#nb anders

So I sent in a ticket to AO3 Support, because most Nonbinary characters roll up to the general character tag; i.e. “Nonbinary Lavellan has been made a synonym of Lavellan (Dragon Age).“, which is, of course, fairly useless when searching for works with the tag.

“I was wondering how many tags a character needs to be separated from a parent tag.

In the specific case I have looked at, in the Dragon Age fandom, the protagonists can, canonically, be male or female and have tags for such; but there are a growing number of NB and Nonbinary Suranas, Mahariels, Amells, Adaars, Lavellans, Trevelyans, Wardens, Inquisitors, and such that are currently made synonyms of their parent character category (which are very large) and thus are hard to keep track of new stories being published.

Nonbinary Hawke is the exception; they have been "elevated," but as an "Additional Tag," not a "Character."

Thanks for everything y'all do!“

Their response came last week (see below), but I didn’t get a chance to test it out until last night.

Hi there,

Thanks for contacting us.  We passed your feedback along to the tag wranglers, who have replied as follows:

"In general, we're moving away from creating character tags for specific gender variations of video game protagonists, because while they can be useful they can also lead to issues when filtering. We now prefer to create these tags in the Additional Tags instead, since that allows for more flexibility in searches.

The current gendered character tags like Female Lavellan and others were created under older policies, but going forward the team has opted to create new non-canon gender variations as Additional Tag canonicals instead.

We now have the following nonbinary tags created under Additional Tags: Nonbinary Inquisitor (Dragon Age) Nonbinary Tabris (Dragon Age) Nonbinary Anders (Dragon Age) Nonbinary Hawke (Dragon Age) Nonbinary Lavellan (Dragon Age)

And the team will be creating more in the future when there are enough uses for a particular character or group."

Now the original is still true (it’s how I actually got the text copy/pasta), BUT, if you go to the “Freeform: Nonbinary Lavellan (Dragon Age)“ or “Freeform: Nonbinary Tabris (Dragon Age)“ or any of the others, in the tag search, you now get “This tag belongs to the Additional Tags Category. It's a common tag. You can use it to filter works and to filter bookmarks.“