"I have imagination in my head."

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

Well, let me introduce you to the amazing world of ✨ metatags ✨

One of the cool things about AO3′s tagging system is that tags are linked together in a way that if a general metatag is used to filter out works, all the tags housed under that metatag (called subtags) also get filtered out! 

For example, the tag “angst” is a metatag for “heavy angst”, “light angst”, “angst & fluff”, etc., so if someone excludes the “angst” tag from their search, any fics with those subtags will also be filtered out. So, if the author didn’t directly tag the fic with “angst”, but tagged it with “heavy angst”, excluding “angst” will hide the fic from you!

So if you are worried about not being able to tag every single variation of a trigger, check to see if the tags you’re adding are subtags of a tag you’ve already added to your fic. Click the search bar at the top > tags, then enter the tag, click canonical, and go to the page for that tag. Here’s a link to the page for the “fluff” tag as an example, it shows all the subtags that get filtered out if a user excludes “fluff” from their search! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Fluff

Different sites handle their tags differently. The way you tag on twitter isn’t the same as the way you tag on tumblr isn’t the same as the way you tag on AO3. For example, both tumblr and AO3 allow spaces while twitter doesn’t.

I currently have a nearly 60,000 word fic with about 90 tags on it. It’s very much an ensemble cast story for My Hero Academia. I have ONLY tagged for characters who have a portion of the story written in their point of view, relationships which are the focus of a chapter or significant scene, a few warnings, and a few applicable additional tags which are specifically major tags in the fandom and not redundant. I could MAYBE at most trim FIVE of those tags and still have it adequately covered.

No this is NOT a story that could be broken up into shorter pieces. It’s not a series of stories that should be separate one-shots. It’s a single fandom piece.

Tags are intended to be searchable and excludable. That's LITERALLY their entire purpose. There are bigger problems with AO3 functionality than this. Like not having the ability to block tags/works/authors without having to bookmark a filtered search off site or coding a whole new site skin.

AO3 already has a checkbox under preferences to not show additional tags. Coding in additional preference boxes to instead of hiding all tags, hide "all tags after [number]" which could be a box filled in by the account holder would make far more sense. Heck they could even do it for each field - relationships, characters, and additional tags.

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

Well, let me introduce you to the amazing world of ✨ metatags ✨

One of the cool things about AO3′s tagging system is that tags are linked together in a way that if a general metatag is used to filter out works, all the tags housed under that metatag (called subtags) also get filtered out! 

For example, the tag “angst” is a metatag for “heavy angst”, “light angst”, “angst & fluff”, etc., so if someone excludes the “angst” tag from their search, any fics with those subtags will also be filtered out. So, if the author didn’t directly tag the fic with “angst”, but tagged it with “heavy angst”, excluding “angst” will hide the fic from you!

So if you are worried about not being able to tag every single variation of a trigger, check to see if the tags you’re adding are subtags of a tag you’ve already added to your fic. Click the search bar at the top > tags, then enter the tag, click canonical, and go to the page for that tag. Here’s a link to the page for the “fluff” tag as an example, it shows all the subtags that get filtered out if a user excludes “fluff” from their search! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Fluff

Different sites handle their tags differently. The way you tag on twitter isn’t the same as the way you tag on tumblr isn’t the same as the way you tag on AO3. For example, both tumblr and AO3 allow spaces while twitter doesn’t.

I currently have a nearly 60,000 word fic with about 90 tags on it. It’s very much an ensemble cast story for My Hero Academia. I have ONLY tagged for characters who have a portion of the story written in their point of view, relationships which are the focus of a chapter or significant scene, a few warnings, and a few applicable additional tags which are specifically major tags in the fandom and not redundant. I could MAYBE at most trim FIVE of those tags and still have it adequately covered.

No this is NOT a story that could be broken up into shorter pieces. It’s not a series of stories that should be separate one-shots. It’s a single fandom piece.

For anyone still defending that this won't horribly impact authors of long fic who very often need more tags to adequately cover the topics/potential triggers in their stories, especially in fandoms with very large ensemble casts and/or multiple media sources - I've run some numbers for you.

AO3 says that they chose this number because it only effects about 0.5% of fics on the site. AO3 currently has just over 8,000,000 fics in the archive. 0.5% of that number is 400,000. When I run a search of all works in the archive across all fandoms based upon nothing except word count, I find that there are only 207,847 works on the ENTIRE SITE that are over 50,000 words. That's approx. 0.25%! Same search including all works over 30,000 words? 391,214 works. Okay that's ALMOST 0.5%. Same search including all works over 25,000 words this time. That gotta jump quite a bit right? 478,064! On the entire freaking site and I still haven't even hit 1%!

This means that OVER 99% of fics on the ENTIRE SITE are UNDER 25,000 words!

Anyone who still thinks that this move doesn't disproportionately favor short fic in fandoms with smaller casts and harm authors of long fic and fandoms with larger casts is a moron! (And don't even get me started on what it will do to authors of erotic fic - but that's what the antis wanted all along anyway wasn't it?)

Does there need to be a solution to make the site more accessible? Yes. I'm not arguing that. But this is NOT it. Maybe try fixing the system so that we can set certain tags/works/authors we don't want to see to be blocked on the site in preferences WITHOUT having to bookmark them on our personal devices or write them into the code of a site skin? Write a new preference code to allow readers to hide all additional tags over a certain number instead of just hiding all of them? If you have to have a limit, set it proportional to the word count/chapter count of a work? (And before anyone says this will hurt podfics and and fanart - obviously they would get the same base limit as everyone - which COULD BE 75 tags. But fics over 25,000 words should not have to be held to that limit.)

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

Well, let me introduce you to the amazing world of ✨ metatags ✨

One of the cool things about AO3′s tagging system is that tags are linked together in a way that if a general metatag is used to filter out works, all the tags housed under that metatag (called subtags) also get filtered out! 

For example, the tag “angst” is a metatag for “heavy angst”, “light angst”, “angst & fluff”, etc., so if someone excludes the “angst” tag from their search, any fics with those subtags will also be filtered out. So, if the author didn’t directly tag the fic with “angst”, but tagged it with “heavy angst”, excluding “angst” will hide the fic from you!

So if you are worried about not being able to tag every single variation of a trigger, check to see if the tags you’re adding are subtags of a tag you’ve already added to your fic. Click the search bar at the top > tags, then enter the tag, click canonical, and go to the page for that tag. Here’s a link to the page for the “fluff” tag as an example, it shows all the subtags that get filtered out if a user excludes “fluff” from their search! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Fluff

Different sites handle their tags differently. The way you tag on twitter isn’t the same as the way you tag on tumblr isn’t the same as the way you tag on AO3. For example, both tumblr and AO3 allow spaces while twitter doesn’t.

I currently have a nearly 60,000 word fic with about 90 tags on it. It's very much an ensemble cast story for My Hero Academia. I have ONLY tagged for characters who have a portion of the story written in their point of view, relationships which are the focus of a chapter or significant scene, a few warnings, and a few applicable additional tags which are specifically major tags in the fandom and not redundant. I could MAYBE at most trim FIVE of those tags and still have it adequately covered.

No this is NOT a story that could be broken up into shorter pieces. It's not a series of stories that should be separate one-shots. It's a single fandom piece.

The movies emphasize the magical control that the evil powers exercise over Theoden, but in the books, it's more obviously a depiction of bad kingship, in the British medieval sense. Theoden takes bad advice; he neglects his family; he fails to reward his knights; and he leaves his people vulnerable to attack. He also does not honor his kingdom's promises to help nearby kingdoms, as we can tell from Boromir's account of what Gondor has been going through.

Gandalf doesn't just cast out the curse and magically fix everything. He encourages Theoden to free himself from his bad advisor, but Theoden has to take all the subsequent steps. And those choices are not easy; after so much neglect, his knights are scattered, and his only option for defending his people is to gather them at Helm's Deep. The siege does not go well. His people are afraid and despairing. But nevertheless, he holds firm and charges out to meet the enemy -- and Gandalf literally meets him halfway, bringing with him the lost knights, whom Theoden welcomes and rewards after the battle.

Theoden could have just gone home after that. But when Gondor calls for aid, Theoden proves his worth by honoring his promises. He keeps his oaths not only to his people but to his allies.

And the climax of his redemption in the book is not his death, but his leadership. The ride of the Rohirrim against Sauron's armies is described in lavish detail, with an uncharacteristically heated pace: Theoden leads the entire line of Rohan, his banner streaming behind him in the wind as they race toward their foe. And that's the end of the chapter.

I love Theoden's arc so much, and especially that moment so much, because the message is not that he has to win battles or seek power. He just has to keep fighting. Theoden's greatest enemy isn't really Sauron: it's despair. And over the course of the book, he keeps choosing hope and action over despair and hesitation, until finally he can lead his people with courage.

Yes, Theoden’s greatest enemy is despair! Everyone’s greatest enemy is despair. It’s the biggest fucking theme of the series IMO and it makes me crazy how often it gets overlooked.

lord of the rings is a story written by a man whose experience of war was crouching in the bottom of a trench. People like to make a lot of hay about the charge of the light brigade and it’s similarity to the ride of the rohirrim, but no. Tolkien’s experience of war was getting fucking trench fever, not watching cavalry charges. Tolkien’s experience of war was listening to the shells fall around him, knowing that death could come at any moment. He experienced war in a way where the soldiers on the other side of the line were a faceless threat, and the closest and most present enemy was his own fear.

this is the hill I will die on. This is why I hate it when people talk about LotR as a morally cowardly story about fighting mindless orcs that exist to be cannon fodder. No. Lord of the Rings is about seeing the dark coming on the horizon, and fighting yourself. Fighting the fear and despair that rise up inside you. Struggling with your own terror and powerlessness, knowing that you are small, and nothing you do will matter in the face of this massive conflict—  you’re just here, one more meaningless soul to feed into the machine guns. Lord of the Rings is about taking a deep breath, and bracing yourself, and deciding that if nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it. The ring can’t possibly be destroyed— we choose to form a fellowship anyway. Helms deep will surely fall by morning— we still choose to fight. The quest can’t possibly succeed— and yet we choose to march into the teeth of mordor to distract the enemy. It’s not hope, exactly? But’s it’s not not hope.

I did at one point have twenty pages written about this. Tolkien was a deeply christian man— he believed in eucatastrophe. Salvation. A better world to come, after suffering, if you bore your suffering well. But he was also a world-class Beowulf scholar with a kinda viking-warrior-type view of the world. And do you know what the vikings believed? (Pls don’t anybody @ me for saying viking, I know it’s a verb and not a culture). The vikings believed that the time of your death was preordained, and that all you had control over was how you met it.

And that is some seriously Rohirric shit!! Like, we’re all mortals doomed to die, Ragnarok is coming, and this whole world is an inevitable grind down into oblivion… but if we’re fighting a long defeat, all the more reason to fight it gloriously!! That’s epic. Eomer approves the hell out of that message.

I’m gonna be a real nerd now, and quote from a poem called the Battle of Maldon.

“Courage shall grow keener, clearer our will,

More valiant our spirits, as our strength grows less.

Here lies our good lord, all leveled in dust

The man all marred. True kinsman will mourn

Who thinks to wend off from battle play now?

Though whitened by winters I will not away,

But lodge by my liege lord that favorite of men;

By my dear one and ring giver intend I to lie.”

That’s a translation from an Old English poem that’s literally a thousand years old, but it always gets me how much it sounds like something Tolkien would write. Theoden and Eowyn are practically leaping out of that poem: We’re all going to die, I choose to meet my end fiercely. We’re all going to die, so I want to die beside my king.

It’s an acceptance of death, and even of failure, but not of defeat. Because— to get back to what I was talking about earlier— Lord of the Rings isn’t actually a story about battlefields. It’s a story about being at war with your own heart. Despair or faith? Hope or defeat? Tolkien wants you to know that even if your city is overrun by orcs, or you’re killed in a meaningless push for another 50 feet of french mud, you can still hold on to your courage with both hands and not cede up your soul to despair-- and that’s the battle Tolkien thinks is really worth writing about.

It’s a battle that every major character in the story fights. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Theoden, Denethor, Merry, Pippin, Boromir, Galadriel, Eowyn, Faramir, Eomer, Saruman, Gollum, Aragorn. Some of them hold onto hope through everything. Some of them break utterly. Some of them are defeated, and then with help find their footing again, and make a redeeming last stand.  

But the point that Tolkien hammers home again and again is: Death and failure are natural parts of life, and should be accepted. Despair shouldn’t be.

Tolkien says: hope is hard, actually. Fuck that Game of Thrones grimdark bullshit. Hope is hard fucking work. And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place.

One of the AO3 translation volunteers (Min) created a Google Docs script to handle issues when copying from a doc into AO3. It’s really easy to use

create a copy of this google doc. It contains the script that will do all of the HTML formatting for you.

Delete all of the text from the document.

Write or paste your fic/chapter into the document.

Go up to the top menu and click the new menu option Post to AO3, then choose Prepare for posting into the HTML editor

Note: because this is an apps script, you’ll need to give it permission to run the first time. 

The script will automatically mark up your document with the required HTML that you can then paste into the AO3 composition window. \o/

To revert your text back to normal, just go back up to that menu and choose Remove HTML. It will look like regular text again. 

Once you have the doc, you can make a new copy of it for each new fic you write and that way you’ll always have that script available when you need it :)

A lot of writing advice out there encourages writers to show rather than tell information to their readers. This is really useful in things like characterization where it can be a much more satisfying reading experience to understand a character’s personality over time rather than just being given a list of adjectives right up front.

But that doesn’t mean that stating things directly is bad. It just means that you should reflect on your story and decide which parts are important enough to be worth showing and which parts are just background and can be handled with a quick sentence or two that tells the reader the relevant information.

If you try to show every piece of information that a reader needs to be aware of, you’ll find yourself going off on long tangents away from the point of the story. Or you’ll find yourself writing two pages of context that could have just as easily been handled by a character (or the narrator) revealing that information much more succinctly.

What is the point of your story? What are you trying to get across? What is the main idea that you want to spend the most time with? Those are the parts of the story where showing will have a satisfying payoff.

The parts where telling is useful are where you want to give your reader information but you don’t want to lose the thread of what you’re talking about. In that situation, telling keeps your story more on target. It also respects your reader’s time.

The next time you find yourself faced with a section of a story that you really don’t want to write but you feel like you have to because context, try just dropping that information in - even just as a placeholder - and see how you feel.

I have a preference for writing long fic and read fast enough that for me anything less than 1000 words is rarely clicked on, but transition paragraphs and exposition to get the characters from point A to point B are expected techniques in all prose regardless of length, not the enemy that they're often made out to be. That said a good story strikes a balance and doesn't overdo the exposition but uses it judiciously to move the story along at a satisfying rate.