sweet dreams!

13 карт was previously synned with the canonical fandom tag Фёдор х 9 | Fedor x9 (Webcomic), but now its syn was changed to be under the canonical new fandom 13 карт | 13 cards (Cartoon). This is a deliberate change the team has made, and that means many of the fics in the fandom have now switched fandoms.

sorry for answering this late, anon fhsjks but here's my long ahh explanation (with pictures)!!

first thing i have to say is that they literally have a sun&moon rug. sun&moon felix&joker is canon in technicality guys! felix is the sun, bright and blinding in how he spreads his ideas and values to the world, and joker is the moon, always watching and subtle until it's his time to strike, when people least expect it.

now onto the minisodes. they too have given me much to chew on. felix&romeo are noticeably closer there than the actual series, and each time their friendship is shown joker is there to ruin it somehow (breaking hearts is fun?)

in kuromaku's minisode, we can assume the two cards joker steps on are felix&romeo. they're attached to the hip in most scenes, like in both the times they're summoned. this is the only instance joker physically appears in exchange.

in romeo's minisode, he impersonates romeo again—something he already did in knight of the lucky banner. and we can see him stealing romeo's life in the television scenes. although there isn't a real joker&felix interaction here, the concept of joker taking romeo's place includes usurping his role as felix's best friend. much to think here.

and of course, in felix's minisode, we have this thing

joker ruins felix's life and has the audacity to look at him like that. what an asshole.

but also, why is he pitying him now after using his best friend's image to shatter his fantasy?

joker likes to play a role, we see that in his impersonations of romeo. he likes high stakes, we see that in kuromaku's minisode. he likes to test the clones' wills and potentially see them fall, we see that in brolly's minisode. he likes to take control and play his twisted mind games, that's really the whole thing of felix's minisode—but perhaps he finds a slight sense of solidarity in felix?

felix, subconsciously or otherwise, tries/wants to be something more, which leads to him being hypocritical more than once. he wants positivity, absolute kindness and universal good—concepts that aren't possible. he wants to play the selfless hero, a valiant knight helping everyone despite reality.

joker knows that's not possible, sure, but. isn't Joker Presents a similar idea? he's taking these characters and putting them in fake scenarios to entertain himself. sometimes he purposefully joins in to push the story in a preferred outcome. he doesn't exactly hate the slice of life fluff of s1, the same way felix doesn't exactly hate every cruelty of the real world, but favors the version he made for himself much more. maybe he doesn't really care for felix as a person more than a character, but he must be somewhat aware judging from that reaction. makes me wonder, would joker react the same way as felix if someone ruined all the fun he put so much effort into? would he be devastated or enraged if someone tarnished the illusions he created and deemed it as nothing valuable?

I was trying to add some tags to a new fic, typed my usual Blue Umbrella keywords to find the right relationship tags, and couldn't find the characters. So I downsized, and…

We have renamed canonicals 😳

It seems that Brolly, Waru, and Spade were all fixed, and that several unsynned relationships that previously were wrongly synned or didn't have a canonical tag were synned!

Now, I don't know if this is because I linked my suggestions with my request earlier today and staff happened to see the wrongful tag names or because someone else approached staff with the request to fix them, but that's already a pretty interesting development! It means that staff is currently at work with the AO3 tags, and that maybe, we can get the changes we hope for.

Exciting developments!

Part 1 about the fandom tag

The second part of my suggestions for the 13 Cards fandom's AO3 tags and what we can do to make them better. This will go into the details of why our current character and relationship tags aren't working.

A quick illustration

Here's a screenshot from the relationships and characters of a fic of mine in another fandom. Can you tell at first glance which relationships and characters this fic is about?

There are nine relationship tags and another nine character tags, and even if you don't know the series very well, you can pretty quickly glean within seconds who this fic is generally about and what the main relations are. This isn't visually bloated, and though there are many tags, you won't spend a long time reading them to learn relevant information. And especially as a fan of a certain character, your eyes will instantly snap to relevant relationships.

Here's a screenshot from @yuristopheles' fic To Catch a Falling Star, referenced here with permission. Can you tell at first glance which relationships and characters this fic is about?

Because I can't. Nine relationship tags and ten character tags, nearly identical to the previous screenshot, yet both sections span two more lines each.

I find myself, to no fault of the authors using them, staring at these tags and just can't distinguish anything, and this isn't unique to just fics with many relationship tags; even fics with two or three relationships have this issue. This is a wall of text, of eternally-repeating |'s and King of's and Jack of's. I need to read it in-depth, and even if the characters are a little more clear, it still takes a lot of processing power to glean what this is even about. As a Brolly fan, my eyes don't snap to relationships involving him, because my brain doesn't recognise the tags as such.

This is visual noise. I can't do anything with this the way I can with other fandoms' tags.

Here's a third screenshot from yet another fandom.

Despite each tag having (Fandom) behind it, you can still pretty quickly glean what this fic is about. The (Fandom) part of the tag that's necessary to distinguish them in the system quickly becomes white noise that your brain ignores, thus making the tags only slightly less legible, but not much.

The problem

You probably saw this one coming: our fandom has a problem with unsightly relationship tags and long general tags.

When you look at a single character, this actually isn't that bad. I think that the character tags have their own charm, and they're pretty unique. After all, the characters are the Jack of X and the King of Y, and this gives them a regal look.

The problem comes in when you combine them. Most fics won't just have one character and no relationship tags. Take this relationship tag, for example:

Blue Umbrella | Jack of Clubs/Kuromaku | King of Clubs/Pik | King of Spades

Just one relationship tag, and it spans an entire page. On top of that, because there is so much information irrelevant to the relationship, you're reading so much more than is necessary. It's fluff. It's straining to the eyes and mind. It doesn't tell you what it should as efficiently as it could.

Compare to for example the following format:

Brolly/Kuromaku/Spade (13 Cards)

That's completely different, isn't it? More legible, all info is relevant, and for the sake of the system, the tag is distinct.

The second problem is that certain character names are outdated. Namely the following:

Blue Umbrella | Jack of Clubs

Pik | King of Spades

Varu | Jack of Spades

We've known their official English translations for quite some time now. Even Blue Umbrella is very outdated, as his name in Russian has been Umbrella/Zontik for quite some time now. This makes it hard to find fics about the characters you're interested in, and it is part of why there are so many character and relationship tags. No new reader or watcher saw Brolly or Zontik in the series and would think to search any of the keywords in his character tag.

And lastly, related to my previous post, some character tags have the wrong overarching fandom associated with them.

Below are the canonical and synned character tags.

Characters like Halberd and Shield have their canonical tags associated with Fx9, a comic in which they never appeared. Characters without any king, queen, or jack association have an awkward fandom association, especially since Fx9 is outdated.

The suggested solutions

I'm gonna level with y'all: this is a tough one. I have considered multiple solutions, but each one would lose us something important. On top of that, these tags would need to be fundamentally changed to make them work.

I acknowledge that each solution would mean we lose a part of the charm. It's why I won't act before there's been a discussion about this matter. What I do know is that a lot of people don't like the current system and seemed happy that we were tackling it. We can't keep things the way they currently are, as I have already heard accounts of people who simply gave up on writing because of how unusable the current tags are.

I'll outline my options below.

1. The (Fandom) approach

Character examples: Brolly (13 Cards), Franz (Land of Kings) Relationship example: Dante & Kuromaku (13 Cards)

This approach would mean we request that instead of the long card character and relationship tags, all canonical tags become the standard tag for when a character doesn't have a surname. AO3 handles many characters with no surname this way.

My suggestion would include to link all the 13 Cards characters to (13 Cards) and try to link the Land of Kings characters that uniquely appear in the comic to (Land of Kings), but there's a good chance that the latter will regardless have to be linked to (13 Cards) for clarity.

Pros

It's sleek and easy to read. No one will get confused, and the visual bloat that has deterred many people from writing or reading is solved by a much more handsome tag

It's intuitive and easy to find by new readers and writers

It makes especially relationship tags far more clear and easier to read, helping fulfil the purpose of archiving

Cons

We lose the charm of the unique character tags for the fandom. Of course, the Name | Jack of X character tags would be synned with the Name (13 Cards) character tags, but they wouldn't be the suggested tags anymore, nor would they be the canon tags, meaning that the card tags will become less and less used. I acknowledge that for the sake of nostalgia and habit, changing these can hit a few nerves and lose us some of what made the character tags so distinct in the first place.

Separating Land of Kings characters from 13 Cards characters may not be accepted by AO3 staff because they might not be able to link LoK to 13C when wrangling. This is a minor issue, as we can still use (13 Cards) as the canonical tags and request that (Land of Kings) be synned to these.

2. The mixed approach

Character example: Waru | Jack of Spades, Aru (Land of Kings) Relationship example: Fedor Nechitaylo & Felix (13 Cards)

In this approach, the character tags remain intact but the relationship tags, which are by far the most bloated section, change to the shortened (13 Cards) version. Characters who aren't cards will get the (13 Cards) or (Land of Kings) fandom signifier.

Pros

The main issue (bloated relationship tags) is solved without losing the charm of the unique Character | King of X tags.

We can still have Character (13 Cards) be synned to the canon character names, thus giving people a choice while also preserving the more unique names as the canon tags

Cons

It's inconsistent: the relationship tags don't contain the canonical character names

I won't lie when I say that I don't believe that staff will accept this solution due to the reason mentioned above. It will be harder to link characters to relationships by the tag wranglers, and the discrepancy between formats may be declined as too confusing or inconsistent

A wall of character tags will still be hard to read

3. The minimal approach

Character example: Brolly | Jack of Clubs Relationship example: Spade | King of Spades & Waru | Jack of Spades

We don't change the format, just the names. Brolly, Spade, and Waru get their canonical English names, and Land of Kings characters are moved from (Fedor x9) to (13 Cards), but the changes end there.

Pros

Less of a chance to offend people who are attached to the current tags

Easier for tag wranglers to change, and therefore far more likely to be accepted

Cons

This doesn't solve all of the issues I have outlined above and keeps both character and relationship tags a tangled, illegible mess

EDIT: 4. ♤♧♡♢

Character example: Spade | K♤ Relationship example: Kuromaku | K♧ & Romeo | K♡ & Dante | K♢

This one was suggested by @virto-the-weirdo! Instead of the long list of useless info, we replace these with the symbols for the cards.

Here's a mockup of how this would look:

Pros:

We have our cake and eat it, too. Clear visually, and interesting on a character-based level

In my opinion pretty visually sleek, solving a few of the problems we had above

Tags with these unicode symbols already exist, so the AO3 system could theoretically handle them

Cons:

I'm not sure if staff would accept canon tags using these symbols. For visually impaired users and screen readers, I can imagine that these tags are slightly confusing

To some, these may still be visually hard to decipher

The slim icons may not be very visible, and the thick icons are small

Possible issues on lesser known devices or with alternate fonts that break the tags

What I will do nonetheless

Regardless of what we might agree on, I will nonetheless do the following:

Request that the mistranslated names (Spade, Brolly, Waru) are corrected to their proper English translations

Look up all relationship and character tags that aren't synned to their proper canonical tag and ask they be matched up to their proper canonical tag

Request for the fandom tags to be united under the tag 13 Карт | 13 Cards so that we have one single tag for all fanworks in the universe to go to, as discussed in my previous post

Beg the team to capitalise some tags (eg 13 cards to 13 Cards)

Possibly send the AO3 team the question of whether the mixed tag approach would be feasible, and to ask them if they prefer I send one huge request with the question to change a hundred tags or if they prefer that I do this in smaller phases

Feedback

More than ever, for this part of the overhaul, feedback is important. If we make a decision and the next day the tags look different in a way that upsets most of the fandom, I would've failed at my goal. This is above all an effort to serve ourselves and our fandom.

Therefore, I would like to request that any feedback is shared. Even anything as little as "This is okay", "I have a different suggestion", or "Please don't change anything" is good to me. But I'd appreciate if I could get an answer on which of my three suggestions people would prefer the most, if any, and if there are any alternative suggestions about what I could request, anything I missed, anything you'd like me to add to my request when it's finally made.

One big point I'd need feedback on is whether we prefer that the Land of Kings' canonical tags become (13 Cards) or (Land of Kings). I'd prefer consistency, so we'd have to decide on one or the other.

Moreover, I don't know if the Criminart verse is considered to be a part of the 13 Cards verse and if I should ask for these character and fandom tags to also be synned with the 13 Cards tags. Feedback from people who know more about this is much appreciated.

Lastly, if I have forgotten any 13 Cards subfandoms, please let me know! I am not well-versed in Fëdor's other projects and how they link to the 13 Cards universe.

Together, we can make this fandom more welcoming to new and existing users on the platform and change what seems to have been a major pet peeve of many people.

Hello to the AO3 tag team!

I’m writing to you on behalf of the 13 Cards fandom with a request to revise how our fandom’s Fandom tag is handled on AO3.

In short: 13 Cards is a Russian series that started as a web series called Fëdor x9, to which there eventually came a continuation comic called Land of Kings and an animated series called 13 Cards. Early on in its run, creators and fans alike agreed that “13 Cards” would be considered the overarching universe for these characters and stories, so “13 Cards” would reference the 13 Cards animated series, the Fëdor x9 comic, and the Land of Kings comic.

Here on AO3, however, we’ve run into a few problems:

The fandom’s name is for Fedor x9, more specifically, this tag: Фёдор х 9 | Fedor x9 (Webcomic)

There are currently two separate canonical fandom tags for the exact same fandom: Фёдор х 9 | Fedor x9 (Webcomic) and 13 карт | 13 cards (Cartoon)

This is quite the problem, because both of these fandom tags reference the same fandom, so it’s much harder to find the fanfiction for this fandom. On top of that, the comic Fëdor x9 is outdated: almost no one in the fandom knows it, and it makes it harder for new fans to find the canonical fandom to tag their fics with. It would be like, for example, making the canonical tag for the game “World of Warcraft” into “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans” because the whole series stemmed from that one game, even though “World of Warcraft” is the fandom people are writing for.

I inquired what people preferred in our fandom, all outlined in a tumblr post. Both there and on discord, there seems to be an agreement with my suggested solution: https://www.tumblr.com/two-six/800550624369475584/13-cards-ao3-tag-overhaul-suggestion-the-fandoms

So I come to you with the following question: 

Would it be possible for the two fandoms to be merged into one tag? The current fandom tags are Фёдор х 9 | Fedor x9 (Webcomic) and 13 карт | 13 cards (Cartoon). 

We would be very happy if these fandoms could be unified under the following new canonical tag: 

13 Карт | 13 Cards

To us, this is a very clear tag that new watchers can easily find, that is aesthetically pleasing, and that also makes it easy for our fellow Russian fans to find it. We don’t believe that any (Comic) or (Cartoon) parenthesis would be helpful, as this fandom tag would refer to all the stories underneath the universe’s banner, not just one.

It is also very important to our community that the starting letters are both capitalised in Russian and in English, as the current canon tag has “cards” without a capital letter. We would appreciate it if extra care were given to following the AO3 standard style for canonical tags.

As a second request, I have looked up all the fandoms that fall under the 13 Cards universe. Would it be possible to syn them to the proposed new canonical 13 Карт | 13 Cards tag?

13 Cards 13 карт 13 cards - Fandom 13 карт | 13 cards (Cartoon) 13карт | 13 cards (cartoon) 13 Cards (Cartoon) 13 Cards | 13 Kart (TV show) Фёдор х 9 | Fedor x9 (Webcomic) Земля королей/13 Карт Земля Королей | Land of Kings (Comics)   земля королей - Fandom Земля Королей / 13 карт

I thank you for your time and effort, and I hope that you can see our community’s needs and preferences and help us out in making archiving fics and fanworks for our small little fandom a smoother process. 

On a related note, we are also looking at the Character and Relationship tags. Currently, half of them are wrong translations that later got an official translation, and they are hard to navigate as they are clunky and outdated, plus half of the tags aren’t synned to the actual characters, relationships, and fandoms. Because of this, we’d need a rework of the tags that build from the ground up, and that could possibly take several dozens of tags to be requested to change.

First part of the AO3 tag overhaul suggestions, and possibly the largest! Character and ship tags will follow later, since I think it will be the easiest to have those adjusted once the fandom tag has been unified.

The problem

Currently, on AO3, searching for 13 Cards works is hell.

Not only are there two canon tags [Фёдор х 9 | Fedor x9 (Webcomic) and 13 карт | 13 cards (Cartoon)], which means that the fics are arbitrarily divided over multiple fandoms—there are also a bunch of tags that aren't synned to the fandom at all, making searching it hard.

The second big problem is that Fëdor x9 is the current catch-all for the universe. While maybe accurate in 2010, that not only is no longer true, but we have a better option: 13 Cards. The Fëdor x9 tag as the canonical tag makes it exceptionally hard for new users to find the fandom on AO3.

The suggested solution

I'd like to contact AO3 with a request to unify the tags and make everything beneath it canon under a simple tag:

13 Карт | 13 Cards

This way, the Russian media source is respected, the most common umbrella term for the fandom is used, and we have a neat tag where all fics in the 13 Cards universe can be collected. This is a sleek-looking tag that won't contribute to screen bloat. After all, people consider for Fëdor x9 and Land of Kings to be a part of 13 Cards as an overarching universe rather than just the cartoon, as they are simply a prequel and a continuation of the same storyline.

All other tags will be suggested to be synned with this tag. This means that for example if you tag your fandom as "13 Cards", it will still appear in the 13 Карт | 13 Cards tag with all other works, which is one of AO3's greatest strengths but is currently not being utilised for our fandom.

The current suggested structure would look like this:

Feedback

Because this would decide how the fandom would look from here on out, I'd like to ask any writer or reader to offer feedback on this idea. If this isn't a fandom name that works for the fandom, we can search for a better one together.

One big pointer I'm looking for feedback on is capitalisation: do we prefer 13 карт or 13 Карт? One part of fixing the tags is that some capitalisation is odd, but I don't know enough about Russian capitalisation to make a decision.