#tagchatthursday

We recently came across this tumblr post about different types of alternative history fiction, and it sparked a discussion about how we would tag it. All alternate history books would have alternate history as a genre tag, and the tags we discuss in this post would imply Alternate History. 

Stories that start with a clear point of divergence that creates a self-contained alternate history/universe would be tagged with Historical Divergence. For example, the Black Plague killed 99% of Europeans, Charles Lindbergh won the 1940 US presidential election, or JFK survived the assassination attempt. The divergence can begin with a seemingly small change that has wide-reaching consequences, known as the Butterfly Effect.

Stories that generally follow actual history but include something fictional that changes the day-to-day or smaller events would be tagged with History, but Different. These are frequently sci-fi/fantasy novels. For example, there are ghost mediums in World War 2, zombies disrupted the US Civil War, or dragons were around during the Napoleonic Wars. More specific tags like History, but Zombies or History, but Dragons can be used, too.

The last type of alternate fiction described in the post was harder to tag. It’s when there’s a large, fundamental change in history but specific historical events still occur without real change. We’ve tentatively named it Ornamental Worldbuilding. We’re confident this exists, but we weren’t able to find any good examples of it. Have you read any alternate history fiction like this?

Overall, it was a fun post that led to a fun discussion. If you come across any more posts like those, we’d love to be tagged in them.

We've had a few discussions lately about tagging Romance and especially, at what point it becomes a genre, rather than a plot or relationship. As romance can be a very polarizing genre, with many people avoiding it completely and many others seeking it out (almost) exclusively, this seems an important distinction to make. The romance genre is often looked down upon, a large part of which is rooted more in sexism than taste, even though a large portion of fiction of all genres contains a romance plot, and we don’t want to contribute to that.

In contrast to most other genres, where the genre conventions are unique enough to signal the genre (Magic for fantasy, Space Travel for science fiction or Murder Investigation for murder-mystery for example), a lot of books have a romance subplot without being a romance book.

How central this plot is to the story plays a large part in determining whether something is a romance book. Do other story elements and plots ultimately serve to further the romance, or does the romance serve to enhance and influence other plots? We can account for that with the relevance level of our tags, too: a background romance will be a minor tag, whereas a main love story is best expressed with a major relevance. 

Often, genres come with their own set of tropes and conventions. Romance novels are typically required to have a Happily Ever After or Happily For Now ending for example, and Love at First Sight, Love Triangles, and Soul Mates are common romance tropes. However, you could find those tropes or Pining, moving from Enemies to Lovers or experiencing Forbidden Love in non-romance genre books, too. While not exclusive, the more romance tropes you can find in a novel, the more likely it is that the novel is of the romance genre, not just has a romance subplot.

The tagging team has been talking about mysteries lately. What are the genre conventions of a mystery, and what are the popular tropes? How much of the perceived difficulty or plot twistiness depends on the audience vs the individual reader? When does Foreshadowing cross the line into full on clues?

We’ve settled on Narration: Mystery Clues for scenarios where the novel gives you the clues to follow along with the protagonist. We’ve discussed a Ending: Reader Solvable Mystery tag for the novels that give the reader all the clues, but that may be subjective. (We’d love for mystery aficionados to give their opinions on this!) We’ve also discussed scenarios in which readers know more than the characters (which is Dramatic Irony in general), potentially tagging them with a more specific tag.  

Most of the mystery-tagging struggles boil down to reader subjectivity. We have taggers who could guess the ending of a mystery halfway through, and taggers who could read the same book and swear there was no way to guess the ending. To some extent, intended audience comes into this. Books aimed at children will usually have more obvious clues than adult novels, and this is a good place for the audience appropriate modifier such as Narration: Mystery Clues (audience appropriate), but it’s an ongoing discussion.

Following up on our post about The Goblin Emperor yesterday, we want to share how to switch between different editions of the same book, too!

When you’re on a book page, you can choose to view other editions. You'll be shown the cover, the title, and edition tags for all editions we can find - audiobooks and ebooks included. One click on any of these blocks will select this edition and take you back to the book page we showed you yesterday with the newly selected cover and edition tags.

We'd like to take this opportunity to talk about the things you can't see yet: As we've mentioned before, the edition options will be sorted by publication date, and by default you'll only see editions in languages you picked on your user settings, though you can always opt to see them all.

Where we can, we'll also list the identifiers of the edition, usually the ISBN (both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13), but also ASIN (the Amazon Identification Number) and other identifiers we might find useful, so you can easily search for a book with these numbers, too.

Additionally, we’ll also offer external links, which will be added like tags by users or by importing from other databases. On the book itself, these might take you to the author's homepage, to reviews, or a fan wiki. On the editions sidebar, you can also find libraries that stock this book, places to buy it or a link to the publisher.

Books can be amazing escapes from the real world, but they can also be an opportunity to explore difficult ideas or emotions in a safe way, especially for children. Children's books frequently contain dark and scary content that both parents and children might want to be aware of or seek out specifically.  

Lately, the tagging team has been discussing one such children’s series--the Warrior Cats series by Erin Hunter. This series follows clans of sentient, feral cats who live and fight and have friends and family in a fictional, feline society. These clans frequently have battles where cats die, some of them kittens. The series touches on ideas of war, death, child labor, and identity. These heavy topics can be easier to grasp and work through when the characters aren't human.

This week we discussed a pretty specific issue that turned out to be three issues in a trenchcoat and more complicated than we initially thought.

In the Warrior Cats series, the cat cast use a multitude of strange terms for ordinary things: “Twolegs” or “Nofurs” for humans, “Thundersnake” for train, “leaf-bare” for winter. 

Are these neologisms, or a constructed language? Not quite, because they’re compound words made up of English words. Rather, they feel like literal translations of words in a fictional cat language (in translation theory, such a literal translation would be called a metaphrase). On TVTropes, this is called Call a Rabbit a “Smeerp”, but we try for more accessible, neutral language for our tags. We have not settled on a name for this tag yet.

Of course, this stylistic choice stems from the fact that the protagonists are cats, which needs to be tagged separately. We are encountering more and more tags about the whole cast, and are currently debating making “Cast” a tag type. Whether there’s a large cast, a diverse cast, nonhuman cast or a cast that shares a trait, like female cast or teenage cast or white cast, we want to know when something applies to all (or most) characters instead of just some or the most important ones.

Lastly, it is the cat’s perspective that is showcased with words like “Twoleg nest” (house) or insults like “fox dung”. The world of Warrior Cats might not be all that different from reality for the humans in it, but we’re looking at it through the cat’s eyes. Foreign perspective or alien perspective were tags we came up with, but they might be misunderstood to refer to immigrants or the space kind of aliens. This, too, is an issue that we have not yet settled.

This has been a great chance for us to re-evaluate, and we’re pleased to find that everything, for the most part, is going well. But we are also figuring out how to make our tags better.

One discussion we had was about the tag You're a Wizard, Harry, a trope which we defined as the dramatic reveal of a person’s secret heritage to them that they didn’t know about before. It isn’t just found on Harry Potter, but also in stories like Star Wars and City of Bones by Cassandra Clare. However, our tags should be legible to everyone, even without prior knowledge of other books or the origin of a quote. Finding a replacement for this tag was hard. Backstory Reveal could also apply to a character revealing their own backstory to others, for example. Secret Heir or Secret Mage have the additional problem of only applying to some backstories.

Not all ambiguity can be avoided. We’ll display a short description with the tag name when a tag is added, so users know what exactly a tag means. For now, Hidden Heritage is what we settled on. Like all our tags, it could change, but we're confident we're moving in the right direction.

We’ve received a few questions lately about how we’ll handle spoilers that are also tags that people might specifically want to avoid like gore and sexual assault. We wanted to address that today. 

To start with, spoiler tags will be searchable like regular tags, so there should be no worry of missing a potentially triggering tag just because it’s a spoiler. There are a couple different ways for users to moderate their own content even through spoilers. First, users who are logged in will be able to maintain a blacklist that completely hides books that are tagged with any tag on their blacklist -- even if that tag is hidden by a spoiler warning. Users will also be able to have an alert list which will highlight the requested tags on book pages and searches -- even if it’s a spoiler. We’re still experimenting with the best way to display this to give users the control to see or not see spoilers. 

The second tool for users is that the tag type will be spoiled separately from the tag itself, so users can check the spoiler tags for the type of content that bothers them. For example, if you’d really rather not read about blood and gore, and there are two spoiled tags in the Sensitive Content block with Discrimination and Violence as the types, you might choose to view the Violence tag but leave the Discrimination one hidden.