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Do people really care about tags on ao3? Like I understand tagging content warnings and genres and such, but when it comes to additional tags, how much should I tag? I’ve noticed the funniest common tags that just make me wonder if anyone’s really interested in filtering fics by “inspired by music”, “North America” or “umbrellas”. Especially in smaller fandoms, like most of mine, it just seems kind of pointless bc you can’t afford to be picky anyway. Do you think additional tags are useful?
I think…
Actually, I’m going to take this as an opportunity to nerd. So there’s a phenomenon in linguistics called a sprachbund. A sprachbund is basically an area where a bunch of languages that aren’t from the same family have been rubbing up against each other for a very long time. When this happens, these unrelated languages start to pick up features from each other in a kind of linguistic crosspollination.
Example: Romanian is a Romance language, like French or Spanish. But it has a bunch of weird phonetic and grammatical features that no other Romance languages have. Why? Because it’s been living next to a bunch of Slavic languages for so long that it started to act like a Slavic language.
What does any of this have to do with your question? Well, I think that there are a bunch of websites that form a kind of internet fandom sprachbund. Each has its own features, but those features bleed into the other sites, even though they don’t belong there. Think about how ff.net style “legal disclaimers” (that actually have no legal meaning or function) sometimes show up on works written for ao3, which is designed to offer legal protection that makes those disclaimers irrelevant. Or how that ao3 tag generator started getting used as a prompt generator for tumblr drabbles. And on, and on, and on. Internet fandom is an enormous cross-platform sprachbund.
So what does that have to do with tagging on ao3? Well, I think ao3 picked up that style of tagging from tumblr. Because of the way tumblr is structured, it’s considered bad form to add non-constructive comments on your reblog of a post. Otherwise, you get dozens of reblogs just saying “wow” or “mood” and the post becomes unreadable. So people started putting their reactions to a post into the tags they added to their reblog, which prevented the post from accumulating nonsense. But then people were used to thinking of tagging as a mode of expression rather than purely functional, so the expressive use of tagging spread to ao3, even though it doesn’t serve the same purpose there.
The cool bit is that the weird tagging conventions ao3 got from tumblr have come to serve an entirely different and still valuable purpose on ao3. Since author’s notes aren’t visible in search results but tags are, the tags can be used to signal a set of things about the fic that a summary might not get across. For instance, if a fic is tagged “hurt/comfort”, that tells you the genre of the fic, but not its tone. But if the author then adds a tag like “but really mostly comfort we’re all about the comfort here”, you have a much better sense of what kind of fic you’re about to read. So even though no one would ever filter by that tag, it’s still conveying important information.
Isn’t human communication amazing?