reader dares complain at you, you point aggressively at the warning they chose to ignore, lmao.
I haven't used that system for 10-13 years (that's how long ago I wrote Game Theory), though I do still think about it, by book 3 of The Ice Plague I decided to just be transparent about the tags and sometimes if I thought something deserved more explanation, I'd put it in an author's end-note, which is what a lot of authors do!
These days 'tags at the beginning / further discussion of tags in the end notes' tends to work best if I need to do anything like that.
or how about when the tag is pretty mild but can lead to easy extrapolation of the upcoming plot? for example, if chapter 5 and 6 is about characters being apart after a fight, and then chapter 7 has a new tag 'sex maraphon', it's safe to assume characters will make some sort of peace this chapter, so the reader would lowkey know in advance what will happen instead of being on the edge. what's the good balance there, you think? have a good day!!
Tbh you can never assume what readers are going to think. If I read a story that had "sex marathon" between two characters fighting, unless it was explicitly well-tagged or there were author's notes, I wouldn't even necessarily assume that the sex marathon was a) between the two mains or b) was something from a place of reconciliation, hate-fucking exists, anon, and I might even think the sex marathon would be coming as a punishment rather than "making peace" - and it shows a lot about your worldview that you assume readers might only think that a sex marathon happens after the characters make up.
Even in a story with "happy ending" as the final tag, a sex marathon can still be violent, can still be happening during a fight, or cause a fight, or be an act of violation and it can absolutely on every level have nothing to do with reconciliation or characters making up. I've written sex marathons like that myself.
So yeah, always safe to never assume what your readers are thinking, because I would have never made the assumption that this is what your tag means! It's never "safe to assume" in that sense. What is safe to assume is that your readers are going to interpret that tag in like, as many different ways as you have readers. Also, unfortunately, people don't tag well sometimes, which means a lot of fics with dubious consent don't have that tagged. A lot of fics with rape/noncon don't have that tagged. So imho, a lot of readers who have been burned err towards the side of caution. You might even get comments like 'please tell me they make up and the sex marathon isn't violent/mean, I can't handle the fighting.'
I am a big fan of over-warning rather than under-warning because I write quite dark material and am frequently writing dubious consent even in characters that eventually end up happy together, which can make some people very uncomfortable. But now that AO3 (frustratingly) has the 75 tag limit (punishing all of us because of that single Mo Dao Zu Shi/Untamed fic), I can no longer tag nearly as comprehensively as I used to, especially for kinks, so I'm super throttled as are a lot of diverse kink writers, generally I prioritise what I think is most likely to be a trauma trigger at the expense of finding the kinksters who actually want the kinks I'm writing, and put the finer kink details etc. into the author's notes. Even though the kinks themselves can potentially be trauma triggers. Gotta make choices! (Gotta have a couple of flavour tags too).
But yeah anon what you called "easy extrapolation of the plot" was not to me what I ever would have extrapolated in a million years unless you put 'fluff' 'soft' 'cozy' 'fun' 'sweet' 'romantic' 'no one is upset and everyone wins' and then there shouldn't be a 2 chapter fight in there anyway sadlkjfdsa - otherwise, if two people are fighting and I see sex marathon, never in a million years would I assume they "make peace" before that sex marathon. Some of my favourite fics are literally two characters fighting and then having the most upsetting, awful sex marathon you can imagine as a form of punishment or self punishment I've...literally written that, so no way am I going to making peace first x.x
In that sense, you're fine - readers will assume what they'll assume, it's up to you how thorough you want to be! AO3 only holds that the warnings are mandatory, everything else is up to you. But generally speaking, AO3 is the place where people go to see an appropriate amount of tags despite spoilers, the rest of the world is where you can read something without being spoilered, generally.
