Thinking about fanwork categories
Jun. 18th, 2023 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrI'm slowly filling out ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
square_bromides with my old works. Each post includes the original AO3 tags in the text, but I'm also adding new dreamwidth tags, which will help anyone wanting to see all my works of a particular type.
So now I have to decide what people will be interested in, and how much detail I can be bothered going into. Which has me thinking about different ways of tagging and categorising fanworks in general.
All the works I've uploaded thus far have been gen or gen-ish, a mixture of fanart and fanfic. I've listed medium, genre, and fandom. Genre isn't listed on the AO3 but it is on fanfic.net, and I think that works better than putting everything with zero ships in the same undifferentiated 'gen' category, or calling things "het" because they mention a canon couple without making it the focus, etc. I know this is less helpful for people who just want pure gen, but they can still tell if there's much relationship focus from the AO3 tags and summary.
I write so many different characters that I can't be bothered adding individual tags for them all right now.
I'm not sure if I'll add tags for ships, but will at least indicate if something is femslash/slash etc. But I'm not sure the best way to do that. I write a moderate number of polyamorous ships and non binary characters, so the AO3 categories have not always been a good fit. Maybe I'll have "polyamory", "multiple ship", and "non-binary ship" categories in addition to slash/het/femslash. Or maybe mm/fm/ff would be better since then I can also have fmm, mnb etc? That's less readable, though.
Hmm! I have ten works to upload before I hit my first shippy work, better keep thinking! I mean dreamwidth makes mass tag editing pretty easy, so I can always change my mind. But I do have to decide on something.
square_bromides with my old works. Each post includes the original AO3 tags in the text, but I'm also adding new dreamwidth tags, which will help anyone wanting to see all my works of a particular type. So now I have to decide what people will be interested in, and how much detail I can be bothered going into. Which has me thinking about different ways of tagging and categorising fanworks in general.
All the works I've uploaded thus far have been gen or gen-ish, a mixture of fanart and fanfic. I've listed medium, genre, and fandom. Genre isn't listed on the AO3 but it is on fanfic.net, and I think that works better than putting everything with zero ships in the same undifferentiated 'gen' category, or calling things "het" because they mention a canon couple without making it the focus, etc. I know this is less helpful for people who just want pure gen, but they can still tell if there's much relationship focus from the AO3 tags and summary.
I write so many different characters that I can't be bothered adding individual tags for them all right now.
I'm not sure if I'll add tags for ships, but will at least indicate if something is femslash/slash etc. But I'm not sure the best way to do that. I write a moderate number of polyamorous ships and non binary characters, so the AO3 categories have not always been a good fit. Maybe I'll have "polyamory", "multiple ship", and "non-binary ship" categories in addition to slash/het/femslash. Or maybe mm/fm/ff would be better since then I can also have fmm, mnb etc? That's less readable, though.
Hmm! I have ten works to upload before I hit my first shippy work, better keep thinking! I mean dreamwidth makes mass tag editing pretty easy, so I can always change my mind. But I do have to decide on something.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-18 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-18 02:13 pm (UTC)scrolls through your journal to find a fic post Ha, yes, that's rather more detail than I bother with! I have appreciated that level of detail from other people on their blogs, but know from past experience that I am never going to stick to it myself. I admire your commitment to consistent categorisation!
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Date: 2023-06-18 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-18 03:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-20 03:08 am (UTC)haha, cool. Have fun :)
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Date: 2023-06-18 06:46 pm (UTC)The main thing that I think is a pain on DW compared to AO3 is wordcount. Having wordcount automatically handled down to the exact number + a way to filter by wordcount as pickily as you please saves me from having to decide what length-based categories/buckets to use. When I was archiving some of my Tumblr stuff on a private comm here I kind of went by vibes as far as tagging "long posts", but... well, it's nice having the auto-wordcount.
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Date: 2023-06-20 03:07 am (UTC)Yeah I thought about wordcount and went...hmm, nope, too hard, too many decisions. I might tag anything long enough to need multiple posts.
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Date: 2023-06-19 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-20 03:05 am (UTC)ha I love that multiple people have replied to this post going "Oooh...categorisation..."