All The Tags - Blog Posts

A crossover between Portal and Princess Tutu. This was fun! Maybe clean up later?.....Maybe.

He needs a cash withdrawal

Idk Astro: human edition

The nightmare that is AO3 tagging

Okay, so maybe that's being just a touch dramatic. Seriously, though, it seems like there's a lot of tagging advice on Reddit, etc., that talks about not using a lot of tags, only tagging the really major characters, keeping the tags relevant and useful for sorting, and all that. I've kind of freaked myself by reading those conversations, and then looking at my own fic like... oh... dear... you have so many tags... do people find that obnoxious?

I dunno. Personally, I love all the fun, silly, casual, chatty, cracky, creative tags that authors use. Maybe they're not much good for sorting, but they make me smile. I don't mind reading through a huge block of tags, because apparently mine is a bit of a magpie brain, but instead of shiny things, it wants words. Plus, when there are a lot of tags, there's that much more opportunity to find a fun one!

It's also usually nice when there are a lot of characters tagged, because then I can see who all is in the story, not just the MCs. Same goes for relationships. When it comes to tagging my own fic, of course, I'm like, "Major characters? Important relationships? But they're all important! I want to tag them all!"

So, I totally don't blame people who do this as well. And if you prefer to be efficient and tidy, that works, too. Seems like, it's your story, and you know how you want to present it, so why not tag away as you see fit?

**Now that I think of it, though, there could be one very valid caveat to this perspective. Do the majority of AO3 tagwranglers find it frustrating to deal with the zany, one-off tags?